FEATURE BALANCING ACT Balancing act
Paul Johnson, Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), explains to Society Now how the IFS gained its reputation for independent research, the difficulties of being critical yet remaining scrupulously impartial, and the big economic issues of the future
How did the IFS become so influential for fiscal policy debate, as seen in the run-up to the General Election? How did you get there? Paul Johnson: The most important thing to understand about being influential is that you can’t get there overnight. A really important part of the IFS’s success in recent years has been the track record of trust that it has built up since it first started working in similar areas over 30 years ago. Over that whole time we have aimed at
achieving a combination of absolute political independence, both actual and perceived, high- quality empirical work, and a focus on carefully communicating what we do to policymakers and the wider public through the media.
“ Neither I nor my colleagues blog or
tweet on policy issues because it is very hard to get that right all the time
In doing that I think we make use of four advantages over university-based departments or institutes. First, we have continuity. Our data and models are developed over long periods by successive generations of staff. Second, we can provide incentives for staff to build careers in which academic publication is important, but other forms of work and engagement are also invested in and rewarded (we would have scored very high in the REF exercise as well). Third, as an independent organisation we can build a culture among our staff in which all these things are valued, and care and independence in public utterances are expected. Finally, being small and not part of a bigger institution, our brand and our reputation are our own. In the recent general election we followed the usual rules we apply to our work. We only produced analysis in those areas in which we have expertise and we were incredibly careful to ensure that what we did was well founded, rigorously independent and carefully communicated. Being perceived as completely impartial is fairly rare. How do you keep this challenging balancing act? I think there are three aspects to that. First, and probably most important, is that issue of culture again. The need not just for actual independence but for great care in public utterances is instilled in researchers here from the moment they start work. The need for impartiality is in all our DNA.
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Second, we stick to what we know. We probably turn down more requests for comment than we accede to. And we are somewhat helped by our subject matter: when talking about public finance, or tax or pensions, it is facts and objective analysis that are seen as important. Third, in terms of process, we have a set of
internal rules and checks and balances. Unusually neither I nor my colleagues blog or tweet on policy issues because it is very hard to get that right all the time. When we put out press releases, articles and reports they are always read and checked at a senior level. And we do that quickly. I would also say that, personally, having
worked in public policy and in government for a long time, I don’t find it hard to see that there are rarely approaches and policies that are completely right or completely wrong. Independence, in my view, goes quite naturally with experience and a natural scepticism. Importantly none of that means we are never
critical. We frequently are. But our criticism tends to be measured, based in analysis and never about the aims of policy. It is not our job to tell government that it should be more or less redistributive, should spend more or less on health etc. What we try to do is set out the consequences
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