Policy Shops, Hired Guns and Gatekeepers: The Allocation of Policy Analysts in Government Agencies

Abstract

Policy professionals play an important role in political and administrative systems. They provide an important connective tissue between elected politicians and the civil service system. However, the exact configuration of such personnel among and between line and staff agencies is largely unknown. Early works looking at the emergence of professional policy analysts, mainly in the United States, noted the creation of small dedicated ‘policy shops’ in many governments after 1960 where many policy professionals were located. Studies in Canada and elsewhere subsequently confirmed this organizational characteristic but failed to examine in depth question such as how many professionals were employed and where these units were located within existing Departmental structure. In this article we provide a network mapping of policy personnel within the Ontario Public Service (OPS), a provincial government in Canada administering a population approximately 50% larger than Sweden. We find that four major personnel distribution patterns are evident within the OPS. Within single issue departments (such as Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs) we only find integrated policy shops of the kind first noted in early studies. However, this is not the only pattern. Rather in multi-issue departments that deal with complex or controversial issues (such as the Environment or Health), we find such shops in each major issue area. And we also find that both of these patterns are absent in central staff agencies such as Finance or Treasury Board where senior policy shops staffed by ‘gatekeeper’ policy professionals exist. Finally, we find a ‘hired guns’ pattern in key emerging issue areas such as climate change or, in the Ontario case, indigenous affairs, which are assigned additional policy capacity in the form of a cadre of policy professionals distributed throughout the organization in order to help deal with problems. These findings suggest the need to re-evaluate the organization and staffing of professional policy analysis in government in order to account for these different patterns of personnel.