The policy analytical capacity of in-house policy workers in Belgium

This PhD dissertation investigated the in-house capacity for policy analytical work in the federal state of Belgium. Few attempts have been undertaken to determine who the rather anonymous civil servants are that conduct policy analytical work and what that work comprises. Similarly, actual evidence on the capacity for analysis of those policy workers is lacking in the literature, despite growing concerns among practitioners and scholars about a possible decline in policy analytical capacity of government administrations.

This research tackled two important challenges for theory-building on policy analytical work and policy capacity. First, the individual policy analytical capacity of policy workers has been inconsistently operationalized in the past. Second, the incidence and variation in individual analytical capacity have not been the subject of rigorous scientific inquiry. To meet the first challenge, the research defined the policy analytical capacity of policy workers as the deployment of policy analytical techniques in policy work. This definition was based on the assumption that the capacity of policy workers relates to their actual behavior – and not to their potential skills and competencies, or to their personal opinions. To meet the second challenge, three specific research questions were formulated to investigate and explain the individual policy analytical capacity of policy workers:

What are the characteristics of Belgian policy workers and their policy analytical work?

What is the individual policy analytical capacity of Belgian policy workers?

Which factors explain the fluctuations in individual policy analytical capacity?

The research relied on an original large-N survey research on policy analytical work and policy workers in Belgium in order to address systematically and in-depth the above research questions. The research drew upon a newly established dataset of 1,203 observations across four Belgian jurisdictions, namely Flanders, Wallonia, the French-speaking Community and the Belgian federal level. This dataset was constructed via an online questionnaire that inquired about the characteristics of policy workers and the tasks and context of the policy work that they conduct. The online survey instrument also provided the basis to assess and explain the policy analytical capacity of policy workers. Earlier Canadian survey work was relied upon to construct the questionnaire for Belgium. To adjust it to the Belgian context, the research turned to older and current understandings of policy analytical work in Belgium (e.g. Vancoppenolle, 2006; Brans et al., 2012; Brans and Aubin, 2017).

The three research questions that guided the research addressed key empirical gaps in the literatures on policy analysis and policy capacity. Firstly, the dissertation provided systematic evidence on policy work and policy workers across a number of different jurisdictions. The research drew conclusions beyond single systems of governance, whereas most European studies on policy work have been conducted within a singular national context. Secondly, the research uncovered the policy analytical capacity of in-house policy workers, as well as its drivers. Priorly, comprehensive assessments of the analytical capacity of policy workers were few in number, and relied on operational definitions that were inconsistent or based on perceptions instead of actions. This dissertation not only supplemented the available data on policy analytical work across the globe with new representative evidence from Belgium; it equally addressed certain empirical challenges for conducting research on the policy analysis profession in European administrations, and it offered solutions to future researchers to overcome these methodological issues. The third empirical advancement in this work, concerned the systematic explanation of individual policy analytical capacity. Until now, the literature mainly drew on meso-level factors, such as the importance of policy units to explain individual policy analytical capacity. The findings generated in this dissertation agree with some of the evidence offered in the field, yet the research has also made clear that alternative drivers for policy capacity, such as factors at the micro-level, are equally valuable and merit more of the scholarly community’s systematic attention.

In sum, this PhD research presented the first attempt to comprehensively assess policy work in Belgium. The research in Belgium took place on a large scale as the main regional jurisdictions participated in the research. The research itself covered most policy sectors in those jurisdictions, and included the centralized departments as well as a substantive number of governmental agencies. The dissertation opted for a novel perspective to assess and explain policy analytical capacity and it deployed specific strategies to target relevant policy workers in the participating organizations. As a consequence of this systematic and comprehensive approach to policy analytical work and policy analytical capacity, the scholarly community in Belgium now knows more about this topic than it ever did before. Similarly, the dissertation closed some of the empirical gaps in the international literature on policy analysis and policy capacity. Lastly, this dissertation formulated suggestions for policy officials who wish to address a decline in the individual policy analytical capacity of policy workers – or who simply aim to maintain or boost that analytical capacity within their organization.