Masters in Public Affairs

The Permanent Campaign Across the Desk Masters in Public Affairs, Episode 12 You bring the official a clean brief and a sound argument. The meeting's warm. Nothing moves. Here's why: the elected official across your desk is a candidate — right now, every day until they leave the seat — and they're running your ask through one question. Does this help me, or hurt me, with the people who can take th...

Joseph Lavoie works through Chris Rose's How to Win Campaigns — the most practical book in the canon so far, and the one he's returned to more than almost any other in his own campaign work. It's a manual: checklists, tools, tests. Which makes it easy to skim and hard to read well. So instead of running the steps, this episode digs for the ideas underneath them — the ones that don't date. It's bui...

Most of what a campaign does has never actually been tested. Sasha Issenberg is a journalist, not an operative — which is why he could follow the evidence instead of defending a tactic. His 2012 book, The Victory Lab, is an incredibly clear account of how campaigning became experimental: the moment a profession that had run for a century on folklore finally borrowed the clinical trial from medicin...

The operator's job isn't to inform the voter. It's to trigger what's already in them. Joseph Napolitan figured this out in the field by 1968 — a generation before the academic research caught up. His 1972 book, The Election Game and How to Win It, is the founding manual of political consulting and still the clearest working theory we have of how mass communication actually moves people. In this ep...

Most documents called "strategy" aren't strategies at all. They're political artifacts produced when no one in the room was willing to inflict the pain of choice. Richard Rumelt's Good Strategy Bad Strategy (2011) takes a structural question seriously that almost no other strategy book takes seriously: what makes something a strategy at all. This episode walks through Rumelt's diagnosis of bad str...

Robert Cialdini's Influence was published in 1984. Forty years later, it remains by some distance the cleanest taxonomy ever written of how ordinary people get moved to say yes—and why, most of the time, they're not being persuaded. They're being triggered. Cialdini's word for it is click-run. Press a button, the cassette plays. Expensive—click, must be good. Expert said so—click, must be right. E...

Most people file Positioning under marketing. I think that's a mistake. So much of what we do in public affairs is positioning — positioning an issue, positioning your organisation as a stakeholder, positioning a specific policy ask. The discipline that Ries and Trout describe is core to what we do. But it's a discipline most practitioners have never been formally trained in. In this episode, I br...

The Book Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade by Robert Cialdini. Cialdini is best known for Influence, which identified the six principles that drive agreement — reciprocity, liking, social proof, authority, scarcity, and consistency. That book is foundational. But Pre-Suasion answers the prior question: what do the best communicators do before they make the ask? Most of us...

For a century, we've assumed that behaviours spread the way diseases do — find the right carrier, maximise exposure, make it sticky, and it'll go viral. Damon Centola, a network scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, spent two decades proving that model wrong. His book Change shows that the viral playbook works for spreading information but fails completely for spreading behaviour change. Th...

"It's no what you say, it's what people hear." Words That Work is Frank Luntz's attempt to codify what he learned across decades of polling, focus groups, and real-time language testing for politicians and Fortune 500 companies. The core claim is deceptively simple: effective communication starts with the listener, not the speaker. What matters isn't what you say — it's what people hear. Luntz is...

All persuasion is self-persuasion Most of what we do in public affairs is built on a broken assumption: that giving people better information will change their minds. David McRaney's How Minds Change dismantles that assumption and replaces it with something far more useful — a framework for understanding how people actually update their beliefs, drawn from field-tested techniques that outperform t...

This is the first episode of Masters in Public Affairs. We're starting with what might be the most important book ever written about how public opinion actually forms. Not how we wish it worked. Not the civics textbook version. How it actually works. Walter Lippmann wrote Public Opinion in 1922—over a century ago. The technology has changed beyond recognition since then. But the mechanism he descr...

Masters in Public Affairs is a podcast about the fundamentals of public affairs—how power moves, how opinion forms, and how change actually happens. Kobe Bryant used to do 45-minute pre-dawn workouts on nothing but footwork. Michael Jordan warmed up every practice with a chest pass. The greatest to ever play their game, still drilling the basics. The best public affairs practitioners operate the s...