Poficy Sciences 28: 79-100, 1995.

1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Between knowledge and power: Utilization of social science

in public policy making
ERIK ALBiEK
Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Universitetsparken, DK-8000 Aarhus,
Denmark
Abstract. Most conceptualizations of the linkage between science and politics have traditionally been informed by rationalist concepts of science and decision-making. The result has been
a false dichotomy between (legitimate) rational research utilization and (illegitimate) political
research utilization. This dichotomy must be overcome, on normative as well as empirical
grounds. Scientifically generated knowledge constitutes an important, but on the whole unquantifiable part of the enormous store of knowledge which participants in the politico-administrative decision-making process apply to their practical tasks. To understand the complex interfaces between social science research and the political-administrative decision-making process,
it is necessary to be aware that research is transferred to, and becomes part of, a discourse of
action, in the philosophical as well as the everyday practical sense - a discourse in which
(self)reflecting participants deliberate on and debate norms and alternatives with a view to concrete action. This makes the contribution of science to policy making both less tangible and
potentially more influential than is usually assumed.

The issue of how to reconcile the true with the good - and more specifically,
the function that should be assigned to those who possess true knowledge in
the society that ensures a good life for its citizens - has been central to
Western thinking. Plato thought that knowledge and power should be concentrated in the hands of 'philosopher-kings? One of the founders of modern
social science, Auguste Comte, thought that the power to govern should be
given to the so-called 'positive priesthood' of modern society, i.e. the scientists. And in our own day there is still a widespread idea that it should be possible to apply scientific insight to the solution of the many problems we and
our society face today.
At the same time it is a common view that we have not been very successful
in applying social science in public policy making. It is actually thought that
there is a wide and possibly unbridgeable gap between the research community on the one hand and the policy making community on the other
(Caplan, 1979).
However, for some time there has been a growing feeling among scholars
that the alleged gap between (scientific) knowledge and (political) action does
not exist in reality - or at least does not have the form and extent claimed. If it
is thought that there is a gap between social science and policy making, this is
primarily because of unrealistic and normatively problematical expectations
of how social science could and should be utilized in public policy making;
expectations that could only be disappointed when attempts were made to

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make social research more 'applied" and to gear it more to the solution of
specific problems faced by policy makers, for example in the form of policy
and evaluation research.
This is the complex of problems that will be addressed in this essay. I will
first demonstrate how the dominant conceptions of the linkage between
science and politics have traditionally been informed by positivist and rationalist concepts of science and decision-making. A clear symmetry exists
between rational decision-making and positivist science. In rational policy
making 'policies are hypotheses' (Landau, 1977: p. 425), hypotheses of how
means (i.e., given social programs) will lead to desired ends. This process
resembles the classical scientific experiment: hypothesis - intervention effect. Consequently, there should be no problem in using social science
research to test policy hypotheses (Alb~ek, 1989).
However, both the positivist ideal of science and the rational decision
model have been heavily criticized. By reviewing three theoretical alternatives
to the rational decision model I show why we should not be surprised to find
that the empirical research on knowledge application has had very great difficulties in finding examples of rational social science research utilization; on
the other hand, there have been no problems in identifying alternative, nonrational practices.
Not only do these alternative decision models allow for a more realistic
account of social science research utilization; they also allow for a normatively much more appealing account. The reason for this is that the focus has
shifted from the analysis of decision-making to the analysis of action. One of
the few social science theorists who has steadfastly tried to build a decision
theory that is both empirically and normatively based on the premises of
political action is Charles Lindblom. It is this point of departure that has
allowed Lindblom to see an alternative symmetry between science and politics, that is between, on the one hand, 'partisan-mutual-adjustment' (1965) as
a politico-democratic method, and on the other hand 'incrementalism' (1979)
and 'probing' (1989) as analytical and scientific methods.
A review of Lindblom thus enables us to arrive at an alternative understanding of the interfaces between science and politics; an understanding that
is free of the technocratic and authoritarian implications inherent in the positivist/rationalist conception of social science research utilization. I argue in
this essay that there does in fact exist a kind of symmetry between science and
politics, inasmuch as both are based on language and argument. It is thus here
that one must search for the (potential) linkages between the spheres of
science and politics, linkages that make the contribution of science to policy
making at once less tangible and potentially more influential than is usually
assumed.
In a way there is nothing new in this understanding of the interplay between
science and politics. Fundamentally, it is a return to the original Enlightenment notion of a pluralist, reasoned debate which later, in its perverted positivist/rationalist version, was restricted to meaning solely a rationally cal-

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culated decision. The legitimizing basis of both the democratic and the scientific process originates in the Enlightenment idea of reasoned debate, and it
is by applying these democratic ideals of criticism and dissent to scientific
knowledge and research that we can allow this notion to play its most fruitful
role in politics.

