VOICES CHARLIE JEFFERY Impact champion
For over a decade UK devolution has been Charlie Jeffery’s main research focus. In 2015 he was announced ESRC Impact Champion for his long-term commitment to maximising impact opportunities for his own research as well as for colleagues and collaborators
The ESRC Future of the UK and Scotland initiative was a valuable resource on a timely issue. What other topics or events do you think might benefit from such a comprehensive programme of research? Perhaps the most obvious is the question of the UK’s membership of the EU, now we know we will have a referendum most likely some time in 2016. And ESRC’s UK in a Changing Europe initiative has been set up to bring expert analysis from some of the UK’s leading EU experts to help illuminate that debate. This kind of approach – bringing key academics together to apply their accumulated expertise to inform a major social issue in ‘real time’ – works well for referendums, adding perspective and nuance to debates which inevitably become polarized. It’s a form of ‘crowd- researching’ which can be valuable to protagonists on either side of a referendum debate, but also
“ Voting ‘No’ clearly wasn’t a
statement of approval of how Scotland is governed now
for ordinary voters looking for information and analysis that hasn’t been filtered through a campaign lens. But there’s no reason an ESRC model of ‘crowd-researching’ couldn’t work for other issues which have resonance both for policy communities and for citizens. There is a real opportunity, especially with on-line communication methods, to build public engagement at scale into social science research and analysis. So why not a ‘crowd’ initiative on inequality, or immigration, or housing policy, or online privacy?
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What do you think might be the long-term outcomes of the referendum result and subsequent General Election result? How will relations between Scotland and the rest of the UK fare with the rise of SNP? The referendum has changed the way Scots think about how they are governed. Voting ‘No’ clearly wasn’t a statement of approval of how Scotland is governed now. The No vote disguised a deep disenchantment with government at and from Westminster, and shifted the allegiance of many from Labour to the SNP. The decimation of Labour in Scotland at the last UK election was the outcome. There will continue to be a drive to strengthen decision-making powers in Scotland. But what the referendum debate also did was harden opinion in England about how England
26 SOCIETY NOW SUMMER 2015
is governed. While the Prime Minister’s plans on English Votes on English Laws were in part a tactical manoeuvre to limit the voice of Scottish MPs (an obvious enough move if you only have one of them), it was also a response to a still rather unfocused but increasingly potent demand for some kind of self-government for England. So one of the long term outcomes will be a gradual hardening of the boundaries between what is now a clearly distinct Scottish political system, and a nascent English one.
How does working in a controversial/divisive area (in this case Scottish independence) affect your work? Is there a risk of being drawn into a partisan ‘bun fight’ one way or another, even if stressing that one is strictly neutral? That risk was ever-present during our work on the Scottish referendum, and we had to work hard to keep the Scottish and UK Governments, and the Yes and No campaigns informed about our work, so they understood what we were doing. It’s not quite accurate to say that we were ‘neutral’, because some of the findings of our work resonated directly with one side or the other. What was important was that all sides recognised that however the findings ‘landed’ in the debate, they had been reached through robust methodology. It was the social science that was neutral. And it worked. Neither side liked all that we published, but both of them praised how we went about it.
What advice would you offer early career researchers on achieving impact? How do you approach impact differently if you want to reach different sections of the public – how do businesses, policymakers, community groups and others respond differently?
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