3 - Political events and the policy sciences

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The previous chapter establishes with regard to Western Europe and the United States that the emergence and evolution of the social sciences have been structured both by the nature of particular intellectual and scholarly traditions and scientific institutions and by the shape of societal institutions and policy traditions. In this chapter I distinguish between internal variables, that is, factors that arise within an area of inquiry and external variables, deriving from political and contextual conditions. Wittrock et al. (chapter 2) have documented the impact of the range of internal and external features on the relationships between the state and social science (see also deLeon, 1986; Schottle, 1968).

Internal, or endogenous, variables include the nature of the contributing disciplines (for example, economics, sociology, and political science) and the explicit normative considerations embedded in each approach. For better or worse, these considerations are brought to the policy sciences in a relatively disciplined, albeit circumscribed, manner by practitioners (Hanson, 1983). External, or exogenous, variables refer to political or situational conditions that lie beyond the control of the analyst and, often, of the decision maker. For instance, the demands for rigorous, or at least systematic, policy and programme evaluation were given tremendous impetus by the need to assay the social-welfare programmes formulated in the mid-1960s.

This chapter focuses on such external forces. By demonstrating how various contextual conditions – some might call them crises – have shaped the development of the policy sciences, this chapter attempts to set the policy sciences in the political environments in which they must operate.