Positivist s c i e n c e - - rational d e c i s i o n

Today science forms part of our ordinary conceptual world. Everyone knows
what it looks like, and the fundamental qualities people associate with science
are easy to reel off: thoroughness, the systematic approach, reliability, validity,
objectivity, the search for truth, logic, generalizability, originality and relevance. Science's perception of itself is an extension of this, and scientists
expound these qualities in thick books and learned articles, making sure this
self-perception is passed on to the next generation as soon as a freshman
opens his first textbook on methodology.
Welt, more or less. The books on methodology go a long way, yet they rarely get as far as the last two qualities - originality and relevance - despite the
immense importance of these qualities in the perception of science. It is not
exactly a vision of the researcher's methodological skills that first strikes the
mind's eye when we hear that so and so has won the Nobel Prize. Nor is it
because young researchers burn with the flame of reliability and validity that
they choose careers in the social sciences, but because they are struck with
curiosity or want to play a part, however modest, in ensuring that society can
develop for the better. As no hard and fast instructions can be given on how
to make your research original and relevant, or how to measure whether it is
so, originality and relevance have been regarded as part of the 'context of discovery' that the theory of science and methodology has not considered itself
qualified to deal with. Instead, efforts have been concentrated on setting
norms for the 'context of justification' - all the other qualities.
If relevance and originality are seen as extra-scientific qualities - that is,
things for which norms cannot be established scientifically - there is no
reason why others should not be able to establish or judge these qualities
without prejudice to the activities of the researchers as science. This, in fact,
was what made it possible to launch one of the most comprehensive attempts
so far to allow research to make its original, relevant contribution to changing
society for the better: the introduction of evaluation and policy research into
American public administration in the 1960s and 1970s. This succeeded in
incorporating science with its thoroughness, objectivity-, etc. as part of the
rational decision-making process that US policy making was believed to be or believed it ought to be (Albaek, 1988a; 1989).
The rational decision-making process involves a limited number of political actors who make calculated choices between clearly formulated alternatives. Decisions are regarded as rational when they can be explained as c h o o s -

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ing the most suitable means of achieving desired ends. The decision-making
process is divided into a number of successive steps: the decision-maker must
specify goals; draw attention to alternative ways in which the goals can be
achieved; evaluate the consequences of each alternative; and select the action
which maximizes the net benefit. The starting point has been the decision
model of economics, whose logical structure is generalized to apply to any
choice at all, whether a choice made by individual consumers, private producers or public-sector decision-makers.
Both the ideal rational decision-making process and the classic ideal scientific process prescribe procedures - and only procedures. This means particular steps that have to be followed regardless of content if something is to
deserve the predicate 'rational' or 'scientific.' Since there is a clear symmetry
between the logical structures of both processes (Chamhis, 1979: pp. 16-36),
the same characteristics recur in discussions of them. They are logical, systematic, objective, thorough, etc. And this is what has made it easy to incorporate science in rational policy making and administration - as an invaluable aid in demonstrating whether means are suitable for achieving the
intended ends. In fact, rational decision-making and policy making, problemsolving, etc. were made more or less synonymous with applied social science
in the form of policy analysis, evaluation research, cost-benefit analysis or
whatever label was attached to it. For example, a well-known and often-used
textbook on policy analysis embarks on its subject as follows: 'How choices
should be made - the whole problem of allocating scarce resources among
competing ends - is the stuff of economics and the subject of this book'
(Stokey and Zeckhauser, 1978: p. 22). While the scientific expert has never
been crowned king in this view of decision-making, he is nevertheless assigned a post in the inner circle of the court.
The road had thus been laid for the march of research into American politics and administration. This road was used on the grand scale and in the
course of time has been widened considerably to meet the demands of traffic.
But the use of research was to turn out quite differently than expected. Just a
few years after evaluation and policy research took the American corridors of
power and administration by storm, it became depressingly clear that one
could only rarely and with difficulty prove that the research had exerted any
specific influence or had any beneficial effect on the policy that was implemented. And indeed this was also the result arrived at by a number of
more systematic, empirical analyses of the use of research (e.g. Caplan et al.,
1975; Rich, 1977; Weiss with Buchavalas, 1980).
It has gradually become clear that one of the most important explanations
of this failure to apply scientific knowledge is that those involved with making
social science useful to public policy makers operated with far too naive and
mistaken a view of how rational the political-administrative decision-making
process is - or can become. Many researchers had the notion that, if they
were involved in the political-administrative decision-making process, they
would be able, given the scientific insight afforded by their respective dis-

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ciplines, to make other decisions than the existing decision-makers. This
notion itself reveals an abysmal lack of insight into and respect for the nature
of the political-administrative process.
The rational decision-making model is an idealized model. One therefore
has no trouble finding examples of decisions that are not made in accordance
with the model. In fact it is almost by definition impossible to find examples
of decisions that are, since reality will never live up to the ideal. And actually
this is not the issue addressed by criticisms of the model. It is rather the fact
that its basic demands on a rational decision-making process are misleading,
impracticable and inappropriate, and on the whole fundamentally irreconcilable with the way decisions are made in the real world.
For several decades now much hard criticism has been directed at the
theory of the rational decision-making process, which has certainly dominated the history of organizational theory. And alternative schools or 'models'
have been formed, differing to varying degrees from the classic rational ideal.
Let us look at three such alternative decision models. In his Administrative
Behavior, Herbert Simon assumed that decision-makers intend to act rationally. But they are far from successful in doing so, since the decision-makers
only have limited individual and collective abilities to act in logical, maximizing ways. The combination of psychological and organizational imperfections, which limits our ability to make fully rational decisions, makes us 'satisrice' rather than 'maximize' - that is, we make decisions that satisfy and suffice, but which are not necessarily the best decisions. To 'satisfice' is to do
something well enough, but not necessarily as well as possible.
In his extensive works on the politico-administrative decision-making process, Charles Lindblom has followed up on Simon in his critique of the
'rational-comprehensive' decision model by demonstrating, for example, how
the quest for full rationality is associated with costs in the form of time, energy
and money. One must be fully convinced that the benefits of adopting a more
rational approach to the solving of a problem outweigh the costs; otherwise
one is acting quite irrationally. Striving for the abstract optimum solution to a
problem may require so many resources in terms of money and time that the
firm goes bankrupt before a solution has materialized.
Although Lindblom, in pointing out the limitations of rational decisionmaking, concurs with Simon much of the way, he goes further than simply
identifying such limitations. Indeed, he seems almost to take a Mephistophelean pleasure in demonstrating how the world of reality turns rationality
on its head. Not for nothing did he call his famous article of 1959 'The
science of "muddling through".' Where Simon and Lindblom differ strikingly
is in the role played by values in the decision-making model. Simon is fully
aware that organizations are not homogeneous units, and that the values of
the organization as a whole may differ from the values of individuals within
the organization. He thus operates with both impersonal 'organizational'
values and individuals' 'personal' values. Simon is first and foremost interested in the former, and his view of them is close enough to that of the rational

