Evaluation use and learning in public policy

Abstract

Scientific evidence has become increasingly important for the decision-making processes in contemporary democracies. On the one hand, research dealing with the utilization of scientific knowledge in the political process has pointed out that decision-makers learn from evidence to improve policies to solve problems. On the other, scholars have underlined that actors learn from evidence to support their political interests regardless of how it affects the policy problem. One conventional insight from the policy learning literature is that higher salience of a policy issue makes it much less likely that decision-makers use evidence in an “unpolitical” way. Nevertheless, only few studies have investigated systematically how differences regarding issue salience between policy fields impact on how decision-makers learn from evaluations at the individual level. Using multilevel regression models on data from a legislative survey in Switzerland, this paper shows that salience and technical complexity of policy issues do not automatically lead to less policy learning and to more political learning from policy evaluations. Nevertheless, this article’s empirical analysis also points out that issue salience increases policy learning from evaluations if the policy issue is technically complex. Our findings contribute to research on policy learning and evidence-based policy making by linking the literature on policy evaluation and learning, which helps analyzing the micro-foundations of learning in public policy and administration.

Navigating the challenges of policy evaluation

“…Numerous research studies, numbering in the hundreds, have concluded that evaluation results are either not used or underused. For instance, despite the creation of evaluation units within parliaments in recent decades, studies indicate that parliamentarians seldom utilize evaluation findings or lack the capacity to fully benefit from the information and analysis derived from evaluations (Bundi, 2023). "Evaluators can enhance the utility of evaluations when they pay attention to the parliamentarians' needs.…”

Ending the Transformation before the Goal is Fulfilled: The Case of Head Start

“…When the level of conflict is low, it is difficult to draw actors’ attention to the new information (see, for instance, Baumgartner et al, 2009). On the other hand, when the level of conflict is high, each side defends its original positions and does not wish to pay attention to new information (Bundi & Trein, 2022; Nohrstedt et al, 2017).…”

Introduction: putting policy evaluation into its democratic context

“…Our introduction to this Handbook will not further explore the challenges presented by Fischer's approach to policy evaluation, but rather highlight that evaluation is always a political activity (Eliadis et al, 2011;Weiss, 1975). Evaluators should be aware of the political forces shaping the evaluation scope and process, or their findings bear the risk of being instrumentalized to reinforce existing power relations (Bundi & Trein, 2022). This Handbook thus focuses on the political dimension of the policy evaluation process rather than the technical and methodological problems about how best to capture the net effects of a public policy.…”