Understanding variation in evidence-based governing across policy subsystems: The cases of employment and education policy in Denmark

Research on evidence-based policy-making (EBPM) suggests that such practices are playing out differently across policy sectors despite government ambitions to increase the use of research and data. To explain this, scholars have examined drivers and barriers associated with using evidence in policy-making, mainly focusing on evidence or policymaker characteristics. This paper uses theory on analytical capacity and policy subsystems to understand how efforts to promote EBPM as a governing strategy in government ministries are influenced by subsystem dynamics and stakeholder interaction over time. Using a most-similar case study design, the paper studies the development of EBPM in the Danish Ministry of Employment and Ministry of Education from 2000 to 2022, drawing on a combination of interviews, documents and a survey. The paper finds that while international EBPM trends inspired both ministries in the early 2000s, dynamics between subsystem actors in the following decades have resulted in substantially different patterns of evidence use in 2022. The paper argues that a dynamic and contextual perspective is necessary to understand why evidence becomes a strong factor in policy-making in some subsystems and less so in others.