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model for him to follow it in assuming that an authoritative person or group
of persons will at some point assign an explicit set of values to the decisionmaking process. This is why prescriptive models based like Simon's on synoptic rationality easily take on technocratic overtones.
Lindblom, on the other hand, makes explicit value conflicts a fundamental
element in his decision-making model. In so doing, he emerges as a political
scientist, whereas Simon is more an economist. 1 In the approach inspired by
political science, a decision-making process consists of individuals and interest groups with different values, preferences, convictions and perceptions of
reality. Such differences are not resolved by the management of an organization authoritatively stablishing a hierarchy of goals. Instead it is assumed
that organizational objectives and decisions arise from ongoing processes of
negotiation, maneuvering and bargaining among individuals and groups associated with the organization. Strategy and tactics therefore become important
means of influencing the end result of the negotiations. Thus, a conflict-bargaining perspective need not necessarily abandon the idea of rational behavior at the individual level, and in fact rarely does so. The classic example of a
conflict-bargaining situation involving fully rational actors is game theory.
If social research has generally been inclined to look for reason, cause and
functionality in all behavior, a third alternative model, the garbage-can model
(Cohen, March and Olsen, 1972), emphasizes the random, temporary, fluid
and shifting nature of social life. In its vision of a flow of 'choice opportunities'
through the organization, into which participants can throw problems and
solutions by expending a certain amount of energy, the garbage-can model
ranges far from the rational paradigm and takes a far more anarchic view of
decision-making processes.
It is thus a basic feature of the garbage can model that no direct connection
is specified between the values and objectives of the actors involved and the
events that the model is intended to explain - that is the outcome of a decision-making process. In other words, such outcomes are not viewed as the
realization of the intentions of the actors, not even in the form of a negotiated
realization, as implied by the conflict-bargaining model. On the contrary,
problems, solutions and choice opportunities are conceptually separate from
the actors in an organization, and can be analysed independently of them.
This does not necessarily mean that the actors participating in the decisionmaking process do not formulate goals, and do not consciously try to influence the process and its outcome accordingly. But it means that no individual
actors or coalition of actors are able to guide the process through to a desired
result. The dynamics that control the process cannot be seen as a predictable
or controllable process, rather as an anarchic meeting-place which allows
actors, problems and solutions to come together, sometimes such that the
final decision or end-result is one that was desired by no one. It can therefore
be misleading to speak of a decision-making process, for insofar as there are
decisions in a garbage-can process, it is usually a matter of actors afterwards
rationalizing the events in the process or its results into willed decisions.

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Bearing in mind this massive critique of the axioms of the rational decisionmaking process, it should come as no surprise that only in exceptional cases
do we find examples of the direct and immediate, 'instrumental' use of
research results that was the anticipated result of the introduction of evaluation and policy research into American politics and administration (Caplan et
al., 1975; Rich, 1977; Weiss with Buchavalas, 1980). For the notion of a relatively close relationship between research results and the decision-making
process, where the latter would make direct, demonstrable, instrumental use
of the research to solve clearly predefined problems, is predicated on the
actual existence of a rational decision-making process.
This, however, is not to go to the other extreme and say that research is not
used - simply that it is not used as prescribed by rational thinking. If social
science knowledge has been placed in a domain where members of an organization carry out a limited search for alternatives, keeping to familiar, wellworn paths and selecting the first satisfactory one that comes along, it may
perhaps function as one of the premises for solving the problem. If, instead,
decision-making processes take the form of a bargaining game among actors
with different interests and views of reality, one can easily imagine how those
actors seek out information that they can relate to their own perception of the
problem and that can be used to promote a solution seen from this perspective - i.e., research is used as 'political ammunition' (Weiss, 1977a; 1978;
Knorr, 1977; Feldman and March, 1981). And if the decision-making process
is perceived as a looser coupling among problems, solutions, choice opportunities and participants, we should not expect research results to be disseminated and used as the integrated totality they are in the research reports.
Instead, knowledge, including scientifically-produced knowledge, flows into
the decision-making process through obscure channels from many different
sources, and this results in a more general awareness of the way the world
appears and is structured. In this sense, one says that research is used 'conceptually' (Rich, 1977; Weiss, 1978; Pelz, 1978) or that it has an 'enlightenment' function (Weiss, 1977). And empirical studies have also proved the
existence of this kind of political and conceptual use of research, where it is
not applied in 'pure form' but through translation into other contexts than the
one in which it was produced; by being synthesized with other types of knowledge; and by being integrated into existing views of problems and solutions,
which, however, themselves adapt and therefore undergo constant transformation (Caplan et al., 1975; Rich, 1977; Weiss with Buchavalas, 1980; for
non-US studies, see Van de Vail and Bolas, 1980; Nilsson, 1992; Lampinen,
1992; Naustdalslid and Reitan, 1994).
And all this is fine. Or more or less fine. For while it is assuring for the social researcher to find evidence that research does in fact make its way into
the politico-administrative decision-making process, it is hard to accept that
the road is so roundabout and murky, and that the research is only helped on
its way up through the court by the intrigues of the sycophants. So continued
attempts are made to develop research that will gain more direct access to the

