FOUR STYLES OF POLICY ADVOCACY PRACTICE

1. Ballot-based Advocacy Style: Policy advocates work with campaign organisations or political parties. They need skills in talking with voters, framing issues and working with campaign staff.

2. Legislative Advocacy Style: They work with advocacy groups, trade and professional associations and lobbyists as they try to convince legislators to adopt their measure or to defeat a measure that they dislike. Policy advocates need skills in policy analysis, lobbying, knowledge of the legislative process, building and sustaining coalitions.

3. Analytic Advocacy Style: Policy advocates use data to develop programmes or evaluate how existing policies are working. They need skills in conducting research, obtaining and processing data, making technical presentations.

4. Troubleshooting Advocacy Style: This style is used to increase the effectiveness of operating programmes or evaluate them with an eye to improving them. They need to work with planning groups that consist of members of the implementation team, sometimes mixing insiders with outside consultants, government officials, funders or consumers or others who bring pressure on the staff of a programme to change it. Troubleshooters need skills in diagnosing why specific programmes have flawed operating outcomes, in obtaining data to access them, and in working collaboratively with staff and administrators.

Not everyone is skilled in each of the style, and tensions often exist among persons who like different styles. Some policy advocates like political maneuvering and excel in it, whether the electorate or legislative advocacy style. They are sometimes critical of the analytic advocacy style, believing that proposals, no matter how meritorious they are on technical grounds, will come to naught absent of political advocacy. Persons who like to use the analytic advocacy style are sometimes critical of persons who they perceive to be excessively political since they often want policy choices to be made primarily through the use of data and research. Some troubleshooters, excelling at using collaborative planning approaches to overcome such organisational problems as turf rivalries and fragmentation, are less comfortable with high conflict strategies sometimes used by political activists.

In the real world, of course, the different styles are often combined in hybrid styles in which policy advocates combine or move between the four different styles. You cannot engage in legislative advocacy, for example, without doing at least some policy analysis, because your policy initiatives will not be credible if you use no data. You cannot be effective doing policy analysis, if you are not looking ahead to political realities that your proposal will encounter when it comes before legislators. If you draft a policy that makes sense in terms of data but that has no chance for adoption by legislators, you risk spinning your wheels.

Both policy analysts and legislative advocates need to anticipate issues and problems during policy implementation lest they frame and enact policies that are poorly implemented because they failed to anticipate them.

All policy advocates, no matter their stylistic preference need to engage in ballot-based advocacy to enhance the chances that their proposals will receive a sympathetic hearing from elected public officials.

Quite apart from policy styles, effective advocates need a combination of each of the four skills to be effective. Someone who relies only on good values but does not develop and use power resources, and never uses analytic information ought to ponder whether this narrow approach to policy practice is effective. Similarly, people who use only political or analytical skills risk not being effective in many situations. Policy practitioners who rely on a single skill are sometimes stereotyped: Opportunist rely on political skills, do-gooders rely on values, and policy wonks rely on analytical data.