Will Davies in evidence schmevidence? gives us the heart of his article in Open Democracy, examining what he calls the cult of evidence-based policy in Government. The issue he addresses is that people don't seem to value improvements in public services - even though there is firm evidence to show they are getting better. At the same time people may complain that things are getting worse when they aren't, as with some aspects of crime.
The trouble is that people want not just the facts, but the feel of the way that things are improving.
There is an important dimension to democracy that the evidence-based policy movement appears to miss. Democracy is not just about the desirability or otherwise of outcomes, but about the mechanisms used to select and achieve them. The government is bewildered that measured improvements in public services have not been noticed by the public, and that measured falls in crime have been accompanied by increased fears of crime, then tends to blame the media for excessive pessimism. But when policy is constructed and evaluated by anonymous statisticians, one cannot assume the public will share the government's assessment of it. In politics, it is not enough for something simply to be the best option; people must reach agreement that it is the best option, a process which then becomes constitutive of that option's value.
The processes of democracy are as important as the products ... it's not just what you do, but the way that you do it.
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