Addressing the problem of best buys in politics: the political economy of education research

Stefan Dercon

Why do policymakers choose education reforms that aren’t supported by evidence? And how can researchers work with them to implement interventions with better outcomes? These are thorny questions often faced by education researchers and stakeholders worldwide.

The answers aren’t simple. To explore this issue, we’re sharing a blog series examining just one example – a story of laptops in Kenya. In Part 1, we framed and explored the problem; in Part 2, we discuss approaches to address it.

Crafting effective interventions that policymakers want

In Part 1 of this series, I explored how President Kenyatta of Kenya chose ‘laptops for all’ as a campaign promise even though evidence supported a different education intervention.

My conclusion was that he did not make this choice because he was unaware of the evidence. Rather, the ‘laptops for all’ policy was a rational decision to meet his political objectives. It was a ‘best buy’ for politics rather a ‘best buy’ for education.

So, how do we create interventions that meet both researchers’ and policymakers’ objectives? How do we design interventions that have the highest chance of being adopted and implemented by policymakers?

The obvious answer is to design those interventions that maximise the policy makers’ objective function given their constraints. For those researchers locked in research contracts from certain donor agencies that must show ‘impact’, this surely is the route they go.

Obviously, getting a senior decision-maker to reveal all and ‘tell you what I want, what I really really want’ is not self-evident. To do this, researchers should invest in fully understanding the objectives of the senior decision-makers and not simply their stated objectives in speeches and roundtables.

Suppose decision-makers would value boosting educational opportunities and outcomes but also offer something tangible that voters can relate to. An example from Kenya was the abolition of school fees. This was the platform for Mwai Kibaki in the 2002 election: free primary education for all. Its subsequent implementation from 2003 has been fraught, but overall, the assessment still is that it improved average outcomes for children and that it was pro-poor, even if in practice it hasn’t quite worked in the way it said on the tin of the election promise.¹

So, what does this mean for the researcher? ‘Free education’ can be considered a happy marriage between a pro-poor education policy as well as a best buy for politics. Researchers keen on boosting outcomes, surely can be celebrating the increased access, but then be really impactful by trying to focus on evidence on how to make this work: for example, how to optimise stretched resources by encouraging the most cost-effective ways to teach when class sizes get bigger. I am surely not alone in finding, in such circumstances, willing Ministry of Education officials or head teachers who would be interested in scalable solutions to their pressing needs.

What if researchers’ and policymakers’ needs widely differ?

However, I am not simply cynical when stating that this happy marriage between what the researchers and the policymakers want is not always there. ‘What they really really want’ may be uglier.

Suppose that the senior decision-makers value boosting education outcomes, but mainly need to balance competing objectives: they need something tangible that can appeal to voters, but also appeals to one’s political funders or powerful civil servants. The latter would both value a juicy procurement contract worth hundreds of millions. And the proposed policies also should not upset teacher unions at all. ‘One Laptop per Child’ seems to fit the bill.

So, how can one be a researcher keen to have an impact on education in Kenya? One reaction could be to stay away from impact-focused work and revert back to the first case: research alternative education policies, feeding them via policy briefs and events to those who should act on it, but with little hope that any advice is taken, as all attention will go to those programmes that are the best political buys in the circumstances.

The more ‘impactful’ alternative is to help the senior policy makers with research that investigates how to win votes with education announcements, staying away from anything that may upset the teacher unions, and preferably with some silver bullets that require procurement.

Of course, that does not sit well with them as it turns advisors and researchers into mercenaries for less than scrupulous decision-makers. While well-meaning civil servants or internal advisors may not have much choice, outside researchers and advisors surely find it problematic, even if, as in the case of multilateral agencies like the UN or World Bank, their job is to work with government.

What’s left then? Only a choice between being a naïve researcher or advisor with little impact, and being a mercenary if impact on learning outcomes is what is desired and required?

A different view of the issue

I want to argue that there is an alternative. The first step is to recognise that political incentives of decision-makers are what they are – well-meaning objectives mixed with a quest for power and re-election through rewarding supporters with jobs and contracts, or building schools or other investments in loyal constituencies. Not for nothing is politics in a country like Kenya described as ‘competitive clientelism.’²

The second step is to accept that it is fine for a researcher to have objectives that are different from those in power and to look for ways in which the best possible learning outcomes can be achieved through research and advice.

This can be cast as a Principal-Agent problem: a conflict of interest that occurs when an agent acts in a way that is not in the principal’s best interests. Maybe somewhat surprisingly, the right way to think about it is to see the Principal here as the education researcher (and all others that seriously want to prioritise boosting learning outcomes), while the Agent is the government led by decision-makers on education policy with less desirable objectives than just boosting learning, and constrained by other vested interests.

