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 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 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 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 Evidence Based Policy Making in the Social Sciences written by Stoker, Gerry and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2016-09-29 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gathers an expert group of social scientists to showcase emerging forms of analysis and evaluation for public policy analysis. Each chapter highlights a different method or approach, putting it in context and highlighting its key features before illustrating its application and potential value to policy makers. Aimed at upper-level undergraduates in public policy and social work, it also has much to offer policy makers and practitioners themselves.
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 Evidence Based Policymaking written by Karen Bogenschneider and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New thinking is needed on the age-old conundrum of how to connect research and policymaking. Why does a disconnect exist between the research community, which is producing thousands of studies relevant to public policy, and the policy community, which is making thousands of decisions that would benefit from research evidence? The second edition updates community dissonance theory and provides an even stronger, more substantiated story of why research is underutilized in policymaking, and what it will take to connect researchers and policymakers. This book offers a fresh look into what policymakers and the policy process are like, as told by policymakers themselves and the researchers who study and work with them. New to the second edition: • The point of view of policymakers is infused throughout this book based on a remarkable new study of 225 state legislators with an extraordinarily high response rate in this hard-to-access population. • A new theory holds promise for guiding the study and practice of evidence-based policy by building on how policymakers say research contributes to policymaking. • A new chapter features pioneering researchers who have effectively influenced public policy by engaging policymakers in ways rewarding to both. • A new chapter proposes how an engaged university could provide culturally competent training to create a new type of scholar and scholarship. This review of state-of-the-art research on evidence-based policy is a benefit to readers who find it hard to keep abreast of a field that spans the disciplines of business, economics, education, family sciences, health services, political science, psychology, public administration, social work, sociology, and so forth. For those who study evidence-based policy, the book provides the basics of producing policy relevant research by introducing researchers to policymakers and the policy process. Strategies are provided for identifying research questions that are relevant to the societal problems that confront and confound policymakers. Researchers will have at their fingertips a breath-taking overview of classic and cutting-edge studies on the multi-disciplinary field of evidence-based policy. For instructors, the book is written in a language and style that students find engaging. A topic that many students find mundane becomes germane when they read stories of what policymakers are like, and when they learn of researcher’s tribulations and triumphs as they work to build evidence-based policy. To point students to the most important ideas, the key concepts are highlighted in text boxes. For those who desire to engage policymakers, a new chapter summarizes the breakthroughs of several researchers who have been successful at driving policy change. The book provides 12 innovative best practices drawn from the science and practice of engaging policymakers, including insights from some of the best and brightest researchers and science communicators. The book also takes on the daunting task of evaluating the effectiveness of efforts to engage policymakers around research. A theory of change identifies seven key elements that are fundamental to increasing policymaker’s use of research along with evaluation protocols and preliminary evidence on each element.
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 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 of Being written by Darius Bost and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-12-21 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evidence of Being opens on a grim scene: Washington DC’s gay black community in the 1980s, ravaged by AIDS, the crack epidemic, and a series of unsolved murders, seemingly abandoned by the government and mainstream culture. Yet in this darkest of moments, a new vision of community and hope managed to emerge. Darius Bost’s account of the media, poetry, and performance of this time and place reveals a stunning confluence of activism and the arts. In Washington and New York during the 1980s and ’90s, gay black men banded together, using creative expression as a tool to challenge the widespread views that marked them as unworthy of grief. They created art that enriched and reimagined their lives in the face of pain and neglect, while at the same time forging a path toward bold new modes of existence. At once a corrective to the predominantly white male accounts of the AIDS crisis and an openhearted depiction of the possibilities of black gay life, Evidence of Being above all insists on the primacy of community over loneliness, and hope over despair.
Download or read book The Evidence of Things Not Said written by Lawrie Balfour and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Evidence of Things Not Said employs the rich essays of James Baldwin to interrogate the politics of race in American democracy. Lawrie Balfour advances the political discussion of Baldwin's work, and regards him as a powerful political thinker whose work deserves full consideration.Baldwin's essays challenge appeals to race-blindness and formal but empty guarantees of equality and freedom. They undermine white presumptions of racial innocence and simultaneously refute theories of persecution that define African Americans solely as innocent victims. Unsettling fixed categories, Baldwin's essays construct a theory of race consciousness that captures the effects of racial identity in everyday experience.Balfour persuasively reads Baldwin's work alongside that of W. E. B. Du Bois to accentuate how double consciousness works differently on either side of the color line. She contends that the allusiveness and incompleteness of Baldwin's essays sustains the tension between general claims about American racial history and the singularity of individual experiences. The Evidence of Things Not Said establishes Baldwin's contributions to democratic theory and situates him as an indispensable voice in contemporary debates about racial injustice.
Download or read book The Politics of Policy Analysis written by Paul Cairney and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-02-10 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on two key ways to improve the literature surrounding policy analysis. Firstly, it explores the implications of new developments in policy process research, on the role of psychology in communication and the multi-centric nature of policymaking. This is particularly important since policy analysts engage with policymakers who operate in an environment over which they have limited understanding and even less control. Secondly, it incorporates insights from studies of power, co-production, feminism, and decolonisation, to redraw the boundaries of policy-relevant knowledge. These insights help raise new questions and change expectations about the role and impact of policy analysis.
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 The Politics of Inclusive Development written by Sam Hickey and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-12-11 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. It is now widely accepted that politics plays a significant role in shaping the possibilities for inclusive development. However, the specific ways in which this happens across different types and forms of development, and in different contexts, remains poorly understood. This collection provides a state of the art review regarding what is currently known about the politics of inclusive development. Leading academics offer systematic reviews of how politics shapes development across multiple dimensions, including through growth, natural resource governance, poverty reduction, service delivery, social protection, justice systems, the empowerment of marginalised groups, and the role of both traditional and non-traditional donors. The volume not only provides a comprehensive update but also a ground-breaking range of new directions for thinking and acting around these issues. The book's originality thus derives not only from the wide scope of its case-study material, but also from the new conceptual approaches it offers for thinking about the politics of inclusive development, and the innovative and practical suggestions for donors, policy makers, and practitioners that flow from this.
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.
