Can data save democracy?

This interview was first published in the UCL Policy Lab Magazine 10, in September 2025.

From the budget to land registration, driving licenses and passports being processed, effective administration is at the heart of government. It is also at the heart of public opinion – criticisms of the blob, timewasting and quangos, all factor into discourse about whether public administration is working.

“Sometimes we’re very cynical about politics and what politics and administrators can achieve, but they make a big difference to how we live our lives.”

As the co-editor of The Government Analytics Handbook (with Daniel Rogger), Professor Christian Schuster has quite literally written the book on public administration, detailing how it can be measured and improved. It’s not a surprise – growing up in Germany, Schuster spent his childhood immersed in public policy, learning from two parents in key policy and non-profit roles.

“They had this incredible passion about how public organisations, at the local level in particular, can make a difference in people’s lives. From education to health to infrastructure – if you live in a place where all of these things work, and you know that your kids have access to a great education, you can go to a great hospital, for instance, then it’s likely that you’ll be living a good life. And it’s likely you’ll be extremely supportive of democracy.”

It’s a passion for public organisations that Schuster inherited. His initial work focused on how public organisations work in the Global South. As an economist for the World Bank earlier in his career, he became increasingly convinced that traditional approaches to public sector reform in these countries weren’t working.

This led him back into academia, with a growing interest in how to understand the state through data and draw more nuanced conclusions, grounded in the actual workings of organisations, rather than one-size-fits-all generalisations about government. As Schuster says, the issues are not confined to the Global South, but in the North too, where public sector reforms are not always evidence-based, data-informed or effective.

And now, he works on “government analytics” – exploring how data can be used to understand the administration of government, and then how to improve it. At the heart of this work is the simple insight that governments are sitting on large amounts of data but not using it to its full potential.

“Over the last two to three decades, we’ve become really good at using data for policy, but we traditionally haven’t used data for the actual administration of government organisations —for how they’re run, for where they’re effective and not effective.”

“The challenge we’ve always had is that government doesn’t have a bottom line. There’s no obvious data point to understand whether HMRC is effective, for instance. For many administrative organisations where you don’t have clear interaction with citizens, it’s historically been very hard to come up with a robust assessment of effectiveness.”

Now, paper-based records of government operations stored in basements have become reams of digital data. Much of Schuster’s work revolves around helping governments make use of these now-digitised records.

“Many government organisations are not generating insights from digitised records, because they created them not for analytics or data – they created them to run government, to process tax claims, buy goods, process business licensing claims and so forth. But these records can also help government organisations understand themselves better – for instance, to understand where you are productive and, say, process claims more quickly and with fewer complaints, and where your productivity is low.”

As with many things in life, knowledge is power, but I ask him how, in a country which allegedly has “had enough of experts”, can we ensure public buy-in for data-informed governance?

“Analytics can help governments become better and more efficient in concrete ways, for instance saving a lot of money that is then available for other services. Some governments have used data to identify that some departments are paying more than 50% more for the same goods and services than other departments. Once you figure that out, you can start buying together and bring down the price. You can save billions.”

As Schuster puts it, “If you can show that your work is making government more effective, saving billions that can be used elsewhere, I think you’ll have at least part of an answer to that challenge.”

This speaks to a core emphasis of Schuster’s work – government employees want, and believe in, change. The stereotype of old-fashioned, changeresistant bureaucrats walking the halls of Whitehall doesn’t match what global survey data reveals about civil service attitudes.

“Most people in government overwhelmingly want to make government better and want to make government administration better,” he observes. “They are actually in favour of a lot of the things that we would think, with our priors, they’re not in favour of.”

Much like Dan Honig’s Mission Driven Bureaucrats, this suggests that empowering civil servants with the right tools and support could be the answer to government reform. Many people choose to work in government to improve policy outcomes – we should encourage and empower this drive, not stifle it.

It’s this overlap with policy in Schuster’s work that brings us to our work at the UCL Policy Lab.

“I’m very proud that I’ve been able to play a role in bringing it to life.” He smiles.

For the past five years, Schuster has been the inaugural Academic Co-Director (Political Science) for the Lab, central to the Lab’s founding and our programme of work – with his tenure now coming to an end, he leaves some large shoes to fill.

“The Lab has found a really important niche in the policy landscape by bringing a lot of voices together. I think it has made a step change to how we can help public debate, support policymakers come to more evidence-based decisions, and connect our colleagues to those audiences.”

It is a role he has shaped not only during his time with the Lab, but also as one of the original thinkers who helped conceptualise it.

Reflecting on his career, I ask him whether his research has led him to assess his own efficiency.

“One thing you always see in survey data is that employees who are really good at redesigning their own job tend to be very satisfied. There’s massive scope for doing that in an academic job – academic careers look extremely different across individuals even within the same department and university. If you’re really good at job redesign, you’re going to be very satisfied with your job because you have this unique ability to create the job that you want to do. You have to be very cognisant of what you actually want to achieve, and then you work toward that.”

Schuster’s work comes at a critical moment. Public trust in institutions has eroded across Britain, fuelling populist movements and calls for radical restructuring of government and changes to the status quo.

Today, government analytics is not just about efficiency, it’s about the legitimacy of democratic institutions. What’s needed now is the political will to embrace data-informed governance and the institutional capacity to act on analytical insights.

This is a change that must come from the top, with leaders viewing data and efficiency not as dry administrative concerns, but as fundamental to democratic health, effective public services and societal wellbeing.

Dismantling existing institutions, or accepting dysfunctional, ineffective organisations are not the only options. National renewal can come through that simple promise of democratic governance: that public institutions can be responsive, effective, and accountable to the people they serve.

In Schuster’s vision, the data to make this happen is already at our fingertips, but we need to start using it.