Who Leads and Who Follows? How Do Academic Research and Policy Practice Interact?—Taking Emergency Management as an Example

The interaction between academic research and policy practice is an important issue to which contemporary academic and political circles have paid close attention, especially those in the field of emergency management. However, existing research on the roles of leaders and followers in the interactions between academic research and policy practice remains highly uncertain.

Utilizing thematic analysis as a feasible approach to analyze their relationship, this study is based on academic literature and policy texts in the field of emergency management from 2003 to 2022. We use a LDA topic model to extract common themes in academic research and policy practice regarding emergency management and, accordingly, to construct the panel data. Categorizing the policy texts into laws and regulations and departmental regulations based on the policy effectiveness, we analyze the dynamic relationship among academic research, laws and regulations, and departmental regulations through a panel vector autoregressive model, an impulse response function, and variance decomposition.

The results show that: first, academic research and policy practice have positive influences on each other, but both laws and regulations and departmental regulations can positively affect academic research, indicating that policy practice is the leader in their interactions. Second, academic research can only have a positive impact on laws and regulations that have a higher policy effectiveness, and with the passage of time, the positive impact gradually increases, even though the absolute degree of the impact remains small. Third, departmental regulations with a lower policy effectiveness are mainly positively affected by laws and regulations, and academic research has no significant influence on them. This may be due to the greater involvement of experts and scholars in the formulation of laws and regulations as well as that of think-tanks that can facilitate the translation of the outcomes of academic research, thus making the laws and regulations more susceptible to academic perspectives. Fourth, in the short term, departmental regulations have a strong positive impact on academic research, but in the long term, laws and regulations have an even more obvious positive effect on academic research. This can be explained by the frequent issuance of departmental regulations, which quickly capture the attention of researchers over the short term, whereas the laws and regulations demonstrate greater scientific and authoritative significance, reflecting national development intentions, strategies, and governance approaches and thereby guiding academic research trends over the long term.

To realize the positive interaction between academic research and policy practice, efforts should be made in three areas: First, we should attach importance to the policy value of academic research by integrating a research-oriented and problem-oriented approach. Second, we should strengthen and improve an evidence-based concept to ensure that policy making is well-founded. Third, we should enhance interactive communication between academic researchers and policy makers so as to broaden the channels that link academic research and policy practice.