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ear of the king. Qualitative methods (Patton, 1980; Miles and Huberman,
1984; Lincoln and Guba, 1985), formative (Weiss, 1972: pp. 16-17; FitzGibbon and Morris, 1987: pp. 14-20) or process evaluation (Patton, 1987:
pp. 23-24), stake-holder models (Bryk, 1983), utilization-focused evaluation
(Patton, 1978), etc. are developed, aiming almost without exception to increase the benefit of the individual research process in terms of some quite
specific problem-solving process. It cannot be denied that much has been
done, and still can be done, to narrow the gap between 'the two communities'
- the researchers and the decision-makers (Caplan, 1979). Nor can it be
denied that the gap has on occasion been reduced so much that even former
skeptics seem to be convinced that research does sometimes reach the decision-makers relatively directly (Rossi and Wright, 1989: pp. 455-56). None
the less, even the most direct use of social research can never be understood
in anything but a political context. And the suggestion here is that this may
not be such a bad thing.

The political-practical context of social science research utilization

Deep within Western culture lies a wish to see human behavior - individual as
well as collective - as something controlled by a consistent goal-oriented
rationality. If the world is interpreted in this perspective, politics must undeniably appear as an impediment to the exercise of reason. How much better
and more efficiently the world could be organized without politicians interfering and serving special interests! What we forget when we succumb to this
kind of thinking is that we have not built our world with blinkered efficiency
in mind. If we had, we would probably have chosen an enlightened despotism
to rule it. But we chose democracy. And we did so precisely in the awareness
that we do not all want the same things. So conflicts of interest are inevitably a
feature of the order of things. If we are to ensure that we do not make a practice of decapitating one another, we must have a conflict-solving mechanism
that allows individuals and groups to further their own interests, but which at
the same time forces them to give ground to one another and seek compromise and consensus. Thus, if one takes one's point of departure in political
realities instead of a limited economic concept of the rational, the politicodemocratic way of solving problems appears rational enough.
At the abstract level, that is. For while democracy in the abstract appears
attractive to most people, one is often misled into preferring an equally
abstract, but fundamentally antidemocratic 'expert solution' when one sees
democracy manifested in specific decision-making processes.
This is not only true from the layman's point of view. It is very much the
case too with the theory of decision-making, where Charles Lindblom is one
of the few to have the actual political decision-making model as a normative
ideal. It is with no regret that he amuses himself by demonstrating the antirational features of the specific version of the conflict-bargaining perspective

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that he portrays in his incremental, mutual adjustment model. On the contrary, he defends it under the title of 'the intelligence of democracy' (1965) as
the only way politico-administrative decisions can and should be made in a
pluralist, democratic and liberal society. In American society, which is the
starting point for Lindblom's assumptions, political power is spread over a
number of different institutions, and this forces the members of the fragmented 61ite to bargain their way to results ('partisan mutual adjustment'). In
such a fragmented decision-making process, progress can only be made in
small and discontinuous steps ('disjointed-incrementalism'). Lindblom's angle
of approach has had great success, partly because it lies close to the involved
actors' own experience of the way the political system functions, and partly
because it has been strongly supported by empirical studies, especially of
budgetary decisions in modern industrialized countries (Wildavsky, 1964;
Schick, 1983).
The science of muddling through - the method of successive limited comparisons - is a frontal attack on synoptic rational planning and its notions of
the potential for implementing large-scale reforms. The fundamental view of
incrementalism is that the decision-makers choose to act cautiously when, as
in a political system, they are faced with great uncertainty because of a lack of
information on causes and effects, the actions of other actors, and the consequences of their choices. Not only do they choose this kind of strategy of
caution; according to Lindblom, they are also wise to do so. Here Lindblom's
position resembles that of Karl Popper when the latter recommends 'piecemeal engineering' - a strategy where those involved characteristically act 'in
caution and in preparedness for unavoidable surprises' - rather than 'utopian
engineering' (1968: p. 69).
Lindblom's well-known arguments will not be rehearsed here at any length.
In this context, it is sufficient to point out two aspects of incrementalism/partisan mutual adjustment. In the first place, it is worth noting that Lindblom's
'strategy of decision' (Braybrooke and Lindblom, 1963) is first and foremost a
strategy for action - unlike the rational model, whose prescriptions according
to Lindblom would paralyse decision-makers: values and facts cannot be
clearly separated, so any attempt to do so would be in vain; values change
over time as a result of new experience, so one cannot establish a consistent
hierarchy of values; conflicts between values and complexes of values make it
even more difficult to arrive at a consensual value set; etc. If decision-makers
wish to act, it is therefore very sensible of them to do what they in fact do
according to Lindblom: remedy known problems and ills in society rather
than act in a forward-looking goal-oriented way.
Precisely because Lindblom's decision theory is first and foremost a strategy of action, he would probably relish the line from Corneille's tragedy
NicomOde, which says 'Being just and prudent, the King wills only what is in
his power.' And he would therefore probably also declare his fundamental
disagreement with the motto of the students at the Aarhus Business School in
Denmark - 'First the men of thought, then the men of action' - although he

