With unrivalled political savvy and a keen sense of irony, distinguished political scientists Anthony King and Ivor Crewe open our eyes to the worst government horror stories and explain why the British political system is quite so prone to appalling mistakes.

Investigates the effects of research in the field of international development.. Examines the consequences of 23 research projects funded by Canada's International Development Research Centre in developing countries. Shows how research influence public policy and decision-making and how can contribute to better governance.

New thinking is needed on the age-old conundrum of how to connect research and policymaking. Why does a disconnect exist between the research community, which is producing thousands of studies relevant to public policy, and the policy community, which is making thousands of decisions that would benefit from research evidence? The second edition updates community dissonance theory and provides an even stronger, more substantiated story of why research is underutilized in policymaking, and what it will take to connect researchers and policymakers. This book offers a fresh look into what policymakers and the policy process are like, as told by policymakers themselves and the researchers who study and work with them. New to the second edition: • The point of view of policymakers is infused throughout this book based on a remarkable new study of 225 state legislators with an extraordinarily high response rate in this hard-to-access population. • A new theory holds promise for guiding the study and practice of evidence-based policy by building on how policymakers say research contributes to policymaking. • A new chapter features pioneering researchers who have effectively influenced public policy by engaging policymakers in ways rewarding to both. • A new chapter proposes how an engaged university could provide culturally competent training to create a new type of scholar and scholarship. This review of state-of-the-art research on evidence-based policy is a benefit to readers who find it hard to keep abreast of a field that spans the disciplines of business, economics, education, family sciences, health services, political science, psychology, public administration, social work, sociology, and so forth. For those who study evidence-based policy, the book provides the basics of producing policy relevant research by introducing researchers to policymakers and the policy process. Strategies are provided for identifying research questions that are relevant to the societal problems that confront and confound policymakers. Researchers will have at their fingertips a breath-taking overview of classic and cutting-edge studies on the multi-disciplinary field of evidence-based policy. For instructors, the book is written in a language and style that students find engaging. A topic that many students find mundane becomes germane when they read stories of what policymakers are like, and when they learn of researcher’s tribulations and triumphs as they work to build evidence-based policy. To point students to the most important ideas, the key concepts are highlighted in text boxes. For those who desire to engage policymakers, a new chapter summarizes the breakthroughs of several researchers who have been successful at driving policy change. The book provides 12 innovative best practices drawn from the science and practice of engaging policymakers, including insights from some of the best and brightest researchers and science communicators. The book also takes on the daunting task of evaluating the effectiveness of efforts to engage policymakers around research. A theory of change identifies seven key elements that are fundamental to increasing policymaker’s use of research along with evaluation protocols and preliminary evidence on each element.

Food systems around the world face a triple challenge: providing food security and nutrition for a growing global population; supporting livelihoods for those working along the food supply chain; and contributing to environmental sustainability. Better policies hold tremendous promise for making progress in these domains.

This report examines the influence of trust on policy making and explores some of the steps governments can take to strengthen public trust.

Argues that the central goal of policy design is effectiveness.

Over the last twenty or so years, it has become standard to require policy makers to base their recommendations on evidence. That is now uncontroversial to the point of triviality--of course, policy should be based on the facts. But are the methods that policy makers rely on to gather and analyze evidence the right ones? In Evidence-Based Policy, Nancy Cartwright, an eminent scholar, and Jeremy Hardie, who has had a long and successful career in both business and the economy, explain that the dominant methods which are in use now--broadly speaking, methods that imitate standard practices in medicine like randomized control trials--do not work. They fail, Cartwright and Hardie contend, because they do not enhance our ability to predict if policies will be effective. The prevailing methods fall short not just because social science, which operates within the domain of real-world politics and deals with people, differs so much from the natural science milieu of the lab. Rather, there are principled reasons why the advice for crafting and implementing policy now on offer will lead to bad results. Current guides in use tend to rank scientific methods according to the degree of trustworthiness of the evidence they produce. That is valuable in certain respects, but such approaches offer little advice about how to think about putting such evidence to use. Evidence-Based Policy focuses on showing policymakers how to effectively use evidence, explaining what types of information are most necessary for making reliable policy, and offers lessons on how to organize that information.