What are the limits of evidence-based policy?

Responsible researcher: Viviane Pires Ribeiro

Paper Title: The Limits to Evidence-Based Policy: Evidence, Emotion and Criminal Justice

Authors: Arie Freiberg and WG Carson

Intervention Location: Global

Sample Size: Not specified

Major theme: Economic Policy and Governance

Variable of Main Interest: Evidence-based policy

Type of Intervention: Identifying the limits of evidence-based policy

Methodology: Literature review

Given the relevance of affective approaches to law and order policies that resonate with the public for penal reform, Freiberg and Carson (2010) argue that criminal justice policies are more likely to be adopted if, in addition to collecting and presenting of evidence, recognize and deal with the roles of emotions, symbols, faith, belief and religion in the criminal justice system. The authors also recognize that evidence alone is unlikely to be the primary determinant of policy outcomes and that successful policy creation and implementation also requires broad engagement and evidence-based dialogue with interested and affected parties.

Assessment Context

While 'evidence-based' or 'rationalist' approaches to crime policy may appeal to technocrats, bureaucrats and various academics, they often fail to compete successfully with the affective approaches to law and order policies that resonate with the public and which appear to satisfy deep psychological needs. These approaches often fail to recognize that “policy” and “politics” are related concepts and that debates about criminal justice are held in broader arenas than the academy, department, or agency. To be successful, penal reform must take into account the emotions that people feel when faced with crime. Furthermore, successful reform must take into account changes in the public's “mood” or emotions over time and be sensitive to different political and social cultures.

Intervention Details

In a legal context, “evidence” refers to information provided to establish a fact or point in issue. More broadly, it can be any “information selected from the available stock and introduced at a specific point in the argument to persuade a specific audience of the truth or falsity of a statement.” In this sense, Freiberg and Carson (2010) argue that, although evidence is an important element in the policymaking process, it is only one part of the persuasion process and rarely determines policy outcomes.

The impression predominantly conveyed by the literature is that a model based on a straightforward linear relationship of rationality is not adequate to the task of making sense of the place that evidence and more general knowledge can or even should play in policy formation.

Thus, the authors cite some previous studies that reproduced a five-fold typology of the relationship between politics and knowledge that analyzes several alternative models:

• The knowledge-driven model in which research leads policy. This model contains an element of scientific inevitability, with the expert 'at the top' and, in an extreme form, the abdication of political choice in favor of science;
• The problem-solving model in which research follows politics, and political issues shape research priorities. Experts are 'on tap' rather than 'at the top' and specific pieces of research (evidence collection) are used to assist in policy formulation and implementation;
• The interactive model where research is one of many factors in a “much more complex and subtle set of relationships between decision-making and research”;
• The political/tactical model is one that “sees politics as the outcome of a political process” that also drives the research agenda in a politically instrumental way;
• The Enlightenment model has research affecting how issues are framed. Rather than research serving political agendas directly, the benefits are indirect. The research and subsequently derived evidence do not address the decision problem itself, but the context in which that decision will be made.

However, Freiberg and Carson (2010) argue that of these five models, only the Enlightenment model, appropriately expanded, can embrace the intrinsic characteristics (emotion and affect) of the evidence/policy domain in a constructive way.

Methodology Details

In the first part of the study, Freiberg and Carson (2010) trace the growth of the contemporary evidence-based policy (EBP) movement and, in particular, the 'imaginary' of an idealized linear/rational model of science policymaking that appears to persist. . Although the authors do not disregard the place of evidence in policymaking processes, they suggest that the development of evidence-based policies should not be seen simply as a process, however complex and confusing it may be, of the inexorable march of disqualified rationality in formulation of public policies. Instead, it should be seen as a step in the evolution of a reflexive, recursive and multi-factorial policy development and implementation model.

In the second part of the article, Freiberg and Carson (2010) expand the model, highlighting that affective or emotional arguments have a legitimate, if not vital, role in public policy discourse. Indeed, it is the authors' contention that a failure to appreciate the role of emotion may partly explain why so many official and academic reports remain unimplemented in the government's metaphorical drawer. Next, the authors discuss a range of models of the relationship between politics and evidence and argue that to take both evidence and emotion into account requires a model that incorporates broad democratic engagement and dialogue with stakeholders. An understanding of the process of collecting, presenting and explaining evidence – the procedural aspects of reform and policy – ​​can be as important as the substance of those policies.

Results

The vision of the Enlightenment model emphasizes the importance of creating informed discourse on a broader democratic front; one in which the vision is of an “evidence-based society in which debate is informed and takes into account (contested) evidence that is available to the many, not the few”. It also pushes the evidence into the broader arena of affect, possibly supporting the unfamiliar, if not illogical, notion of “emotion-driven evidence.” It also posits a centrifugal process of disseminating evidence rather than a narrower centripetal process of collecting instrumental evidence, albeit with dignified consultation, for policymaking purposes. Evidence is circulated back to the policy-making process through a communicative, discursive or dialogical approach that seeks to democratize knowledge and its use; deliberately injecting values ​​and emotions into the decision-making process; and avoid the depoliticization and managerialization of knowledge production and its use. This would involve the rejection of scientific claims to sole authority and the “insertion into the very center of the scientific enterprise of a more accessible and democratic discourse.

Adopting the evidence-based policy clarification model would also imply a new commitment to openness on the part of organizations designed to maximize the impact of evidence on policymaking. Most obviously, perhaps, they would have to be open in the sense that they would have to be permeable to the input and participation of other parties in a more active and collaborative role than is connoted by traditional concepts of consultation, contracting or expert advice. Interest groups and advocates become an integral part of an informed process of public debate about data and evidence. Practitioners, users and other stakeholders (who are not without their own emotional and value positions) become part of an iterative process within which their knowledge, feelings, needs and perspectives, although not given primacy or unconditional privilege, are integrated in identifying problems, analyzing evidence and formulating relevant policies.

Public Policy Lessons

The public policy model suggested by Freiberg and Carson (2010) does not require abandoning evidence for intuition or reason for emotion. The authors attempted to draw a distinction between the “evidence” element in evidence-based policy and the policy component. While the evidence base for policy, to the extent it is empirical or quantitative, must be scientifically rigorous, the application or translation of that evidence into practice, particularly in relation to the criminal justice system, must be informed by broader considerations such as emotions.

Therefore, the authors suggest that the recognition of emotion and affect within a dialogical and open policy-making process would not only generate a better model of evidence-based policy, but also a greater likelihood of such policies achieving their expressed objectives.

References

KARIMI, Saeid et al. The impact of entrepreneurship education: A study of Iranian students' entrepreneurial intentions and opportunity identification. Journal of Small Business Management , vol. 54, no. 1, p. 187-209, 2016.