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might well appreciate the seemly modesty expressed by it. For in Lindblom's
strategy of action, it is not possible to separate analytical knowledge and
action - far less to give precedence to the former. Insofar as analytic/scientific
knowledge is relevant to action, it must be integrated into, or perhaps rather
subordinated to, action-oriented knowledge. Lindblom and Cohen (1979)
have for example compared scientifically-generated knowledge with ordinary
knowledge (i.e. common sense, casual empiricism, and thoughtful speculation) and concluded on the one hand that research can generate some information about a delimited, simplified segment of existence, and on the other
that urgent problems can rarely walt for the production and accumulation of
decisive scientific proofs. Decision-makers and practical people must therefore on the whole rely first and foremost on the deeper and more manyfaceted experience and shrewdness of ordinary knowledge, as embedded for
example in the standard procedures of the organization, in professional evaluations, in sensible rules of thumb, and, we may add, 'tacit knowledge'
(Polanyi, 1967; Sch6n, 1983). Any application of scientific knowledge must
necessarily be reconciled with such experience. Here Lindblom and Cohen
take up the thread of the very few, tentative suggestions and attempts of
March and Co. in providing a normative defense for the garbage-can model.
It is emphasized as an advantage of the garbage-can processes that they are
conducive to collective learning by, unlike the scientific-rational processes,
resembling the way children in general learn (March, 1976), and that they are
conducive to the production of opinion and consensus, to 'the maintenance
and change of social values and the interpretation of human existence'
(March and Olsen, 1983: p. 292).
Secondly, it is asserted that incrementalism is fundamentally compatible
with the democratic requirement of an open, aspiring society, unlike synoptic
rationalism, which is predicated on certain knowledge and a centralized/
authoritarian decision-making and implementation structure. Lindblom's
view has a certain acknowledged resemblance with Popper's demonstration
of the agreement between the politico-democratic method he calls 'piecemeal
social engineering' and the method of scientific falsification which he calls
'critical rationalism.'2 In both cases we have an open, infinitely recursive process allowing for constant reassessment and the elimination of errors. Or as
Braybrooke and Lindblom have it,
Old possibilities are discarded, and new urgencies appear. Fact-systems are
restructured as new ones are discovered. Policy proposals are redesigned
as new views of the fact are adopted .... Thus, analysis and evaluation together follow a series of steps.., each one incrementally different from
those preceding and succeeding it (1963: pp. 98-99).

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Between knowledge and action

One of the attractive features of Lindblom's decades of production is that he
has steadfastly tried to build a decision theory that is both empirical and normative on the premises of political action. That Lindblom has been the object
of some debate and criticism 3 is no reason to belittle the effort he has made to
develop a realistic account of politico-administrative decision-making processes in modern society. And he provides an important springboard for the
development of a future, theoretically satisfactory understanding of the use of
social research in the politico-administrative decicion-making process. Lindblom himself has taken an important step in this direction in his recent book
Inquiry and Change in which he very directly confronts the role of (scientific)
knowledge in what he calls the 'probing' policy making process.
One of the problems of the most common decision-making models is that
each of them seems to overestimate the importance of its basic premises. In
the rational perspective, the political and arbitrary aspects of decisions are
ignored, while the power and potential of rationality is grossly overvalued.
This is done either by assuming that there is a direct, automatic linkage
between research and the detailed, planned solution of problems; or by
regarding the decision-making process itself as a rational, scientific activity. In
a conflict-bargaining perspective there is a tendency to ignore the specialized,
knowledge-based aspects of the decision-making process. Knowledge, information, evaluation, etc. are viewed in a political perspective as instruments
which can be used and are used more or less at will to further one's own ends.
And, finally, a garbage-can perspective makes any kind of control of a
decision-making process impossible, whether this control is based on knowledge or the resources of power. Decisions are by and large the result of the
free play of chance.
It is not true that the perspectives reviewed here have no basis in reality.
This was precisely the point of Graham Allison's exemplary study (1971) of
the Cuban missile crisis: that the way the world looks depends on the theoretical spectacles one puts on. According to Allison, the same decision-making
process can thus be studied, for example, as a rational, political or anarchic
one; or at least as involving rational, political or anarchic features. The question is however whether it is fruitful to view the decision-making perspectives
as such mutually exclusive systems as Allison seems to be suggesting; his own
mixed model, indeed, actually rejects such a view.
It is undoubtedly the case that no decision-making process is fully rational
in the classic synoptic-rational sense. The criticism of this perspective is convincing, theoretically as well as empirically. It immediately becomes difficult
when one tries to find good arguments for not going to the opposite extreme,
where everything in a decision-making process is explained as the result of
special political interests or the free play of chance.
However, there is a quite simple, but unfortunately often neglected, argument against collapsing decision-making down to pure and simple power

