Download or read book The Politics of Evidence written by Justin Parkhurst and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. There has been an enormous increase in interest in the use of evidence for public policymaking, but the vast majority of work on the subject has failed to engage with the political nature of decision making and how this influences the ways in which evidence will be used (or misused) within political areas. This book provides new insights into the nature of political bias with regards to evidence and critically considers what an ‘improved’ use of evidence would look like from a policymaking perspective. Part I describes the great potential for evidence to help achieve social goals, as well as the challenges raised by the political nature of policymaking. It explores the concern of evidence advocates that political interests drive the misuse or manipulation of evidence, as well as counter-concerns of critical policy scholars about how appeals to ‘evidence-based policy’ can depoliticise political debates. Both concerns reflect forms of bias – the first representing technical bias, whereby evidence use violates principles of scientific best practice, and the second representing issue bias in how appeals to evidence can shift political debates to particular questions or marginalise policy-relevant social concerns. Part II then draws on the fields of policy studies and cognitive psychology to understand the origins and mechanisms of both forms of bias in relation to political interests and values. It illustrates how such biases are not only common, but can be much more predictable once we recognise their origins and manifestations in policy arenas. Finally, Part III discusses ways to move forward for those seeking to improve the use of evidence in public policymaking. It explores what constitutes ‘good evidence for policy’, as well as the ‘good use of evidence’ within policy processes, and considers how to build evidence-advisory institutions that embed key principles of both scientific good practice and democratic representation. Taken as a whole, the approach promoted is termed the ‘good governance of evidence’ – a concept that represents the use of rigorous, systematic and technically valid pieces of evidence within decision-making processes that are representative of, and accountable to, populations served.

Download or read book The Politics of Evidence Based Policy Making written by Paul Cairney and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-11 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Evidence Based Policymaking identifies how to work with policymakers to maximize the use of scientific evidence. Policymakers cannot consider all evidence relevant to policy problems. They use two shortcuts: ‘rational’ ways to gather enough evidence, and ‘irrational’ decision-making, drawing on emotions, beliefs, and habits. Most scientific studies focus on the former. They identify uncertainty when policymakers have incomplete evidence, and try to solve it by improving the supply of information. They do not respond to ambiguity, or the potential for policymakers to understand problems in very different ways. A good strategy requires advocates to be persuasive: forming coalitions with like-minded actors, and accompanying evidence with simple stories to exploit the emotional or ideological biases of policymakers.

Download or read book Unhealthy Politics written by Eric M. Patashnik and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How partisanship, polarization, and medical authority stand in the way of evidence-based medicine The U.S. medical system is touted as the most advanced in the world, yet many common treatments are not based on sound science. Unhealthy Politics sheds new light on why the government's response to this troubling situation has been so inadequate, and why efforts to improve the evidence base of U.S. medicine continue to cause so much political controversy. This critically important book paints a portrait of a medical industry with vast influence over which procedures and treatments get adopted, and a public burdened by the rising costs of health care yet fearful of going against "doctor's orders." Now with a new preface by the authors, Unhealthy Politics offers vital insights into the limits of science, expertise, and professionalism in American politics.

Download or read book The Proof written by Frederick Schauer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Scribes Book Award “Displays a level of intellectual honesty one rarely encounters these days...This is delightful stuff.” —Barton Swaim, Wall Street Journal “At a time when the concept of truth itself is in trouble, this lively and accessible account provides vivid and deep analysis of the practices addressing what is reliably true in law, science, history, and ordinary life. The Proof offers both timely and enduring insights.” —Martha Minow, former Dean of Harvard Law School “His essential argument is that in assessing evidence, we need, first of all, to recognize that evidence comes in degrees...and that probability, the likelihood that the evidence or testimony is accurate, matters.” —Steven Mintz, Inside Higher Education “I would make Proof one of a handful of books that all incoming law students should read...Essential and timely.” —Emily R. D. Murphy, Law and Society Review In the age of fake news, trust and truth are hard to come by. Blatantly and shamelessly, public figures deceive us by abusing what sounds like evidence. To help us navigate this polarized world awash in misinformation, preeminent legal theorist Frederick Schauer proposes a much-needed corrective. How we know what we think we know is largely a matter of how we weigh the evidence. But evidence is no simple thing. Law, science, public and private decision making—all rely on different standards of evidence. From vaccine and food safety to claims of election-fraud, the reliability of experts and eyewitnesses to climate science, The Proof develops fresh insights into the challenge of reaching the truth. Schauer reveals how to reason more effectively in everyday life, shows why people often reason poorly, and makes the case that evidence is not just a matter of legal rules, it is the cornerstone of judgment.

