Abstract
Josh McCabe interviews Scott Winship, sociologist and the Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee in the United States Congress.
Scott Winship is a sociologist and the Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee in the United States Congress. I sat down with Scott at the American Sociological Association headquarters in Washington DC to discuss what it’s like working in the policy world, including his work for think tanks, Congress, and advice for graduate students interested in policy careers.
Scott Winship
Human Capital and Economic
Opportunity Global Working Group
On Working in Think Tanks
Can you tell us about the think tank work? How is that different from the traditional academic route?
I think most obviously it’s more directly concerned with public policy. People in the think tank world tend to have much stronger views, I would say, about specific policy directions and policy agendas, which is not to say that academic sociologists don’t. But, there’s no time in most think tanks to think about big questions. You get to do a lot of exploratory work that might not be directly related to public policy. There’s a real premium on questions that policymakers can run with or that can shape their policy agendas.
I think that there’s an obvious upside to it and that to the extent that somebody wants to do primarily research, rather than teaching or some of the other mentoring responsibilities that come with academic position. There’s none of that, so it’s nice to be able to do research full time. It comes with a lot of downsides, too, of course, most of them related to politics, pressures to follow the incentives and tell a very simple story that’s in demand by policymakers versus a more nuanced, complicated story.
On Working in Congress
What is it like to bring your sociological toolkit to Congress? How does that inform how you do your work here?
It’s unusual for there to be somebody on the Hill that has any sort of social science academic background… PhDs are rarer, in part, because so much of what goes on the Hill is fast-paced. The policy agenda is very crowded… There’s just a lot of competing issues within a small space, and not a lot of time to hash out these policy debates… Usually, you don’t have the space to sit back, almost graduate school seminar style, and think about, ‘all right, what’s our research agenda going to be?’ with months to just do writing and research in general.
What members of Congress are trying to do is pass legislation—convert it into policy—and so part of it is the pace, and part of it is just PhDs, a lot of us— and I put myself in this category—they’re not trained to move legislation, right? To the extent that you want to get a PhD and then work as a policymaker, there’s a lot of self-education that has to happen around how does a bill become a law, beyond the Schoolhouse Rock version, which bears no relation to reality… Generally, you need to get really into the weeds on a lot of these issues. Being able to read and write legislative language is something that you’re not going to get in academic training, for sure. In some ways, an academic PhD brings a little bit of the wrong set of skills to the job versus what most policymakers are interested in.
To the extent that you want to get a PhD and then work as a policymaker, there’s a lot of self-education that has to happen around how does a bill become a law, beyond the Schoolhouse Rock version, which bears no relation to reality… Generally, you need to get really into the weeds on a lot of these issues.
Advice for Graduate Students
Could you talk a little bit more concretely in terms of advice for graduate students who want to get their PhD but they see themselves somewhere in the policy world?
The first thing I would say is… that you really need a quantitative background. Or you need to be more of a historian of policy is the other route that I can imagine being useful to a lot of think tanks. It’s very hard to parlay ethnographic skills, or, a background in ethnography into a policy job, even at a think tank. I’m not completely sure why that is, other than the productivity is lower when you have to spend an extended amount of time in the field, and the results come later. (…)
So the big thing, I would say, is to develop quantitative skills, to develop familiarity with the surveys and the data sets that are out there, to the extent that you’re a quantitative person. Or to be more of a policy historian or develop deep policy expertise in certain areas. [The] effect of tax credits on social policy, in your case, is a great example. And it’s, generally, not something that you’re going to find at most PhD programs. In other words, you’re going to have to hustle and do a lot of this on your own.
My program is, actually, multi-disciplinary—it was Harvard’s social policy and sociology program—and, even that was nice in that we got some exposure to labor economics, for instance, that we probably wouldn’t have, to political science, to some extent. But even in that setting, just about everybody there had only known academia—David Elwood being kind of a big exception. You really did need to carve your own way. And a number of folks from my cohort have managed to take that path. So I think the first thing is to think about what your niche would be.
Arguably, if they’re folks who are on the fence about getting a PhD versus going directly into the think tank world, it’s worth thinking hard about what you’ll want to get out of a PhD. Certainly, rigor—doing research, and being a consumer of research—are the two best things that you get out of a PhD program. The other thing that I would say to folks is that networking is really the key. To some extent, that’s probably true in academia as well. But if you’re a painful introvert, such as most of us are who go into PhD programs, it’s just easy to crawl into your lair and work on your research and, hopefully, publish in some good places. And that’s kind of how you advance. In the think tank world, and in the policy world more generally, it’s much more about knowing people who then, when the timing is right, recommend you for things.
Arguably, if they’re folks who are on the fence about getting a PhD versus going directly into the think tank world, it’s worth thinking hard about what you’ll want to get out of a PhD. Certainly, rigor—doing research, and being a consumer of research—are the two best things that you get out of PhD program.