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categories or mere chance - that is, the fact that politics is rooted in language.
Politics will always take the form of argumentation. This is also true when, in a
dictatorship, words are distorted beyond recognition. Or when power is
manifested as raw violence. Even the Chinese leaders had to defend their
massacre of the students in Tienanmen Square in the spring of 1989. With
words. But with weak words. For as Michel Foucault (1975; 1976) has pointed out, power is least effective when it shows its negative, repressive face.
Violence exposes precisely the fact that the power of words has been lost. It is
in its positive, opinion-forming aspect that power shows its true face.
In democracy one finds differences of opinion and argumentation institutionalized as ideals. This is the very core of the emergence of the 'biirgerliche
Offentlichkeit;' i.e., the pluralist public sphere in bourgeois society (Habermas, 1962). Only in light of this ideal do civic and civil rights and the parliamentary forum - i.e., a forum where you have a fight to talk ('parler') and to
reason - have meaning. It is by consistently taking this ideal at its word in its
consciously Utopian demand for a dialogue free of domination that Jiirgen
Habermas (1981) comes down on the side of modernity in sharp contrast
with the post-modern theorists who abandon reason and reduce it, for example, to the play of signs, simulacra, or pure power.
In the world of reality, dialogue is of course not free of dominance, but is to
a considerable extent determined by power, influence and resources which, as
incessantly pointed out by political science, are not equally distributed in
society. But what political scientists' surveys of the structures of power and
influence usually ignore is 'the extraordinary potential of persuasion and the
centrality of two-way discussion to democracy' (Majone, 1989: p. 2). Modern
political-administrative institutions cannot therefore be reduced to pure
power structures, but also have the function of regulating and institutionalizing public argument and discussion by ensuring that many points of view
are heard without compromising the need to reach a conclusion.
The point here is that because politico-administrative decision-making
processes are rooted in language and based on argumentation and discussion,
they can never be entirely arbitrary and can never be fully explained by saying
that a single actor or coalition of actors determines the form and content of
the decision-making process. Arguments are always subject to certain rules
and procedures; and the content of the arguments must refer to, and be
integrated with, a wider set of concept formations, which in a concrete historical situation cannot be freely selected by the actors themselves.4 No one
knows this better than the politicians themselves, for whom argument is not
only necessary to clarify their own positions, but also to get others to understand and accept them. Even in cases where a decision-making process is best
explained in terms of the individual actors' efforts to serve their own interests,
an appeal must be made, in the attempt to legitimize the content of the decision, to wider public interests and the actual merits and values of the case
(Stone, 1988).
What we actually have are two dimensions that have always been central to

91
our understanding of democracy, but which have apparently been difficult for
us to subsume under the same formula. On the one hand, democracy has
been interpreted as an effort to bring more reason to the political decisionmaking process. With the growth of the bourgeois pluralist society, a public
space was created where, through reasoned discussion, it became possible to
achieve a balanced view of which political arguments are most rational. But at
the same time, democracy has been interpreted as an effort to prevent any
individual group in society from achieving a disproportionate degree of influence on public policy - however good this group's arguments are for possession of the true knowledge of what serves the interests of society best. Instead,
it has been the function of public debate to allow citizens, legislators, specialinterest groups, administrators, street-level bureaucrats, social workers,
experts, users, the media, etc. to have their say with whatever insight, knowledge, understanding and opinions each may have, so they can all help to create understanding of and solutions to the problems they face. Both aspects
are important to the understanding of politico-administrative processes. If
public policy were simply understood as power, influence and horse-trading,
not as debate, argumentation and the play of opinions, much would be lost. If,
on the contrary, both aspects are considered together in our understanding of
the fundamental nature of the politico-administrative decision-making
process, the incorporation of research and its results immediately becomes
much less problematical. It then becomes meaningful to say that research can
have and does have an influence - even an extraordinarily great influence on the politico-administrative decision-making process.
The potential for finding interfaces between research and policy is related
to the fact that there is indeed a symmetry between the politico-administrative
and the scientific process, although of a different kind from the previouslymentioned symmetry between a positivist scientific ideal and a rational
decision-making process. The symmetry is inherent in the fact that science, as
much as politics, is a discussion based on argument. No one is convinced of
the truth of a research result by simply looking at 'reafity.' On the contrary,
researchers and research teams devote enormous resources to convincing one
another that the world should be viewed from precisely their point of view.
The rules of legitimation and proof may be different, and stricter, than in politics; nevertheless collective debate takes place among researchers. As modern
theory of science has shown, the scientific is not based on simple agreement
with reality, but on what scientists by convention regard as science. And in
establishing the conventionally accepted, the scientists form their arguments
not only against the background of their quest for truth, but also to a very
great extent, for example, on the basis of their special interests (Kuhn, 1970;
Whitley, 1984; Morris, 1992). Just as in the political process.
It is therefore also characteristic of scientific discussion that it is about
much more than factual testing with the aid of the - often very formalized procedures of the 'context of justification' for testing scientific postulates. The
positivist view of objectivity with its insistence on a strict separation of values

