Gut-Level Decisionmaking: Implications for Public Policy Analysis

Abstract

You can't read the literature on the use of policy analysis in public policy making without feeling disappointed or (if you consider yourself a policy analyst) even a little embarrassed. Naive social scientists who-early onbelieved in a rational model of decision making have been replaced by (or retrained into) war-wise program evaluators, survey researchers, and policy analysts. Conscripts to the real world of policy making, these scientists have been dragged, beaten and screaming, to the sensible conclusion that decisions are based on many factors among which one, if you are lucky, may be the report you wrote. Article after article describes the hard knocks understanding of what may work and what is hopeless as policy-analysis strategy. The cumulative intent of this literature can appear to be to cut the losses among bruised policy scientists-kind of a triage by exposition.