When Evidence Is Personal: Civil Servants’ Experience and Educational Policy Attitudes

Policy theories typically explain civil servants’ policy attitudes through four main lenses. Rationalist accounts emphasize evidence and expertise, rational choice approaches focus on self-interest, institutionalist perspectives highlight path dependency and professional socialization, and ideational theories stress the role of beliefs and ideologies. While these approaches offer powerful explanations of public officials’ attitudes, recent research suggests that personal experience constitutes a crucial, yet often overlooked, factor in policy processes, shaping how actors interpret information, evaluate reforms, and judge policy outcomes (Lerman a McCabe 2017). Among the general public, a substantial body of literature demonstrates that personal experience has a strong impact on policy attitudes through policy feedback mechanisms (Campbell 2012). In contrast, the role of personal experience among policy officials remains surprisingly underexplored. This gap is partly explained by the assumption that civil servants’ higher levels of political sophistication, professional training, and institutional embeddedness insulate them from experiential effects commonly observed among citizens. However, it has been documented many times that policymakers often rely on their experience rather than research evidence, and that their personal observation can easily trump hard data (McDonough, 2001). This paper thus asks to what extent personal experience matters for policy attitudes even among highly professionalized bureaucratic actors, and how such experience interacts with other established determinants of policy attitudes, including professional identity, institutional position, and potential self-interest. Rather than denying the relevance of rationalist, institutionalist, or ideational explanations, the paper conceptualizes personal experience as a form of experiential evidence that operates in interaction with these factors within the policy process. Empirically, the paper examines this question in the context of Czech education policy, focusing on a long-standing policy issue: the change in the length of basic school from eight to nine years. The analysis draws on an original survey conducted between September and October 2025 among civil servants working in education policy at the national, regional, and local levels in the Czech Republic. The final sample consists of 761 respondents from the Ministry of Education, the Czech School Inspectorate, the National Pedagogical Institute, and education-related departments of municipal and regional authorities. Using multivariate models, the paper examines whether civil servants’ own personal experience with eight- or nine-year compulsory schooling is associated with their current policy attitudes towards the organization of basic education, controlling for age, institutional affiliation, level of governance, professional role, and political orientation. This design allows us to disentangle the extent to which personal experience continues to shape policy attitudes even when rational, institutional, and professional factors are taken into account. The paper contributes to public policy and policy process research by extending policy feedback theory to bureaucratic actors, clarifying the role of experiential evidence within public administrations, and offering new insights into the micro-foundations of policy change.