The Role of Evaluation in Building Evidence-Based Policy

• Author: Larry L. Orr
• Date: 01 July 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716218764299
• Published date: 01 July 2018
• Subject Matter: Background

ANNALS, AAPSS, 678, July 2018 51

DOI: 10.1177/0002716218764299

The Role of

Evaluation in

Building

Evidence-Based

Policy

By

LARRY L. ORR

764299ANN The Annals of The American AcademyThe Role of Evaluation in Building Evidence-Based Policy

research-article2018

Growing recognition that many government programs

may be ineffective, or at best of unproven effectiveness,

has led to the evidence-based policy movement—an

effort to ensure that proposed and existing public pro-

grams have been shown to achieve their objectives.

Rigorous evaluation is central to this movement. In this

article, I briefly review the history of evaluation of

social programs and the barriers to the application of

effective evaluation to public policy.

Keywords: evidence-based policy; social experiments;

randomized trials; evaluation; evaluation

history; barriers to evaluation

Faced with a proposal for a new program or

policy, decision-makers must ask crucial

questions. What is its objective? Is that objec-

tive desirable? And if so, will this program or

policy achieve that objective? The first two

questions call for value judgments, and I have

little to say about them. But the third calls for

evidence. Only by examining evidence can we

hope to learn whether an intervention achieves

its objectives. The role of evaluation is to pro-

vide and interpret that evidence.

The need for careful evaluation is not always

recognized, especially in political circles. After

all, public programs are designed by experts

and run by experienced administrators. Can’t

we be confident that these programs work,

without all the trouble and cost of an evalua-

tion? Unfortunately, no. Rigorous tests of

Larry L. Orr teaches the program evaluation course in

the master of public policy program at Johns Hopkins

University and consults on the design and analysis of

evaluations of public programs. His current research

focuses on theoretical and empirical analysis of external

validity. He is author of the graduate level text, Social

Experiments: Evaluating Public Programs with

Experimental Methods (Sage Publications 1998).

Correspondence: Lorr5@jhu.edu