Getting Evidence into Practice: Perspectives on Rationality

The UK Government’s renewed emphasis on evidence-based policy making (EBP) is held to reflect a less ideological, more pragmatic ‘third way’ to developing and implementing economic and social policies. The new mantra – ‘what matters is what works’ – signals a resurgence of traditional notions of rationality in policy making. It implies a central role for social research and evaluation in developing robust evidence of how and why policies do, or do not, ‘work’ and policy-making processes that prioritize the influence of such evidence. Of course, there is nothing new in the notion that the application of knowledge to the conduct of social affairs improves the prospects for human betterment. This was the conviction of Francis Bacon in the 17th century (Zagorin, 1998), whose advocacy of systematic critical empiricism founded upon careful experimentation was passionately endorsed by John Dewey, in the early 20th century, in his quest for a philosophical basis for the capacity to achieve social progress: