The argumentative turn in public policy inquiry: deliberative policy analysis for usable advice

Abstract

The argumentation turn in policy analysis emerged in the late 1980s as a response to questions concerning social relevance and usable knowledge. Toward this end, it focused on an apparent gap between policy inquiry and real-world policymaking. Basic to the approach was a challenge to the ‘value free’ positivist orientation that has shaped the field of policy analysis, underscoring in particular the limits of the technocratic practices to which it gave rise. After tracing the political and academic debates that surrounded the uses of policy analysis, the chapter presents the alternative argumentative orientation and its post-positivist methodological perspective. The discussion emphasizes its language-based foundations and outlines the logic of a deliberative-analytic framework for the assessment of policy argumentation. It illustrates the ways that policy analysis needs to integrate empirical and normative inquiry. Policy findings and practical policy argumentation are interpreted by decision-makers and citizens in terms of their relations to the larger framework of norms and values that imbue them with social and political meanings. Moving beyond a narrow empirical assignment, the argumentative turn seeks to assist these actors by also drawing out these normative connections. It is, as such, an effort to make good on Harold Lasswell's call for a 'policy science' of democracy.