Political and Policy Translation
A brief review of Vital City's Translation Project // Turning rigorous research into a digestible format for policymakers
If people are interested in New York City government and policy, I often recommend that they follow Vital City, a policy journal that’s compelling and accessible to almost any interested citizen—their most recent issue was on the subway. From their About page:
Vital City seeks to improve civic life by finding great ideas and innovative research and making them available — and understandable — to those who shape urban policy. We also seek to make relevant data accessible to anyone who wants to get a better understanding of how cities work, because we believe an informed citizenry is a crucial pillar of a healthy democracy.
To that end, they’ve recently launched The Translation Project, which aims to translate rigorous academic research into an accessible, usable format for policymakers. I recommend watching the full video of Elizabeth Glazer, founder of Vital City, explaining the nature of the problem and The Translation Project’s solution. From the top of that video, she lays out the problem:
There is a world of people who generate ideas in the academy and other places. And then there's a world of people in government…desperately seeking ideas. But those two places do not meet.
When you're in government, and you're making policy, your day to day is so busy…you are working with a blowtorch in your face every day. And in the academy, you're writing for a different purpose and a different audience.
So government isn't going to research the ideas, and researchers have a hard time figuring out how to get their ideas over the wall to be used by government.
So what does a solution look like? Of course the answer is much larger than a launch video, but she paints the picture concretely and well (at 6:47-7:40):
…the idea is: let's have essentially one piece of paper, and on one side—very simply and absorbably—what is the idea?
[For example:] Lighting reduces nighttime felony crime by 36%, flip it over and have the costs and the benefits…not kind of highly hyphenated, and hard to absorb, but that any lay person, any government official could understand it well enough to go, you know, this might make sense…this would work in my budget.
And we would then have back up that people who are trying to figure this out at a higher level of detail could use as a kind of technical appendix. But in the first instance, let's have the document that could be distributed.
Translation between academics and policymakers is a longstanding problem. In a 2023 edition of
’s Statecraft, his interviewee lays it out plainly when speaking about the federal government:How much does that kind of [quantitative poli-sci] work actually get used within State decision making?
Oh, almost not at all. Yeah. Never. When I was on the outside, we were doing all kinds of statistical analysis. In that period, everyone was doing cross-country growth regressions on aid and economic growth. In my time in government, I never once saw a regression table. Not once.
Was that a weakness of government, or was that work not applicable?
I do think that government officials are very hungry for evidence-based answers. It's often not clear what's going on, what's the right thing to do, what's your likelihood of success? There's very few markers for how to benchmark that. At best you get a kind of business school case study approach.
In general the questions that political science is answering are driven more by what's methodologically possible rather than what the important question is. There's no incentive for somebody on the tenure treadmill to spend time trying to answer a policymaker's question. They're trying to get published and keep their job.
But it's also the case that even when the academy has useful information for policymakers, it's almost never presented in a format that somebody could use or understand. One of the functions of my current organization, the Energy For Growth Hub, is to turn good data analysis and evidence into something a policymaker could use, because there are thousands of people doing amazing work on energy modeling, climate policy, how engineering works, and how finance works.
But if you’re an official at a government agency and you've gotta decide something, you need it in a short, digestible format. You're definitely not reading a book and you're not even going to read through a 20-page, data heavy paper. You need somebody to give you the meta-analysis and why the evidence supports one decision versus another. And that's why we try to do everything short, with the idea that you gotta say the problem, the relevancy, and what the data tells you.
Policy translation is needed broadly, especially in New York City
I’m very pleased to see Vital City working to bridge the gap between rigorous research, policy, and implementation. They eventually hope to scale the effort beyond New York City, but they’re starting it here.
Maximum New York’s principal thesis is closely linked to the idea of translation. But instead of marrying good research to policymakers, I work to get information about how the government works into the hands and heads of any kind, smart, ambitious New Yorker would like it. I teach classes on NYC and NYS government, because we don’t currently have any institutions that reliably do.
Just as policymakers struggle to find well-presented, quality options, citizens struggle to find any systematic introduction to their own government. The problem of “not knowing how government works” becomes more acute as citizens struggle to vote, or find themselves on community advisory boards of various kinds that are supposed to interface with the government.
The way I see it, we have two broad needs for policy/political translation in New York City:
Academia —> policymakers
Citizens —> government
Of course, these things are related. Citizens can become policymakers, as can academics. Everyone needs to know how the government works. And so on. But it looks like New York City is seeing a welcome rise in institutions dedicated to translation work throughout the civic sphere.
Excelsior.