From evidence-based policy making to policy analytics

Abstract

The paper aims at addressing the problem of what makes specific aiding to decide within public policy making problem situations. Under such a perspective it analyses some basic concepts such as "public policy", "deliberation", "legitimation", "accountability" and shows the necessity to expand the concept of rationality which is expected to be behind the acceptability of a public policy. We then analyse the more recent tentative to construct a rational support to policy making, that is the "evidence-based policy making" approach. Despite the innovation introduced with this approach, we show that it basically fails to address the deep reasons for which supporting the design, implementation and assessment of public policies is a hard problem. We finally show that we need to move one step ahead, specialising decision aiding methodology to meet the policy cycle requirements: a demand for policy analytics.

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Technocratic recentralization in the French health care system: A critical evaluation

“…The quest for efficiency via a streamlining of top down decisions in times of rising uncertainty was at the expense of citizen's engagement . Hence, the resurgence of the technocratic ideology and expert power under NPM does not always served the public interest in traditional areas (eg, health) where inherent incommensurability exists …”

Policy analytics: an agenda for research and practice

“…This attempt extends the idea of governing based on ''facts'' (instead of ideology) typical of the European culture since the enlightenment (for a discussion see Dryzek 2006). However, this approach, criticised under many aspects (see Almquist et al 2012;De Marchi et al 2012), failed to become a standard, perhaps mainly because of its inability to convince policy makers that the typical difficulties of legitimating public policies could be overtaken by using it.…”

“…Policy making has been a traditional domain of research and practice, where decision analysts 1 have introduced formal methods aimed at helping policy makers improve their decisions (for a recent survey see De Marchi et al 2012). In recent years, the field of decision analysis has been heavily influenced by the ''analytics'' perspective, which integrates advanced data-mining and learning methods, often associated with increasing access to ''big-data'' and with decision support systems.…”