Governing with Evidence: Making Sense of Current Uses and Models of Evidence Based Policy

This workshop focuses on the role of political and bureaucratic actors in designing strategies and institutions for evidence based policy-making and their actual use of evidence in the formulation of public policies. Political actors such as governments and parliaments play an important role in setting ambitions for evidence based policy and in deciding whether to base political decisions on evidence rather than on ideology or interests. Public administrations at the national and international level also have a crucial role to play: they draft and implement legislation, they are key providers of policy advice, and they connect information input with political decision-making (Littoz-Monnet 2017; Christensen 2020). This includes setting evidence standards in attempts to ensure that they consider valid and systematic evidence before preparing and taking decisions (Oh & Rich 1996; Parkhurst 2017). The following models of evidence use by public authorities are used as a starting point for discussion: Public authorities as clearing houses for evidence (the rational model) The rational model starts from the observation that EBP is useful for ministries because valid effects-based knowledge are believed to translate well into policy advice and evaluation. According to the rational model, ministries use evidence strategies both as a means of reducing information overload by giving priority to high-quality evidence as a basis for political decision-making and as a means of making policies more efficient by giving preference to policies showing strong, positive effects and eliminating ineffective policy interventions and programs. A guiding idea is that the need for ministries to filter evidence and information for the purpose of prioritizing effective interventions becomes increasingly important as government and public policy accumulates and becomes more professionalised over time (Baron 2018). Public authorities as boundedly rational evidence users (the bureaucratic model) The bureaucratic model is inspired by an incremental understanding of decision-making, which holds that decision-making is characterized by processes such as “satisficing” (Simon 1955) and “muddling-through” (Lindblom 1959) rather than by rational choices based on full information. In this perspective, policy-makers consider mainly the most relevant evidence and choices with a focus on achieving (positive) marginal changes from the status quo. Under conditions of bounded rationality, experience with past policy plays the dominant role in decision-making and extensive and systematic use of available evidence is considered unlikely because it is both resource-demanding and risks leading to information overload in ministries. In this model therefore, ministries are expected to use evidence strategies selectively to identify evidence on indicators that are already considered important for political or administrative reasons. Public authorities as strategic evidence users (the government politics model) According to the government politics model, political and bureaucratic actors use evidence strategically to pursue specific political or administrative policy agendas and preferences (Hesstvedt and Christensen 2021). This corresponds to ‘political’, ‘strategic’ or ‘symbolic’ models of knowledge utilization, where evidence is used ceremonially to legitimize decision-making or as political ammunition to back up predetermined policy preferences (Weiss 1979; Best & Holmes 2010; Boswell 2018).