“Being important” or “Knowing the Important”: who is best placed to influence policy?

Those wishing to influence policy and practice often aim to identify key individuals with whom to connect. For example, researchers may wish to connect with brokers on the edge of the policy world who can speak for them in policy discussions, or they may wish to identify political or professional opinion leaders and influence them directly. Network analysis offers a robust analytical approach to identifying these influential individuals. One way to do this is to ask people to nominate key players. However, reputational approaches may be subject to recall bias, incomplete, or otherwise unreliable. This subjectivity and partiality is unlikely to be randomly distributed, however. Being able to accurately identify other powerful and influential actors may be a characteristic of powerful and influential actors. Previous work suggests that those with an accurate picture of the social network are both more likely to be influential, and better able to manipulate network structure. Hubs and Authorities offers a way to identify (a) those who are agreed to be powerful and influential and (b) those who are good at identifying these Authorities. Using Hubs and Authorities captures centrality in directed networks in an intuitively appealing manner. In this paper, I explore Hubs and Authorities measures in a policy network of 225 nodes. Findings indicate that most people who are good at identifying Authorities are not themselves considered important. However, there is a small overlap between the Hubs and Authorities, consisting of two-to-three mid-level managers. I explore possible interpretations of these results using qualitative interviews of the same network members, in which they discuss the nature of power, influence, and network structure. Finally, I discuss implications for evidence use and particularly network interventions aiming to increase evidence use.