How to solve the issue as a Principal-Agent problem

The solution to this problem is first to characterise the set of actions that the Agent is willing to take – basically, actions that keep them at least as well off in terms of their own objectives than before, and then for the Principal to look within this set for the best possible programmes and interventions in terms learning outcomes.

In Dercon (2024) this is described and discussed further.³ In simple terms, it suggests that to be most impactful, we need to be politically-informed researchers, not naïve researchers or mercenaries.

So what could this mean? If the objectives are indeed to look for silver bullets that sell well to voters, that do not annoy teacher unions and that possibly involve some attractive procurement, then the task is hard.

For the sake of argument, could one not have introduced some fast experimentation and added some untested but politically attractive features to Tusome? For example, ‘One Textbook per Child’ plus more focus on the digital aspects of Tusome, including for children directly, building on the focus on teaching materials and digital support through tablet-based monitoring that were already part of it? It may have made the programme somewhat more expensive and less cost-effective but given what happened next, it could have avoided $600m of wasted resources.

Or, researchers could have responded to offer studies and evidence on better procurement of educational materials such as laptops, to bring down wastage in education, or design complementary studies to boost impact from laptops in schools, even if the underlying programme, ‘One Laptop per Child’, was known to be fraught with problems and low impact.

All this may feel like quite a compromise. One objection to these examples is that they treat this interaction between researcher and policymaker as a one-shot game: research for impact must respond to the current reality of politics.

Maybe research can also be a game of strategic patience: research important questions now, even if they are not sufficiently urgent for the political powers to care much about it, but the time for these insights will come. It would mean that there is little point in spending too much time trying to influence current decision-makers if their objectives really are not consistent with what one cares about, but wait for entry points and windows of opportunity in the future. Think of climate researchers in the 1980s and 1990s – their time came later, but it was worth building up climate science as they did.

Taking it further

A committed researcher can, however, go one step further. Rather than taking the political conditions as a given constraint on impact, one could also treat these conditions as something that can be influenced.

For example, if it were possible to make learning outcomes more salient for voters, so that they cannot be as easily bought off by some gimmicky, shiny asset transfer, then it could strengthen those in the local education system who genuinely care about outcomes without upsetting the political leadership. Or one could choose to work on researching and then publicising more broadly how procurement of education inputs is being manipulated and push for stronger transparency; and if this effort creates enough noise, well-meaning politicians will be less constrained by their political funders to provide rewards via education procurement.

The best result is that research may help to shift the objectives being pursued through education policies to be more in line with improving educational outcomes. Of course, there is something subversive about this: picking research to shift the objectives of people in power, often with the legitimacy of the ballet box behind them. And success will depend on the existence of suitable interlocutors that can help with entry points or that can create windows of opportunity.

Some of this will feel uncomfortable for researchers used to the plush surroundings of the ivory tower, and the examples given may be too extreme. But the key point – that to be impactful researchers, they should understand the political reality of educational policy – cannot be dismissed in any country. While it is true that one can ignore the politics of policymaking to conduct good research in any discipline, politics cannot be ignored to conduct good research that is also highly impactful.

1. Lucas, Adrienne M., and Isaac M. Mbiti. “Access, sorting, and achievement: The short-run effects of free primary education in Kenya.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics  4, no. 4 (2012): 226-253. Bold, Tessa, Mwangi Kimenyi, Germano Mwabu, and Justin Sandefur. “Can free provision reduce demand for public services? Evidence from Kenyan education.” The World Bank Economic Review 29, no. 2 (2015): 293-326. Some have consistently argued that it may also have set the stage for longer term failure in the education system, with overcrowded schools and low motivation of teachers, and that it even fostered more corruption. ‘Free education in Kenya is a failed promise’, The Conversation; ‘Kibaki’s Kenya education legacy: well-intentioned, with disastrous consequences’, The Conversation.

2. Ochieng’Opalo, Ken. “Formalizing clientelism in Kenya: from harambee to the constituency development fund.” World Development 152 (2022): 105794. Kramon, Eric, and Daniel N. Posner. “Ethnic favoritism in education in Kenya.” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 11, no. 1 (2016): 1-58.

3. Dercon, Stefan, The Political Economy of Economic Policy Advice, Journal of African Economies, forthcoming 2024.

Dercon, S. 2025. Addressing the problem of best of best buys in politics: the political economy of education research. What Works Hub for Global Education. Blog. 2025/006. https://doi.org/10.35489/BSG-WhatWorksHubforGlobalEducation-BL_2025/006