Sociologists study topics that matter to everyday people. Given that social structures govern everything around us, we have an almost unlimited scope for research. Some social structures—those we sometimes call macrostructures—play an outsized role in shaping the lives of individuals. Nation-states are one example where institutions become binding through laws and regulations, impacting millions of lives.
Sociologists know firsthand the importance of public policy because we study it in our professional lives. We study the rise of global free trade regimes and current attempts to undermine them, efforts to address persistent racial inequality, and how we effectively respond to worldwide pandemics. We also know the power of engaging in the policymaking process because we study the predominant actors in the policymaking world. This includes lawyers and economists and the power their professional training provides them.
But for all our attention to and research findings that could lead to the creation of good public policy, sociologists remain underrepresented in the policy world. Policy sociology, which seeks to “provide solutions to the problems that are presented to us,” received relatively little attention in Michael Burawoy’s notable ASA 2004 Presidential Address on the division of labor within sociology as a discipline. Most sociologists remain dedicated to professional sociology for obvious reasons—its focus on knowledge accumulation is the lifeblood of the discipline—but others have tended to gravitate to public or critical sociology.
This leads us to an important puzzle: why are sociologists underrepresented in the world of public policy? This is a great question for an intrepid graduate student with time to write an entire dissertation on the topic, but my aim here will be much narrower. My thesis is that sociology provides useful tools for those working as public policy professionals, but there are structural holes in the professional pipeline that cause sociologists to overlook these opportunities, generally, and leave those who do show interest in careers as public policy professionals unprepared for careers in this space.
My focus here will be on the value of comparative-historical sociology for two reasons. First, most people think of quantitative analysis when they think of social scientists in public policy, so showing the value of other types of analysis will be helpful. Secondly, I am a comparative-historical sociologist by training and work in public policy, so it is the topic with which I’m most intimately familiar.
Thinking Like a Sociologist (at a Think Tank)
Public policy is expansive and diverse. It includes some sociologists whose names you’d recognize, such as Rep. Maxine Waters or former Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, and some who may not be household names, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Chief of Staff Beth Pearson or the U.S. Census Bureau’s Assistant Division Chief Liana Fox. It also includes various social movements, interest groups, and organizations vying for influence. Each of these positions comes with different audiences, constituencies, pressures, and opportunities. My work in a professional capacity is Director of Social Policy at the Niskanen Center, a Washington D.C.-based think tank. This makes me a rarity. One study of think tanks in America found that public policy, economics, and legal fields of study make up the majority of policy experts. Sociologists were relegated to the “other social science” category, which made up only 3.5 percent of total experts.
Think tanks vary in their approaches. Some, such as the Brookings Institution or the Urban Institute, are geared more toward what we would consider traditional scholarly work. Others, such as the Center for American Progress or the Heritage Foundation, are geared more toward what we would consider partisan policy goals. Two concepts are important for understanding the Niskanen Center’s work. First, we take an elite-centered approach based on providing legislative subsidies, defined as “a matching grant of policy information, political intelligence, and legislative labor to the enterprises of strategically selected legislators.” We have no grassroots constituents to mobilize nor deep pockets to spend lobbying in favor of our policy goals. Instead, our value to policymakers is that we can help them understand which policies might best help them achieve their big picture goals (e.g. reduce child poverty, increase housing supply, make primary care more affordable) and how they can navigate the political environment to best reach those goals. Second, we take a transpartisan approach premised on working across political divides by building “strange bedfellows” coalitions. It goes without saying for a sociological audience that this organizational position colors my experience and reflections.
The Value of (Problem Solving) Comparative-Historical Sociology
Prior to joining the Niskanen Center, my scholarly work was focused on the question of why the United States was an outlier on particular social and fiscal policies. My first project, which became a book, sought to explore why the U.S. is the only rich democracy without a fully refundable child tax credit. My next project, which wasn’t completed before I left academia, sought to explore why the U.S. is the only prosperous federal democracy without an equalization block grant. These sorts of questions are examples of what Monica Prasad, a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Economic and Political Sociology, calls “problem-solving sociology,” and they are very amenable to comparative-historical approaches of study.
The goal of problem-solving sociology is to move beyond mere description of social problems, identification of social villains, and grand theories about their fundamental causes or consequences. In my case, I identify the source of a problem (the absence of policies I consider good), successful cases based on the possibility principle (similar countries that have these policies), and spend the bulk of my time analyzing the causes of the divergences and what would need to change to get us closer to that successful case. This may sound simple, but it can be scary to undertake this endeavor as a graduate student or young academic. Your peers are often invested in particular theoretical approaches that they can test across different research questions—power resources, state capacity, cultural, institutional, race/gender/class, Marxist, etc. However, in problem-solving sociology, one must avoid hitching one’s wagon to a particular theory and hope to discover a good answer (or answers) by the time your research project concludes.
Problem-solving Sociologists must also learn to quickly grasp the wide-ranging but intricate details of unfamiliar case studies over long periods of time. Familiarizing oneself with the history of U.S. social policy since the Progressive Era is hard enough. Adding Canada and the United Kingdom to the mix can feel overwhelming when your graduate funding is finite or tenure clock is ticking. What I have discovered is that the skills involved in comparative analysis, process tracing, and historical explanation are perfect for developing a policy agenda, building coalitions, and thinking about how to persuade policymakers and stakeholders in a noisy environment.
What Is This a Case Of?
Economists and lawyers in the policy world are very good at optimizing policies to maximize impact and writing policy in a way that makes them implementable, but their knack for understanding the politics and possibilities of reforms is often underdeveloped. This is where comparative-historical sociologists have an advantage. Like our peers in comparative politics, we know how to set up case study analyses in a way that can yield new insights into social and political phenomena. If you can identify potential determinants of success in the policymaking process, you have an uncommon skill among think tank professionals.
Structures, as political economist Mark Blyth famously remarked, do not come with an instruction sheet. The same goes for political opportunity structures. The comparative-historical sociologist’s advantage comes from being able to look at all the different pieces in the policy landscape and answer the question: What is this a case of? It matters, for example, whether Congress did not make the 2021 expansion of the child tax credit permanent because conservative members of the Democratic party opposed it, it lacked the positive political feedback effect necessary to mobilize beneficiaries, there was a cultural aversion to expanding benefits to the undeserving poor, business groups opposed social spending, advocates failed to use resonant frames to persuade skeptics, or the critical juncture opened by the pandemic’s exogenous shock closed again (or some combination of these factors).
Knowing the answer to this question helps policy professionals decide whether policy change is worth pursuing at the moment and, if it is, what they can or must do to ensure that it is successful. This includes what coalitions they can or cannot build, what kind of evidence, arguments, or framing is persuasive, and the relative importance of money, information, and representation in advocacy. We do not have a clean sample or laboratory setting, so policy professionals, much like sociologists diving into vast archives, must be able to quickly parse which factors seem to be at play and which are irrelevant or less important in this case. This enables one to build an effective strategy based on the resources available.
With some support and guidance, sociologists can apply their unique skills as policy entrepreneurs outside the academy. American Sociological Association initiatives like the Policy Outreach Program Fellowship provide a promising start to bridging the gap between researchers and policy professionals.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the authors and not the American Sociological Association.