There’s a Whole Lotta Political Engineering Goin’ On

We should perhaps rename ‘Political Science’ departments ‘Political Engineering’ Departments.

Here is a short history of political science. It was:

1. an initially confused and broad and bold literary study suitable for men of the world, statesmen and men of letters (that’s the 19th century);
2. it then took the word ‘science’ literally, and tried, with great ambition, to erect a scientific understanding of political behaviour, processes etc. (that’s the early 20th century);
3. but then, after acknowledging that (2) had failed, became a sort of sliced and diced bits-and-bobs sort of statistical, data-crunching set of micro-hypotheses alleging correlation without causation, decorated with a lot of what I call Opinion Studies (that’s the late 20th century).

That is what I thought until recently looking into the subject again. It is worse than this. Much worse. Having given up the old early 20th century ambition to have a science of politics that can generate laws of politics – an admirable aim, even if flawed – it turns out that the great and proud students of politics pouring out of the universities have in the last 20 or 30 years turned to solving political problems. They have stopped being scientists and instead are selling themselves as useful, as midwives to politicians. They don’t understand anything about government, but they shall be instruments of government.

I think we should call this ‘political engineering’. Hence, let us finish the history:

4. Finally, it has become an attempt to enforce, impose and ‘deliver’ policy by persuading citizens that it is in their best interest to accept such delivery, and to trust government: where persuasion involves all manner of psychological propaganda techniques (that’s the early 21st century).

But of course, none of the proponents of it would want to use the name ‘political engineering’ for this.

Instead it has several fairly neutral academic sounding names. One that you might have heard of is ‘behavioural science’. But a far more pervasive one is ‘public policy’. Public policy is not the study of policy as if from outside. It is not academic in the strict sense. On the contrary, it is a sort of weaponised think-tankery and instrument-of-governmentality. It is, in part, concerned with the design of good policy, but, in even greater part, concerned with how to make sure that policies, whether good or not, are successfully achieved, delivered, imposed, accepted.

It is the public policy people who invented the word we first heard about in 2020, ‘nudge’. I have already written about ‘nudge’. And I have already written about one of the inventors of nudge, Cass Sunstein. In 2008, Richard H. Thaler and Cass. R. Sunstein published Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness. The argument was that humans don’t act in their own interests, so, er, other enlightened humans shall rig the system so that the less enlightened set of humans act in their own interest. I am paraphrasing the blurb of the book: but that sounds absolutely grim and condescending to me. I only mention this again because I discovered that we have our own homegrown equivalent of Cass Sunstein. This is Professor Peter John of King’s College, London.

I only came across him because I was reading about the British Academy. The Academy, which is loosely to the humanities what the Royal Society is to the sciences, announced on January 22nd that a rising number of students want to study politics. In order to celebrate this, the academy, along with the Political Studies Association, hosted an event in London. Four professors presided. I looked into them. Two seemed uninteresting. But the others were very interesting, because they are equal and opposite. The first is this Peter John. The second is Christina Boswell of Edinburgh University. Both are interested in scientific policy. But while our first professor wants to ‘nudge’ us into doing what the Government wants, our second professor wants to make sure that we ‘trust’ the Government that is nudging us to do what it wants.

Aye, this is everything nowadays. First, the political engineers notice that citizens are not doing what politicians want. They can help. Where help = ‘nudge’. And then, the political engineers notice that citizens no longer trust politicians. Nudge causes grudge. But the engineers can help with that too. With a bit of fudge, sludge and whatnot.

Professor Peter John is presumably one of the last pre-AI-era publishing machines. He has written more books, articles and bits of co-authored articles than I care to count. He saw the merits of Thaler and Sunstein’s ‘nudge’ and made himself a professional nudger. He is, for instance, the co-author of Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think: Experimenting with ways to Change Civil Behaviour (2011), and the author of How Far to Nudge: Assessing Behavioural Public Policy (2018).

So I examined a few articles co-authored by Peter John. In one article from 2024 he and eight other political engineers found that “Public support for more stringent vaccine policies increases with vaccine effectiveness”. Ah, correlation! They did not ask whether “vaccine effectiveness” was anything other than a counter in a glass bead game of their own making. But I did learn something from this piece. The selling point of ‘nudge’ is that it is nice. “People prefer policies that preserve freedom of choice, such as behavioural nudges.” The assumption is that coercion would be ideal, if it weren’t for the fact that everyone dislikes being coerced, so instead of treating us as slaves, our overlords treat us as children. I learnt from my wife not to coerce our sons but to offer them alternatives. In other words to ‘nudge’ these poor innocent victims of my political engineering. Well, children and all that. But our political engineers never admit that  they are writing about citizens as if they are all below the age of consent. This might be quite correct, from some points of view, except that it depends on a grotesque and insolent and unnecessary assumption that these political engineers know better than everyone else.

In an article from 2021 entitled ‘Nudge in the Time of Coronavirus‘ John and three other authors say, “Nudge is a key tool for today’s public administrators.” They admit to no interest in this being the case. (Though John is affiliated with the Behavioural Insights Team.) And our political engineers don’t stop at fiddling with citizens, via nudge. In 2022 John and one other author argue that it might be a good idea to carry out experiments on politicians as well as on citizens. Listen to this, from Political Studies Review (a journal which I once published something in):

Studying politics is about power. To research power, it is natural that political scientists should wish to conduct research on the very people who exercise it, the politicians themselves. As a result, politicians frequently appear as research subjects.