92
and facts has been rendered highly untenable by the philosophy of science in
recent decades. It has now become clearly and widely recognized that even
the most quantitative and formalistic scientific techniques of analysis involve
hidden choices and normative implications. Conclusions, regardless of their
immediate nature, depend on a number of premises and methodological
choices. A different conceptualization of the problem, different tools and
models, or a different evaluation of a crucial point in the argumentation can
lead to quite different conclusions. This is true of science, and it is true of
politico-administrative argumentation (Majone, 1989).
So there is nothing strange or odious in the fact that research results
become the object of debate in the politico-administrative decision-making
process when this is considered relevant. Precisely because science can never
arrive at definitive, undisputed truths, the assessment of research results will
depend on the assumptions made and the criteria used. So it is quite natural
for different interests to emphasize particular aspects and qualities of
research. It is really just a matter of the debate on research being carried on
among a wider public than the research community. This is familiar from the
use of hard science research in risk calculation and environmental work. And
it is familiar from the social sciences, for example, when economic models are
used as a point of departure for a debate on economic policy, or when future
educational policy is discussed against the background of projections of the
present-day student body, unemployment among graduates, etc.
The examples just cited may give the impression that research is only used
to discuss the more 'factual' and 'technical' aspects of political problems, insofar as it is at all meaningful to speak of such aspects. It is quite true that it is
used this way, but in fact this is not where we find what is perhaps the most
important and influential contribution to public debate. On the contrary, we
find it in its conceptual and valuational dimensions. Much research - and at
least the most original research - does not produce new knowledge in the
empirically verified sense, but deals rather with the reorganization and reformulation of the structures of knowledge. This, rather than empirical
testing, is what Nobel Laureates are best known for. And what social
researchers and society in general have gained from people like Bentham, J. S.
Mill, Marx, Freud, Durkheim, Weber, Keynes, and from more recent theorists
like Dahl, Lindblom, Habermas and Foucault, is not empirically tested
knowledge. They are valued for a contribution to social research and social
debate which in all essentials lies elsewhere.
Although very few researchers ever in their careers become a match for the
theorists mentioned above, the reorganization and restructuring of knowledge
at a less ambitious and less original level can have profound significance, in
terms of concepts and values, for the ordering of society in the wider sense;
but also, in a narrower sense, for what is perceived as a politico-administrative problem, the way it looks, its extent, and the solutions provided to it, etc.
(Gusfield, 1981; Defy, 1984; 1990; Nelson, 1984; Alb~ek, 1988b; Stone,
1988). Sometimes it happens quite dramatically. Charles Murray (1984:

93
p. 27) has given an illustration of the way a newly-formed consensus among
social researchers, in the course of a single year, not only put the problem of
poverty, but a particular perception of the problem, on the political agenda in
the USA:
The emergence of the structural view of the poverty problem was unexpected and rapid. At the beginning of 1962, no one was talking about
poverty; by the end of 1963 it was the hottest domestic policy topic other
than civil rights. But it was not just 'poverty' that was being talked about.
'Structural poverty' was now the issue.
In the early 1980s both Israel (Dery, 1990: pp. 65-81) and Denmark (Hvid,
1990) offered similar examples of the way researchers helped to formulate a
poverty problem and provoke a scholarly and political debate about it. In
Denmark the catchword became 'relative poverty.'
Although a number of case studies have now examined the agenda-setting
function of social research, its influence on the politico-administrative
decision-making process in general is of a less directly conspicuous kind than
in the example just mentioned - which, however, does not make it any less
significant. When social research is able to intervene in political life, it is due,
according to Anthony Giddens (1984), to the special feature of social science
theories and research results that they 'cannot be kept wholly separate from
the universe of meaning and action which they are about.' For it is not only the
researcher who reflects on society: 'lay actors are social theorists whose theories help constitute the activities and institutions that are the object of study of
specialized observers or social scientists' (pp. xxxii-xxxiii). This does not of
course mean that there are no differences. But the boundaries between the
knowledge of specialists and laymen are fluid and result in 'a mutual interpretative interplay between social science and those whose activities compose
its subject matter' (p. xxxii).
It is on the basis of this observation that Giddens believes he can support
the claim that social science has had as much influence - if not more - on the
social world as hard science has had on the material world: 'The point is that
reflection on social processes (theories, and observations about them) continually enter into, become disentangled with and re-enter the universe of
events that they describe' (p. xxxiii).
In other words, what Giddens is saying is that social research forms an
integral part of the self-understanding of society. No such thing can be said
about nature, which is majestically indifferent to what human beings might
think about it. Moreover, also according to Giddens, it is because social
science classics like those mentioned above have permeated and become an
integral part of society's understanding of itself that they can still be read and
reread as inspiration for present-day social reflection. This cannot be said of
modern physicists, who read their classics, if at all, out of pure historical interest.

94
To understand this linkage between research and the politico-administrative decision-making process, it is necessary to be aware that research is transferred to, and becomes part of, a discourse of action - in a philosophical as
well as a more everyday practical sense. In this discourse, self-reflecting participants deliberate on and debate norms and alternatives with a view to concrete action. So in the politico-administrative debate it is more a question of
discussing and negotiating a practicable plan than the scientifically 'best' one;
that is, of compromising and giving ground to ensure that it is at all possible to
get something done. This is true at all levels of the public sector, from the toplevel decisions of Parliament or Congress to reorganizations of the working
routines in a day care centre. It is true in the private sector (Cyert and March,
1963), and for that matter also in something as private as the family, when
parents give in to little Cindy's demands for a bright red popsicle despite
scientific doubts about the allergenic properties of coloring additives.
Most of us are in fact perfectly well aware that this is so. On Election Day,
for example, when we make our mark by the name of a particular politician,
we do not justify our choice in terms of his or her unique intellectual merits;
nor do we expect our politicians to be awarded a Nobel Prize in science one
day. Perhaps rather the opposite. We appreciate politicians, among other
reasons, for being 'a bit dumb' - that is, in the sense that they are not experts
(Nowotny, 1982). It is often the fate of experts to be unable to see a problem
from any perspective but that of their own expertise. It is the special talent of
politicians, on the other hand, to be able to see a matter from enough different points of view to provide them with scope for action. Being limited to and only accountable for - this kind of 'half-knowledge' (Marin, 1981) helps
to give politicians room for maneuver. And it is precisely for their abilities as
people of action rather than as intellectuals that politicians are rewarded or
punished on Election Day.
It is important to be aware that various types and levels of input go into
such negotiation processes - from strongly-felt individual values, preferences
and needs to empirically tested knowledge and research results. It is the task
of the politico-administrative decision-making process to integrate these
inputs - values, interests, views, claims to knowledge, etc. - and to create the
necessary potential for interaction and learning among important stakeholders.
If it has previously been argued that the traditional conflict-bargaining perspective is not fully capable of accounting for such processes, this is because
the perspective is not sufficiently attuned to dynamics. In analyses based on
this perspective, there is a tendency to see the determining special interests defined in terms of the desire for re-election, career opportunities, budget
and staff expansion and the like - as already given. But interests are just as
likely to arise and be defined in the clarification and reflection process that a
decision-making process also is. How the actors define their own interests
depends partly on how they view the situation. New information can change
their definition of where their interests lie, and their view of the most viable

