Is political science interested in the lived, day-to-day experience of elected politicians, particularly those with executive authority? In his recent book, How to Run A Government So that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don’t Go Crazy, Sir Michael Barber asserts that “very few of the books and little of the commentary focus on how to run a government so that it delivers the change it has promised. In fact, there is a gaping hole where this should be” (Reference Barber2015).

Barber makes the same point in some detail in his previous book, Instruction to Deliver, which narrates the story of his time running the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, and offers a possible reason as to why this is the case. “Stubborn persistence, relentless monotony, attention to detail and glorying in routine are vastly underestimated in the literature on government and political history” (Reference Barber2007). I suppose an alternative way of putting this could be that writing about monotony and routine may not help you make the best-seller lists! After all, as Margaret Thatcher’s authorised biographer and former editor of the UK’s Telegraph, Charles Moore, confessed on behalf of the journalistic profession, “We want fireworks, war-cries, blood on the decks. We are bored by strategy, consistency, plugging on. But we do not have to fight elections, let alone govern the country” (Reference Moore2010). As Mark Bevir and Rod Rhodes acknowledge, however, routines are “a way of making a complex and often anarchic world seem manageable” (Reference Bevir and Rhodes2010).

Barber’s point seems to me a valid one; there is a dearth of detailed commentary on what governments—and their political and bureaucratic leaders—do in practical ways to deliver change and monitor it (see also Wagenaar Reference Wagenaar2004). As Rhodes observes, “the surprise is that mainstream political science should have had so little to say about the occupation of politician” (Reference Rhodes2012).

The relationship of the practice of government to real-world challenges and crises is taught in schools of public administration and government, business schools, and by contemporary historians. Think tanks such as the Institute for Government in the UK or the global Centre for Public Impact look at these questions as well. As a practitioner of politics, I was an avid reader of other people’s experiences in government, drawing on autobiographies, biographies, and political history to understand how others approached the problems they faced in particular circumstances. As an academic, I find myself looking at similar sources but in a more systematic way, looking for generalizable experiences that can inform teaching and scholarship.

I was fortunate as an elected politician and a minister in the Welsh government ^{Footnote 1} to benefit from Michael Barber’s counsel, both in my time as minister for education from 2009–13 and later as minister for public services from 2014–16. In January 2010, within a few weeks of my appointment as education minister, we ran a day-long seminar in which Michael helped my department clarify its goals. In 2015, as minister for public services, I held a two-day summit for the top 200 public service leaders in Wales: local government leaders and chief executives, health board chairs, board members and chief executives, police chief constables, senior fire officers, university and college leaders, and many others. At that summit, organized for me by the Welsh government’s leadership development arm, Academi Wales, we heard from public service leaders with experience in other countries, such as the United States and Australia, and rolled out a set of common values and behaviours for Welsh public services (Academi Wales 2016). Michael spoke passionately, setting out the principles of what he calls “deliverology.” ^{Footnote 2}

I spend much of my time at present thinking about the various problems of governance, such as the governance of a small stateless nation with a young polity such as Wales, the wider challenges of what ministers actually do as departmental and system leaders, or how political leadership relates to the broader question of public service leadership. I am developing postgraduate courses in these areas. I also have a growing interest in what technological governance and broader public administration mean in the age of Uber and the ubiquitous algorithm. This builds on my prior practitioner experience as the BBC’s head of public affairs in London in the 1990s, when I was responsible for relations with Westminster and Brussels during the period of law making on digital television (Andrews Reference Andrews, Harris and Fleisher2005).

Many of these areas are emergent. Although there is some strong initial work, the research base on devolved government and governance generally, and on UK devolution in particular, is thin. In his work on first ministers in Scotland and Wales, Lynch complained that there was “insufficient evidence” to analyse properly the relevance of theories of governance within devolved administrations (Reference Lynch2006). That still stands today. Michael Barber kindly wrote the foreword to my book Ministering to Education (Andrews Reference Andrews2014), which describes the educational reform agenda that we pursued. At the time of writing in 2017, 18 years after devolution to Wales, it remains the only published book by a former Welsh minister on their experience in Welsh government. ^{Footnote 3}

The study of ministers often focuses more on the political circumstances leading to the development of policies or decisions rather than on the practice of ministers or political leaders in governing or leading a system. Political leadership and its development is “under-theorised and under-researched” (Hartley Reference Hartley, Brookes and Grint2010). In his autobiography, Tony Blair reflects that he had never held any ministerial office before becoming prime minister and that he came to grips with the Whitehall machine only over time (2010). As the BBC journalist James Naughtie reflected, “[Blair] is the only prime minister of the modern era in Britain to have had to learn the business of government after being elected to lead one” (Reference Naughtie2004).

No one, of course, teaches you how to be a government minister. Former Conservative Cabinet Minister Michael Heseltine assessed that “The untrained minister can remain untrained. Men and women in middle life, on whom the favour of the voters and of the party leader has fallen for a season of uncertain length, have neither the time nor inclination to take induction courses” (Reference Heseltine1987). That is fine, says Heseltine, so long as the civil service is fit for purpose. As his experience grew, however, he came more and more to question whether that was the case. Others think training might be valuable. “Politics is an unforgiving business,” Barber asserts, “and no one seems to think that a PM, a president or a minister needs to learn their way into the job, whereas in fact they are just like everyone else. And when you ask what it takes to become an expert in a highly skilled role, the answer is surprisingly clear – it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice” (2015). As Hartley observes, however, “politicians have largely been socialized in a Westminster system (or local equivalent) which took ‘learning on the job’ and ‘serving your time’ for granted” (2011).

