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Argumentation and Power in Evaluation-Research and in Its Utilization in the Policy-Making Process
Abstract
The idea that politics is mainly a matter of power and manipulation is quite common. Names which spring to mind are: Machiavelli, Weber and Trotsky.2 To those sharing this view, appealing to rationality is, in fact, an a-political method. This is confirmed by Hoogerwerf s research, in which he quotes a cabinet minister making the following statement:
“Thinking logically and reasoning soundly are soon unlearnt in politics. A carefully balanced argumentation in the House is less understood than slogans” (Hoogerwerf, 1986, p. 271).3
... This influence may be relatively explicit when modelbased recommendations for action feed directly into the policy process, although it would be naive to assume a linear translation from science into policy. 7,118 The influence is more implicit when climate change research contributes to framing the climate change issue in the political sphere. 119 In the context of climate models, Shackley et al. 120 suggest that modeling can effectively depoliticize issues by removing them from the political sphere and turning them into a matter of (supposedly) politically neutral science. ...
Integrated assessment models (IAMs) of global climate change that combine representations of the economic and the climate system have become important tools to support policymakers in their responses to climate change. Yet, IAMs are built in the face of pervasive uncertainty, both scientific and ethical, which requires modelers to make numerous choices in model development. These modeling choices have epistemic, ethical, and political dimensions. First, modeling choices determine how well our current (lack of) knowledge about the elements and processes of the modeled system is represented. Second, modeling choices have ethical implications, for example, the choice of a social discount rate, which is well documented. For other modeling choices, the ethical assumptions and implications are more subtle. Third, climate‐economic models are not produced and used in a political vacuum; they shape and are shaped by the social relations they are embedded in. We review findings from various literatures to unpack the complex intersection of science, ethics, and politics that IAMs are developed and used in. This leads us to suggest theoretical frameworks that may enable an integrated epistemic–ethical–political understanding of IAMs and increase transparency about all three dimensions of model uncertainties. WIREs Clim Change 2016, 7:627–645. doi: 10.1002/wcc.415
This article is categorized under: Integrated Assessment of Climate Change > Integrated Assessment Modeling
In democratic societies, legal procedures are to ensure legally correct and rationally acceptable decisions, i.e. decisions that can be defended both in relation to legal statutes and in relation to public criticism. But can the legal system via the discretion of the judges itself really autonomously settle normative questions? On this constitutionalists and proceduralists disagree. The problem is whether the substantial factors are legitimate, and whether the judges' interpretations of the situations are correct. Robert Alexy conceives of the legal discourse as a special variant of the general discourse but this blurs the distinction between legislation and application. There is a danger of assimilating law and morality and of overburdening the legal medium itself. Moral and legal questions point to different audiences, raise different validity claims and require different procedures for resolving conflicts. The author favours a variant of constitutional proceduralism hinged on discursive proceduralism which sets the terms for a fair procedure of reason giving. This standard for correctness is imperfect but ensures that the substantial, 'pre-political' principles entrenched in modern constitutions as basic rights are subjected to discursive testing in a deliberative process.
The future of public policy evaluation in France seems at once promising and uncertain. Although the signs of development are evident‐increasing numbers of evaluations, aroused public and parliamentary interest, active administrative involvement‐the process is not uniform, codified, or generally rigorous. The administration itself is the chief initiator of evaluations, possessing the greatest resources, yet only in a small minority of instances are the ideal conditions of evaluation met. Strong political pressure would almost certainly be essential to move the government toward the institutionalization of an effective appraisal system. Copyright
We must begin by examining various meanings of ‘politics’ that will fall within the scope of this discussion; next, the various meanings that can be assigned to ‘rationality’ or to ‘rational decision’ in different contexts; finally, how these meanings apply to the concept of a rational political decision.
Sociologists have frequently sought to explain people's beliefs and claims to knowledge in terms of those people's interests. Yet in every case the knowledge/interest connection is an interpretative and revisable one and, moreover, people may have many possibly-ascribable interests. Accordingly the ascription of interests in any particular case is fraught with difficulty. However, actors themselves appear regularly to engage in this kind of interpretative work. Using concepts from sociolinguistics and conversation analysis, this study illustrates through the example of one famous scientific paper how written scientific arguments can be seen to depend on this kind of work also. The study proposes that scientific arguments have a specific interactive orientation, and that technical texts can be seen to operate as a nexus of persuasion, action and belief.
This paper presents a new framework for handling ill-structured decision problems. The framework derives from recent developments in the logic of argumentation. It shows how policy statements may under certain conditions be construed as the outcome of a complex process of argumentation.
The framework is especially suited to ill-structured decision problems since it is capable of handling explicit contradictions and missing parts in an argument structure. It is also shown by means of a new concept—plausibility—how it is possible to locate the weakest links in a complex argument. A major consequence of the concept of plausibility is that it is possible under certain conditions to transform a problem in the logic of argumentation (i.e., symbolic logic) into one of algebra (i.e., linear programming).
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