The Political Use of Evidence and Its Contribution to Democratic Discourse

• Date: 01 July 2018
• Published date: 01 July 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12923

The Political Use of Evidence and Its Contribution to Democratic Discourse 645

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 78, Iss. 4, pp. 645–649. © 2018 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12923.

Fritz Sager is professor of political

science and member of the Executive Board

of the KPM Center for Public Management

at the University of Bern and served as

dean of the university’s Faculty of Business,

Economics, and Social Sciences until 2018.

He specializes in administrative studies

and theory, policy research and evaluation,

organizational analysis, and Swiss politics.

E-mail: fritz.sager@kpm.unibe.ch

Iris Stucki is deputy head of the Federal

Office for the Equality of People with

Disabilities in Switzerland. She received

her PhD in public administration for her

dissertation on the use of evidence in direct

democracy. Her interests cover evidence-

based policy making and voting behavior.

She is the winner of the Evidence & Policy

Carol Weiss Prize 2017.

E-mail: iris.stucki@bluemail.ch

Caroline Schlaufer is professor in the

Public Policy Department of the Higher

School of Economics, Moscow. Her research

interests focus on using evidence in policy

making, policy narratives, policy transfer,

and public policy in non-Western societies.

E-mail: cschlaufer@hse.ru

The Political Use of Evidence and Its Contribution to

Democratic Discourse

Abstract: This article argues that evidence, even when used politically, contributes to high-quality democratic

discourse. Research results on the use of evidence in referendum campaigns in Switzerland show that (1) evidence

fosters discourse quality and shifts the focus away from politics to policy; (2) evaluations and basic research contrib-

ute positively to discourse, but not opinion surveys and statistics; (3) the participation of experts and administrative

practitioners in discourse is crucial to make evidence available to the public; and (4) evidence is always used as a part

of a narrative and can alter the constructed images used in a story. In conclusion, the implications for practitioners

are discussed.

A

growing body of literature describes how

scientific evidence is used in policy making.

This scholarship on evidence-based policy

making mostly focuses on how evidence is used

instrumentally to improve policy and dismisses the

use of evidence to support a political position as

an unfortunate politicization of science (Boswell

2014, 346; Knorr 1977). In democratic campaigns,

however, scientific evidence is mostly used politically.

That means that politicians, interest groups, and

governments select those findings that support their

position and interpret evidence in accordance with

their political conviction (Boswell 2009; Shulock

1999). This article assembles the results of a multiyear

research project on the political use of scientific

evidence in referendum campaigns in Switzerland

(Sager 2017; Schlaufer 2016a, 2016b, 2016c;

Stucki 2016a, 2016b, 2017; Stucki and Schlaufer

2017).1 Based on these results, the article argues that

using scientific evidence politically contributes to

democratic discourse in several ways. More precisely,

this article examines four questions: (1) How does

the political use of evidence contribute to democratic

discourse? (2) What evidence contributes most

to democratic discourse? (3) Who uses evidence

politically in democratic campaigns? (4) How is

evidence used politically?

The article proceeds as follows: The next section

details the theoretical approaches employed to

examine the political use of evidence. Then, the

methodological approach of the research project on

the political use of evidence in Swiss referendum

campaigns is introduced. The results section follows

the research questions and presents a summary of

already published work of the authors as well as

unpublished overarching data from the research

project. Finally, the findings and their practical

implications for administrative practitioners are

discussed.

The Political Use of Evidence

The traditional scholarship on research utilization

(e.g., Weiss 1979) and the more recent literature on

evidence-based policy making (e.g., Davies, Nutley,

and Smith 2000; Isett, Head, and VanLandingham

2016; Sager 2007) focus almost exclusively on

how evidence is used instrumentally in the policy-

making process to improve policy. The political

use of scientific evidence to justify and legitimize

a predetermined position is mostly disregarded.

However, scientific evidence arguably is used much

more frequently for political than for instrumental

purposes (Newman 2017). Furthermore, it is now

widely recognized in the evidence-based policy

making literature that policy making is not a

rational process in which evidence directly influences

policy but rather an inherently political process

of argumentation and persuasion (Cairney 2016;

Newman 2017; Parkhurst 2017; Rissi and Sager

2013). Nonetheless, empirical analyses on the political

use of evidence are scarce (for exceptions, see Boswell

2009; Shulock 1999).

The analysis of the political use of evidence in Swiss

referendum campaigns builds on a deliberative

approach that focuses on the discursive processes

leading to public policy decisions (Majone 1989;

Pearce, Wesselink, and Colebatch 2014; Shulock

1999; Wesselink, Colebatch, and Pearce 2014). In

Caroline Schlaufer

Higher School of Economics, Moscow

Iris Stucki

University of Bern

Fritz Sager

University of Bern Viewpoint

Stephen E. Condrey,

Associate Editor