The Role of Analysts in Public Agencies: Toward an Empirically Grounded Typology

The current practice of policy analysis in governments shows increasing proliferation of analytical tasks across functional fields and institutional structures. One can observe the emergence of highly diverging communities of performance officers, evaluation specialists, regulatory impact analysts, behavioral insight teams, and data analysts. This fragmentation makes it difficult for government practitioners to develop coherent, systemic human resource strategies for analytical capacity building. Thus, both literature and practice indicate the need for an approach to identifying and classifying analysts that would be both inclusive and practically operational. This chapter responds to the need for theory and practice of public policy by providing a definition and a multi-dimensional typology of analysts in government, grounded in an extensive empirical study of analysts in the Polish public administration. The typology is accompanied by a practical toolbox for identifying and grouping analysts, as tested in the Polish government.