SOCS3100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Policy, Formal Methods, Eval
25 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
SOCS3100
Policy Development, Program Management, and Evaluation
May 2, 2018
WEEK 7/8
Evaluation: Political More Than Technical?
Evaluation – stage at which various actors assess how a program / policy has actually
fared in practice
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• Has it actually been a success? What worked? What didnt?
• Politics, power, pressure
• Types
o Formal
▪ Evaluation
▪ Policy / Program Review
▪ Royal Commission – ex. bank policies
▪ Judicial Review – high court evaluates if policies are constitutional
or not
o Informal
• Anyone can critique a policy
• Can kick-start a new policy cycle
o Can direct agenda setting and policy formulation steps of policy cycle
• Agenda setting and policy formulation may be embodied in the findings of a
review
Evaluation and Leaning
• Learning from past policy performance is not new…
• Been going on for centuries
• How English royalty dealt with unemployed
o Wealth for landholders, but social problem
o Landless peasants robbing and begging to survive
o Only thing left to do was to starve to death
o Every few years, there were different methods of punishment
• Policy-deciders (politicians, bureaucrats) and social actors have always reflected
on experience / copied previous ideas
• Historical consciousness, corporate memory
Evaluation as systemic quantified assessment is relatively new.
• Emerged when SS wanted more credibility of hard sciences
• Political push for technical social scientific evaluation emerged from 1960s
• Mid-170s – conservative momentum grew to wind back the welfare state
• Policy debates over public sector effectiveness
• Economic rationalism / monetarism / managerialism
• Conservative push to do more with less, tax cuts
• ... while optimistic supporters of post-war public sector expansion / social
democracy wanted to prove program effectiveness
• ex. Investment in education created a more productive workforce, less
crime, etc.
Who evaluates?
Technical and political modes
• Evaluation brings up image of formal, technical exercises conducted by experts
in evaluation methodology
• Most texts feature range of formal methods
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Document Summary
What didn(cid:1685)t: politics, power, pressure, types, formal, evaluation, policy / program review, royal commission ex. bank policies, judicial review high court evaluates if policies are constitutional or not. Informal: anyone can critique a policy, can kick-start a new policy cycle, can direct agenda setting and policy formulation steps of policy cycle, agenda setting and policy formulation may be embodied in the findings of a review. While optimistic supporters of post-war public sector expansion / social democracy wanted to prove program effectiveness: ex. Investment in education created a more productive workforce, less crime, etc. Our focus: forms of assessment that entail some systematic research: examples, evaluation of the commonwealth-state disability agreement (1992-97, social security review, 1987-89, productivity commission review of the job network (2002, ex. Studies into the operations or impact of programs such as the topics for the. Policy research case study (cid:1684)mutual obligation(cid:1685)/(cid:1685)welfare to work(cid:1685: work-for-the-dole 1996-2006, sole parents + pwd: 2005 welfare to work act present.
