Many of us who study public policy academically often discuss just what impact our work has – do we influence anything?

With the Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise fast approaching, academics across Britain are busily putting together ‘impact’ statements to show just how much impact they have had. And one crucial area of ‘impact’ is on public policy. Everyone has been thrashing around for metrics.

So it was with great interest that I started playing around with the ‘Who’s Lobbying’ database (after my colleague at Manchester, Alex Waddington, spotted it).

We’ve been doing some work at Manchester on trying to encourage engagement specifically with Parliament. (Not least because as a serial offender I think it’s a good thing to do).

I was therefore fascinated to do the following little analysis of (some) Universities engagement with both Westminster (Parliament) and Whitehall (Government).

I picked what I would think of as the top ten ‘policy’ Universities in the UK, based purely on my personal knowledge. So this may be a biased sample and I’m now planning to do a much more thorough research project. But these data, from this limited sample, seems interesting enough to discuss.

The first and most obvious thing is that there appears to be a big imbalance between how open Government is to academics compared to Parliament. Nealry twice as many appearances before Select Committees as ‘meeting with government’ (which is mainly meetings with Ministers).

Of course there are caveats: we don’t know what the quality of either interaction’s are; the data probably misses lots of ‘under the radar’ meetings with Government; etc.

But even with those taken into account, it still seems that Parliament is more open to academic input. And to some extent that’s precisely what you’d expect. Parliament, and especially Select Committees, tries to scrutinise the work of Government, with very few resources. So they are more likely to want to hear from (unpaid) experts who may have interesting and critical things to say. Conversely, Government is still, by its own admission in the recent Civil Service Reform Plan, too much of a ‘closed shop’ when it comes to policy-making.

The second major point this data seems to confirm is the ‘golden triangle’ of London, Oxford and Cambridge holds a near monopoly on engagements with both Whitehall and Westminster. The five Triangle universities (LSE, Oxford, UCL, Cambridge and Kings) account for 77% of Parliamentary appearances and 83% of meeting with Government in this sample. “The Rest”, the other five, are lagging way behind.

Again, there is no great surprise here: the dominance of graduates from the the Triangle universities in the political elite and civil service (including I suspect the parliamentary service) makes this result very likely.

Source: http://whoslobbying.com accessed 12 July 2013

* Appears to cover only House of Commons Select Committees

** Figure in brackets includes missing data from Manchester.

NB: There are clearly some issues about reliability of the data, because when I checked my own entry two of my appearances are missing. For one I think because I was described as ‘Manchester Business School’ rather than University of Manchester (which also affected one other appearance by another colleague) and another was for a House of Lords Select Committee which wasn’t picked up.