Applied Policy Analysis: A Taste of Reality

Dr Céline Mavrot, Dr Susanne Hadorn, and Professor Fritz Sager introduce the fifth article – ‘Blood, Sweat, and Cannabis: Real-World Policy Evaluation of Controversial Issues’ – published in the Journal of European Public Policy Special Issue ‘The Politics of Policy Analysis’. They reflect on the relationship between policy analysis and real-world politics, such as when salient issues divide actors and undermine the trust required to foster collaboration. An academic focus on the wider policymaking context can encourage policy actors to cooperate, while assigning some empirical authority to researchers can reduce the tendency for each actor to pursue their own interpretation of the current evidence.

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has once again highlighted ambivalent feelings regarding the role of science. Governments worldwide have given an unprecedented platform to scientists, and many suddenly became the Prince’s closest advisors. However, the pandemic has also prompted a massive infodemic, some of which promotes skepticism regarding COVID-19 and scientific authority. Democracies and evidence-based policies have a love–hate history. Scientists tend to have an equivocal attitude towards their role in real-world matters, torn between the will to bring useful information to the debate, and the fear of being instrumentalized. This dynamic makes policy analysis all the more intriguing.

What is the role of political science in such activity? It is the discipline most directly concerned with real-world politics, but has also devoted much effort to distinguish itself from the applied matters of power and politics. Some streams of public policy – such as policy evaluation – have kept applied social science at the center of their activity, but are often received with polite indifference or marked skepticism among the scientific community. However, far from being subordinated to the constraints of political mandates and lacking independence, applied streams of policy analysis have – when performed properly – developed reflectivity and instruments to maintain an analytical distance from their object of study. Therefore, a stronger dialogue between applied and theoretical streams of policy analysis would benefit the discipline.

In this contribution, we address the question of hands-on policy analysis, and question what politics does to science and what science does to policies. The article is based on a case of applied policy evaluation. The research team has evaluated the highly controversial policy on medical cannabis in Switzerland. The team was asked to assess the legality and adequacy of its implementation against the backdrop of a parliamentary and administrative controversy. We hold that policy analysis has much to gain from undertaking applied studies around concrete policy problems, and vice versa. We discuss four specific challenges policy analysis faces in its applied endeavors:

• political pressure (how to resist external pressure toward the results)
• scientific integrity (how to balance scientific rigor and needs in the field)
• access to sensitive data (how to manage explosive situations and confidential information), and
• epistemic legitimacy (how to defend the distinctive added value of political science applied to sectoral and highly specialized issues).

Bringing transversal concepts and an external viewpoint, policy analysis can contribute to de-escalating controversies by providing a 360-degree perspective on the issue at hand, and by retracing the historical reasons that account for policy incoherencies of deadlocks. In return, applied mandates allow policy analysts to penetrate the realm of policies behind closed doors. Mavrot, C., Hadorn, S. and Sager, F. (2023) ‘Blood, Sweat, and Cannabis: Real-World Policy Evaluation of Controversial Issues’, Journal of European Public Policy, https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2023.2222141