Download or read book Evidence Politics and Education Policy written by Lorraine M. McDonnell and published by Harvard Education Press. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Evidence, Politics, and Education Policy, political scientists Lorraine M. McDonnell and M. Stephen Weatherford provide an original analysis of evidence use in education policymaking to help scholars and advocates shape policy more effectively. The book shows how multiple types of evidence are combined as elected officials and their staffs work with researchers, advocates, policy entrepreneurs, and intermediary organizations to develop, create, and implement education policies. Evidence, Politics, and Education Policy offers an in-depth understanding of the political environment in which evidence is solicited and used. Two key case studies inform the book’s findings. The primary case—a major, multimethod study—examines the development and early implementation of the Common Core State Standards at the national level and in four states: California, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Tennessee. A comparative case analyzes the evidence used in Congressional hearings over the twenty-year history of the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Together, the two cases illustrate the conditions under which different types of evidence are used and, in particular, how federalism, the complexity of the policy problem, and the policy’s maturity shape evidence use. McDonnell and Weatherford focus on three leverage points for strengthening the use of research evidence in education policy: integrating research findings with value-based policy ideas; designing policies with incentives for research use built into their rules and organizational structures; and training policy analysts to promote the use of research in policymaking venues.

Download or read book The Politics of Evidence and Results in International Development written by Rosalind Eyben and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Evidence and Results in International Development critically examines the context and history of the current demands for results-oriented measurement and for evidence of value for money.This book will inspire development professionals and organizations to cultivate their political skills.

Download or read book The Politics of Evidence written by Justin Parkhurst and published by . This book was released on 2016-10-24 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has been an enormous increase in interest in the use of evidence for public policymaking, but the vast majority of work on the subject has failed to engage with the political nature of decision making and how this influences the ways in which evidence will be used (or misused) within political areas. This book provides new insights into the nature of political bias with regards to evidence and critically considers what an 'improved' use of evidence would look like from a policymaking perspective. Part I describes the great potential for evidence to help achieve social goals, as well as the challenges raised by the political nature of policymaking. It explores the concern of evidence advocates that political interests drive the misuse or manipulation of evidence, as well as counter-concerns of critical policy scholars about how appeals to 'evidence-based policy' can depoliticise political debates. Both concerns reflect forms of bias- the first representing technical bias, whereby evidence use violates principles of scientific best practice, and the second representing issue biasin how appeals to evidence can shift political debates to particular questions or marginalise policy-relevant social concerns. Part II then draws on the fields of policy studies and cognitive psychology to understand the origins and mechanisms of both forms of bias in relation to political interests and values. It illustrates how such biases are not only common, but can be much more predictable once we recognise their origins and manifestations in policy arenas. Finally, Part III discusses ways to move forward for those seeking to improve the use of evidence in public policymaking. It explores what constitutes 'good evidence for policy', as well as the 'good use of evidence' within policy processes, and considers how to build evidence-advisory institutions that embed key principles of both scientific good practice and democratic representation. Taken as a whole, the approach promoted is termed the 'good governance of evidence' - a concept that represents the use of rigorous, systematic and technically valid pieces of evidence within decision-making processes that are representative of, and accountable to, populations served.

Download or read book Evidence Based Policy written by Nancy Cartwright and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-20 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last twenty or so years, it has become standard to require policy makers to base their recommendations on evidence. That is now uncontroversial to the point of triviality--of course, policy should be based on the facts. But are the methods that policy makers rely on to gather and analyze evidence the right ones? In Evidence-Based Policy, Nancy Cartwright, an eminent scholar, and Jeremy Hardie, who has had a long and successful career in both business and the economy, explain that the dominant methods which are in use now--broadly speaking, methods that imitate standard practices in medicine like randomized control trials--do not work. They fail, Cartwright and Hardie contend, because they do not enhance our ability to predict if policies will be effective. The prevailing methods fall short not just because social science, which operates within the domain of real-world politics and deals with people, differs so much from the natural science milieu of the lab. Rather, there are principled reasons why the advice for crafting and implementing policy now on offer will lead to bad results. Current guides in use tend to rank scientific methods according to the degree of trustworthiness of the evidence they produce. That is valuable in certain respects, but such approaches offer little advice about how to think about putting such evidence to use. Evidence-Based Policy focuses on showing policymakers how to effectively use evidence, explaining what types of information are most necessary for making reliable policy, and offers lessons on how to organize that information.