In general, ministers holding office for the first time rely on experience of prior roles, within politics or elsewhere. In my case, academic training may have helped with my framing of arguments. My interest in using speeches to flesh out the bones of policy may have had an academic origin; for politicians, speeches are to policy documents what conference papers are to finished articles. Academic training equipped me with the analytical tools to consider and challenge the advice given to me as a minister. I found the lessons of academic authorities, particularly in history and cultural studies, valuable throughout; they taught me to be sceptical of authority, of received wisdom, of determinism whether technological or social, and to go back to the original sources when necessary rather than relying on summaries by officials. However, I would not want to privilege my academic experience over the shrewd political skills developed by colleagues who previously held political office in local councils, or worked in trade unions, or ran community projects. Even for myself, I gained insight from prior experience of working with politicians and from discussions of issues with friends who had served in senior political office themselves. My work in the corporate environment of the BBC was particularly valuable in developing the patience and “corridor politics” needed to win support for policy positions amongst ministerial colleagues.

Practitioners sometimes disparage “chalk and talk” courses that do not engage with real-world situations. The role of a professor of practice is relatively new at Cardiff University, which means there is space to define that role. Experience is conspicuously valued. I have found my own experience as a minister to be of interest to a number of areas of study in the university. I am fortunate also that the university has taken a practical role both in developing public policy and in testing out what works in public service innovation. Cardiff University has been involved in the creation of both the Welsh Government-backed Public Policy Institute for Wales and of the public service laboratory Y Lab, developed in conjunction with Nesta (PPIW 2014; Nesta 2015). As a result, I have been telling “governance stories” (Bevir and Rhodes Reference Bevir and Rhodes2006) in a variety of departments: in the business school, not only in relation to the development of courses in public administration, but more widely, in terms of business relationships to government and politics; in social sciences, particularly in providing a practitioner perspective on debates in education; and in political science, where the view from a minister’s office is seen as providing a unique insight and the potential to help analyse policy and delivery issues through a number of different lenses.

While experience and testimony is valued in teaching, it isn’t always easy to identify how to translate lived experience as a practitioner into academic writing. My original academic training was as a historian, and I was supervised by a historian, Professor Keith Middlemas. Professor Middlemas insisted on the value of reading political biographies to reach rounded conclusions on judgements made by politicians at particular moments. He did not advocate an uncritical reading; there is, after all, a vast range of evidence on the problems of personal memory as a historical source which raise issues not only of record, methodology, significance, and accuracy, but also of ideology and conscious or unconscious bias.

Is there a problem with the presentation of practical political experience in academic literature? Is it unfair to suggest that academic journals do not find it easy to give space to practitioner testimony, except on an occasional basis? Of course, many practitioners would not want to do the structure-building of references to past authorities and academic debates to contextualize the experience on which they wish to reflect; they may feel that such work marginalizes and limits their professional expertise. They may also feel that their reflections are not as valued in an academic field as they are in the practitioner arena, at least without validation from other academics. Speaking personally, I found it encouraging when distinguished academics in specific fields urged deeper engagement with the lived experience of practitioners, seeking to understand our objectives, motivations and methods, For example, in campaign communication (Scammell Reference Scammell2014) or source strategies within the media or policy-making arenas (Schlesinger Reference Schlesinger and Ferguson1990). Sometimes, however, it can feel as though your only value in the context of academic publishing is as a case study and that your experience is useful only for testing theories. It may be that the time is right to reflect on how experience and testimony is recorded and used in academic journals and conferences. Insider accounts, participant observation, and what is now called autoethnography may all supply opportunities for greater understanding.

The final area which seems to me in need of further attention by political science is the societal governance of technology. It is arguable that there has been something of a lacuna within the field of political science—and indeed, public administration (Pollitt Reference Pollitt2010)—in relation to the governance of media and technology policy. It is evident that the power of new technologies raises questions that challenge the ability of governments to address new, complex issues. Recent developments in relation to fake news, advertising, and data usage have brought the governance of the “big tech” companies—internet intermediaries such as Facebook and Google—into sharp focus, with threats of further regulation in the UK and Europe. The effectiveness of public administration in practice has come under challenge from the practices of companies such as Uber and Volkswagen, which have generated questions relating to algorithmic governance and regulation. These issues are increasingly addressed by scholars, including those within political science. My Cardiff colleague Madeline Carr examines technological governance from an international relations perspective in her book on the making of US internet policy as a measurement of US power. She argues persuasively for the assertion of agency in the governance of technological change. “Understanding how power works in the information age may depend on the understanding that societies can shape technology. Possibly, it is the knowledge that politics can shape technology which is a key element of power in the information age” (Reference Carr2016). There is clearly a huge agenda here for political science generally and the field of public administration particularly; however, it is likely to necessitate interdisciplinary engagement with law, philosophy and ethics, data science, media sociology, the digital humanities, and beyond.

My own academic background is a melange of what might be called “genre blurring” (Rhodes Reference Rhodes2014), drawing on history, media and cultural studies, as well as practical experience of politics, government, and public administration. In thinking about government, I have great sympathy for the desire of Bevir and Rhodes to stress its “cultural practice” by seeing “the world through the eyes of the manager, top civil servant and politician” (Reference Bevir and Rhodes2008)–even though comparing several stories can divulge a set of contradictory responses. But then, as Barack Obama said in one of his last public contributions as US president, “democracy is messy” (Etherington Reference Etherington2016), so why should our governance stories not reflect that?