This seems quite impertinent to me. If I were a politician, I’d respond to this in Henry VIII or Henry II manner and use whatever prerogative power I could find to rid myself of these meddlesome social scientists. Notice the language. Not research in or research about but research on. They want to treat politicians as if they are in the petri dish. Let us experiment on our poor politicians. Enough of this. In other articles, Peter John is quite keen on advocating an intensified thing that he calls “nudge plus”, but I said I have said enough, didn’t I? (Plus!)

It is the fault of – David Cameron. While the Conservatives were in opposition, and grasping at straws, one of their bright ideas was to grasp at Thaler and Sunstein’s book. So it was Cameron who established the Behavioural Insights Team in 2010. Thaler advised it. Clegg, a reputed liberal, in 2010 said “it could change the way citizens think”. It was run from Number 10 for two or three years, then allowed to become private, while still carrying out Government work: and within a few years was pulling in £14 million per year, acquiring an office in New York, etc. The CEO, David Halpern, commented in 2018 that “trust in experts had gone up in the last 10-15 years”. The aim of the Behavioural Insights Team, or BIT, was to nudge everyone into making better decisions. The idea was basically

            Psychology + Policy = Control

Halpern might be an alarming figure. He was apparently involved in Blair’s Strategy Unit in 2001. But Blair disliked psychological controls, once they got a bad press. Someone should write a proper history of all this. But Halpern published a book in 2015 called Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference. Halpern said that in response to “distrust” he chose “transparency”.  “That’s why we’ve written books.” As if telling us, or some of us, makes it any better. Blair disliked it, as I say; and Brown wasn’t interested in it. Good men! (Let’s vote Labour.) But Cameron, outside of power, was more gullible, looking for rabbits and hats, and invested in it. 

The UK. First in the world. Let me repeat that: it was the United Kingdom, the land of Parliament and Common Law, that was first in the world to employ political engineers to lead all the horses and donkeys to water and make them drink. They have exported it everywhere now. There are copycat institutions all over the world. They call this ‘innovation in government’. But it is just deep state and big bucks, not to mention colossal amounts of bullshit. Here is Clegg from 2010:

The challenge is to find ways to encourage people to act in their own and in society’s long-term interest, while respecting individual freedom.

To which the answer is, “Yes, but, how do you know what it is anyone’s long-term interest?”

Halpern is still at it. Wikipedia tells me that in the Daily Telegraph in 2023 he said that the BIT’s measures before and during Covid now mean that public is “well drilled” for future emergencies. He added that “fear” is a useful “tool” – “if you think that people are wrongly calibrated”. Ponder that. As usual, no suggestion that it is the political engineers themselves who might be badly calibrated.

After all this, it is a relief to come to the more charming figure, Christina Boswell. She is trying to offer something on the other side. She notices that we have lost trust in government – I wonder why – and she tries to think about how trust can be restored. (How about by abandoning ‘nudge’?) In 2018 she published a book entitled Manufacturing Political Trust: Targets and Performance Measurement in Public Policy with Cambridge University Press. I read through a few chapters (‘so you don’t have to’). Her style is reasonable. And she is clearly on the reactive, responsive side, rather than on the active side: she is not a little intellectual Duke of Wellington, chasing the French around Spain, but an intellectual Florence Nightingale, trying to patch up the wounded. But in attempting to explain how we can restore trust in government, she makes what seems to me to be a great admission. She more or less says that we cannot restore trust in government. All we can do carry out great rituals of trust. In other words, make a song and dance, say that you are doing X, and though nothing will happen, it is the saying-that-we-are-doing-X that will be, in effect, the-doing-of-X. If that was too obscure, read what she says, on p. 3:

I explore how political and organisational dynamics create a recurrent demand for tools that can vouchsafe performance and reduce uncertainty. My account builds on the work of Michael Power and others, who have understood such techniques as playing a symbolic role: they are valued as a means of signalling order and control. In his work on audits, Power argues that audits operate as ‘rituals of verification’, providing assurances where there are low levels of trust .

That’s it everyone. An inquiry is not an actual ‘inquiry’. It is, rather, a ritual of assurance. Let us get Baroness Hallett, say, and spend some suitably large amount of money, make politicians and administrators write entire books of exculpation, and somehow everyone will be satisfied that we can trust the government.

This is odd. If, on the one hand, Peter John, Richard Thaler, David Halpern et al. think we are living in a world of half-rational entities who require to be nudged by their expert superiors, then, on the other hand, Christina Boswell thinks we are living in a world of mystical entities who would prefer to be cajoled or blessed or hexed or voodooed – given the full Frazer’s Golden Bough treatment – into a state of acceptance. Odd, odd, odd. So there we are. The political engineers come in two forms: the hard rationalists, and the soft mystics. But NB both know better than we do.

Boswell, by the way, was originally Oxford PPE. That’s a warning sign. (And John was an Oxford D.Phil.) Anyhow, she respects the public no more than any other political engineer does. Here is more, from p. 33:

Gerry Stoker and Matthew Flinders suggest that discontent with politics arises because citizens are misunderstanding the political process. They are failing to appreciate that politics involves complex and lengthy processes of negotiation, bargaining and compromise, which often produce messy and disappointing outcomes which are difficult to communicate clearly.

She gave us her tuppenny bit about Covid too. In August 2021 she claimed that COVID-19 had increased trust in science. And she asked whether Covid could do the same for the social sciences!

Not, say I, as long as the social scientists engage in political engineering.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.