Download or read book Beyond Evidence Based Policy in Public Health written by K. Smith and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-10-07 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the complex relationship between public health research and policy, employing tobacco control and health inequalities in the UK as contrasting case studies. It argues that focusing on research-informed ideas usefully draws attention to the centrality of values, politics and advocacy for public health debates.

Download or read book Making Politics Work for Development written by World Bank and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Governments fail to provide the public goods needed for development when its leaders knowingly and deliberately ignore sound technical advice or are unable to follow it, despite the best of intentions, because of political constraints. This report focuses on two forces—citizen engagement and transparency—that hold the key to solving government failures by shaping how political markets function. Citizens are not only queueing at voting booths, but are also taking to the streets and using diverse media to pressure, sanction and select the leaders who wield power within government, including by entering as contenders for leadership. This political engagement can function in highly nuanced ways within the same formal institutional context and across the political spectrum, from autocracies to democracies. Unhealthy political engagement, when leaders are selected and sanctioned on the basis of their provision of private benefits rather than public goods, gives rise to government failures. The solutions to these failures lie in fostering healthy political engagement within any institutional context, and not in circumventing or suppressing it. Transparency, which is citizen access to publicly available information about the actions of those in government, and the consequences of these actions, can play a crucial role by nourishing political engagement.

Download or read book Evidence Use in Health Policy Making written by Justin Parkhurst and published by Palgrave MacMillan. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book provides a set of conceptual, empirical, and comparative chapters that apply a public policy perspective to investigate the political and institutional factors driving the use of evidence to inform health policy in low, middle, and high income settings. The work presents key findings from the Getting Research Into Policy (GRIP-Health) project: a five year, six country, programme of work supported by the European Research Council. The chapters further our understanding of evidence utilisation in health policymaking through the application of theories and methods from the policy sciences. They present new insights into the roles and importance of factors such as issue contestation, institutional arrangements, logics of appropriateness, and donor influence to explore individual cases and comparative experiences in the use of evidence to inform health policy. Justin Parkhurst is Associate Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (the LSE)'s Department of Health Policy, UK. He has conducted research on a range of global health policy issues and on the politics of evidence. He served as the Principal Investigator of the GRIP-Health programme of work. Benjamin Hawkins is Associate Professor at the Department of Global Health and Development, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK. His research focuses on the role of research evidence and corporate actors in health policy making. In addition, he works on European integration, multi-level governance international trade and political economy approaches to health policy. Stefanie Ettelt is Associate Professor at the Department of Health Services Research and Policy, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK. Her work examines the tensions between structure and agency in explaining the influence of evidence and research on policy-making and health system governance, particularly from a comparative perspective.

Download or read book Using Evidence in Policy and Practice written by Ian Goldman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-10 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book asks how governments in Africa can use evidence to improve their policies and programmes, and ultimately, to achieve positive change for their citizens. Looking at different evidence sources across a range of contexts, the book brings policy makers and researchers together to uncover what does and doesn’t work and why. Case studies are drawn from five countries and the ECOWAS (west African) region, and a range of sectors from education, wildlife, sanitation, through to government procurement processes. The book is supported by a range of policy briefs and videos intended to be both practical and critically rigorous. It uses evidence sources such as evaluations, research synthesis and citizen engagement to show how these cases succeeded in informing policy and practice. The voices of policy makers are key to the book, ensuring that the examples deployed are useful to practitioners and researchers alike. This innovative book will be perfect for policy makers, practitioners in government and civil society, and researchers and academics with an interest in how evidence can be used to support policy making in Africa. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003007043, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Download or read book Environmental Justice written by Gordon Walker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental justice has increasingly become part of the language of environmental activism, political debate, academic research and policy making around the world. It raises questions about how the environment impacts on different people’s lives. Does pollution follow the poor? Are some communities far more vulnerable to the impacts of flooding or climate change than others? Are the benefits of access to green space for all, or only for some? Do powerful voices dominate environmental decisions to the exclusion of others? This book focuses on such questions and the complexities involved in answering them. It explores the diversity of ways in which environment and social difference are intertwined and how the justice of their interrelationship matters. It has a distinctive international perspective, tracing how the discourse of environmental justice has moved around the world and across scales to include global concerns, and examining research, activism and policy development in the US, the UK, South Africa and other countries. The widening scope and diversity of what has been positioned within an environmental justice ‘frame’ is also reflected in chapters that focus on waste, air quality, flooding, urban greenspace and climate change. In each case, the basis for evidence of inequalities in impacts, vulnerabilities and responsibilities is examined, asking questions about the knowledge that is produced, the assumptions involved and the concepts of justice that are being deployed in both academic and political contexts. Environmental Justice offers a wide ranging analysis of this rapidly evolving field, with compelling examples of the processes involved in producing inequalities and the challenges faced in advancing the interests of the disadvantaged. It provides a critical framework for understanding environmental justice in various spatial and political contexts, and will be of interest to those studying Environmental Studies, Geography, Politics and Sociology.

