Research team
Evidence-Based Policy, causal mechanisms and causal narratives: How to improve the prediction of policy effectiveness?
Abstract
When policymakers (e.g. governments, private companies, etc.) want to develop a new policy (e.g. a localised lockdown), one of their major concerns is policy effectiveness: they want to know whether the policy P they implement will produce (or cause) the intended outcome O. This is a causational question and, to answer it, one needs to assess a set of causal pathways between P and O and provide understandable causal narratives describing those pathways. Evidence-Based Policy (EBP) – a specific approach to policymaking – prescribes that policy effectiveness predictions should be based on the best available evidence. Moreover, according to recent literature in the philosophy of science, causality between two events like P and O can be established only when there is evidence of the existence of one or more causal mechanisms from P to O. In this project, I will focus on causal mechanisms and EBP to address three obstacles for the improvement of policy effectiveness: (i) integrating the notion of mechanistic evidence with the traditional ideas of evidence present in EBP, according to which the best evidence only comes from quantitative studies; (ii) defining what a social mechanism is; and (iii), developing an account of causal narratives and causal selection to effectively communicate causality in policymaking. I will face these issues by adopting and elaborating tools from philosophy of science, with the overall purpose of improving the analysis of policy effectiveness in EBP.Researcher(s)
- Promoter: Leuridan Bert
- Fellow: Del Grosso Paride
Research team(s)
Project website
Project type(s)
- Research Project
Evidence-based policy, fallibility and ignorance.
Abstract
Evidence-based policy (EBP) is based on the idea that policy makers should use evidence as the basis for their policy decisions, in the hopes that the latter will work. EBP is highly important in present-day societies, and has been heavily discussed in the social sciences (i.a. public policy literature) and in philosophy and philosophy of science. If we look at what has been done, we see that many divergent definitions and characterizations of EBP have been proposed. As of yet there is no agreed upon definition of EBP. Furthermore, EBP faces many challenges in practice. For most of them it is not clear how they should be addressed, in part due to the lack of consensus about what EBP is or should be. This project wants to contribute to the solution to this problem by clarifying existing meanings of 'EBP', by tackling two specific epistemological problems relating to EBP and by striving towards a consensus definition.Researcher(s)
- Promoter: Leuridan Bert
- Fellow: Del Grosso Paride
Research team(s)
Project type(s)
- Research Project