Policy Engagement Strategies of Swiss Social Workers’ Holding Elected Office

Overview: This presentation reports the findings of a qualitative study examining strategies for influencing policymaking processes used by 31 Swiss social workers holding elected office. The results describe in detail how these social workers influenced policymaking processes, and how they placed social work issues on the political agenda.Proposal text: While ethical documents all around the globe call upon social workers to actively participate in policymaking processes, there is little evidence of their actual engagement in this type of practice. In particular, the fact that social workers also engage in party-politics by running for or holding elected office has been neglected in most of the existing research. Therefore, this paper presentation focuses on this very specific route of policy engagement by examining strategies for influencing policymaking processes used by Swiss social workers holding political office. To do so, 31 social workers holding elected office in the German-speaking part of Switzerland were invited to write a book chapter in an edited volume. The authors were explicitly asked to describe in detail their strategies and methods for influencing policymaking processes, and to place social work issues on the political agenda. Based on a qualitative content analysis of the book chapters, the following strategies were identified: (1) bringing social work’s professional expertise into policymaking processes, (2) doing good and talking about it, (3) presenting facts and figures, (4) organizing the profession, (5) networking, and (6) ‘normalizing’ policy engagement in social work. The findings suggest that political content should be strengthened in university social work education and in the field of professional social work associations.