Download or read book What Works written by Nutley, Sandra M. and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2000-07-19 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of how the knowledge gained from research is used to improve the effectiveness of public policy formation and public service delivery. It covers eight areas of public service - health, education, criminal justice, social policy, transport, urban policy, housing and social care.

Download or read book Evidence Argument and Persuasion in the Policy Process written by Giandomenico Majone and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1989-01-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In modern industrial democracies, the making of public policy is dependent on policy analysis--the generation, discussion, and evaluation of policy alternatives. Policy analysis is often characterized, especially by economists, as a technical, nonpartisan, objective enterprise, separate from the constraints of the political environment. however, says the eminent political scientist Giandomenico Majone, this characterization of policy analysis is seriously flawed. According to Majone, policy analysts do not engage in a purely technical analysis of alternatives open to policymakers, but instead produce policy arguments that are based on value judgments and are used in the course of public debate. In this book Majone offers his own definition of policy analysis and examines all aspects of it--from problem formulation and the choice of policy instruments to program development and policy evaluation. He argues that rhetorical skills are crucial for policy analysts when they set the norms that determine when certain conditions are to be regarded as policy problems, when they advise on technical issues, and when they evaluate policy. Policy analysts can improve the quality of public deliberation by refining the standards of appraisal of public programs and facilitating a wide-ranging dialogue among advocates of different criteria. In fact, says Majone, the essential need today is not to develop 'objective' measures of outcomes--the traditional aim of evaluation research--but to improve the methods and conditions of public discourse at all levels and stages of policy-making.

Download or read book Gun Studies written by Jennifer Carlson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As cultural, social, political, and historical objects, guns are rich with complex and contested significance. What guns mean, why they matter, and what policies should be undertaken to regulate guns remain issues of vigorous scholarly and public debate. Gun Studies offers fresh research and original perspectives on the contentious issue of firearms in public life. Comprising global, interdisciplinary contributions, this insightful volume examines difficult and timely questions through the lens of: Social practice Marketing and commerce Critical theory Political conflict Public policy Criminology Questions explored include the evolution of American gun culture from recreation to self-protection; the changing dynamics of the pro-gun and pro-regulation movements; the deeply personal role of guns as sources of both injury and security; and the relationship between gun-wielding individuals, the state, and social order in the United States and abroad. In addition to introducing new research, Gun Studies presents reflections by senior scholars on what has been learned over the decades and how gun-related research has influenced public policy and everyday conversations. Offering provocative and often intimate perspectives on how guns influence individuals, social structures, and the state in both dramatic and nuanced ways, Gun Studies will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as sociology, political science, legal history, criminology, criminal justice, social policy, armaments industries, and violent crime. It will also appeal to policy makers and all others interested in and concerned about the use of guns.

Download or read book Punishment and Politics written by Michael Tonry and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Labour has embarked upon a root and branch remaking of the criminal justice system in England and Wales, with a mass of new legislation implemented or planned. It has ensured a continuously high profile for criminal justice issues, and they have been at the centre of wider political discourse. Yet the basis and evidence on which these reforms are being introduced is both uncertain and highly controversial. Despite spending tens of millions of pounds of research into the criminal justice system in the name of evidence-based policy, evidence has counted only in relation to lowlevel technocratic issues. On the big issues the clear weight of evidence points in opposite directions to those which the government has taken. The primary drivers of recent policies have rather been the emulation of recent USA policies (at a time when these are now being abandoned in the USA because they have been shown to be ineffective); and a media-driven agenda with a focus on conspicuous crime prevention which have had the effect of heightening rather than assuaging public fears and concerns. This provocative yet authoritative book seeks to expose and to unravel what has really driven the making of criminal justice policy in the UK. It will be essential reading for anybody interested in knowing what is going on in criminal justice, and why it is so central to political debate more generally.