Democracy and the policy sciences

Abstract

The policy sciences approach has recently came under sustained criticism for being insensitive to the values and preferences of the ordinary citizen. This paper attempts to address these problems by outlining a post-positivist approach, drawing upon the works of Jurgen Habermas. The paper proposes a “participatory policy analysis” that utilizes a sampling of affected citizens to create a “policy forum” to inform the policymaker of citizens' positions on important policy issues.