95
way of furthering them. All this happens in a political process in which there
is a discussion of basic assumptions, a modification of original standpoints
and an adaptation to changed constellations of conflicting values (Weiss,
1983).
In other words, it is not possible in a political process to operate with clearly separated categories like interests, values, views, knowledge, etc. to which
the end product of a decision-making process can be related. On the contrary,
they interact and grow up in a reciprocal, dialectical play of forces. Or as
Lindblom puts it in his reassessment of a theory of incrementalism, 'partisan
analysis is the most characteristic analytical input into politics and also the
most productive' (1979).
To borrow a phrase from Simon, one can say that research helps to encircle
and bound the space within which decisions are made. Research is one of the
sources on which participants in the politico-administrative decision-making
process draw when they form their views of the way the world is put together.
They draw on research to understand the present state of things, the possibilities available to them for the solution of pressing problems, and the limits of
the feasible. In short, research contributes to the public reflection which
grows up during a decision-making process in which opposing interests
scrutinize the pros and cons of options and objectives. In this way scientifically generated knowledge can contribute to the resolution of political and
other disagreements which are based on conflicts of interest. Even partisan
research can help to cut through factual disputes, bridge value gaps, and on
the whole create a platform on which differences and similarities in views can
be clarified. Scientifically generated knowledge thus constitutes a sometimes
important, but on the whole unquantifiable, part of the enormous store of
knowledge which participants in a politico-administrative decision-making
process apply to their practical tasks.

Conclusion
Throughout the history of Western thought, there has been a desire to reconcile the true with the good; to find the right place for both theory and practice;
to get pure and practical reason to live side by side, where neither 'colonializes' the other; to reconcile scientific insight and ethical perception; and
so on. The names of the adversaries are legion.
In modern times, this wish has manifested itself not least as notions of how
our present theoretical insight - the scientific - can be linked with the form of
government we have chosen as the right one for us: democracy. Modern social
science and democracy both grew up as part of the modernization of European civilization and have been central elements in the self-understanding of
this modernization. The question of their interrelationship has similarly been
a central one. However, in many of the attempts - Marxist/Communist as well
as non-Marxist - that have been made to consider how scientific knowledge

96
can and should be used in connection with the democratic government of
society, there has been a tendency to think along technocratic lines - to think
more in terms of scientific control than of democratic adaptation. This has
also been typical of both the normative and the empirical debate on the
explosive growth in application-oriented social research in the last few
decades (Alb~ek, 1988a).
! have argued above that we do not enhance our knowledge of the use of
research in politico-administrative decision-making process by thinking in the
either/or categories that there has been a traditional tendency to impose on
the relationship between research and society: dirigisme or adaptation;
knowledge or action; rationality or politics; the instrumental, enlightening or
symbolic use of research, etc.
Science and politics are not as fundamentally different entities as suggested
by the traditional notion of the interest-free quest for truth in contrast to the
pure promotion of self-interest. What counts as knowledge in a given research
community is based on a negotiated reality in exactly the same way as the
objects of politics. There is no science without interests, and no politics without analytical reflection. The truth is always a line of dialogue in a given historical situation, as someone once put it. That does not make politics and
science all one. But it makes it far less mysterious that the sociology of knowledge, when it set out to survey the use of research, found not just one use the instrumental use - but a wealth of possible applications that cannot be
subsumed under the same simple formula. For the use of research is a significantly more complex matter than the issue of rational calculation or selfseeking optimization of one's own interests, and the boundaries between
scientific and political-practical argumentation are very fluid, not least when it
comes to the social sciences, whose object is precisely the social reality on
which both researchers and lay persons are constantly reflecting and negotiating.
A prime requirement of future efforts to survey and improve the links
between research and politico-administrative decision-making processes
must be that the legitimacy and the special nature of the latter as conflictsolving mechanisms are taken seriously. Utopian ideas of an enlightened
despotism of the experts, or of the disappearance of conflicts of interest if
only the good argument were allowed to convince in a free dialogue, may at
best be heroically attractive, but do not have much to do with reality.
This is not to say that experts and scientific arguments do not have their
proper place in the politico-administrative process. They do. And the way in
which the greatest possible impact can be ensured for them is to keep a firm
grip on democracy as the ideal resolver of conflicts. For even if the years of
debate on the many faces of power (Lukes, 1974; Clegg, 1989) show that the
right to be heard is not equally distributed in society, it is essential that one
can always invoke the democratic ideal that views, including scientific arguments, have a fundamental right to be heard and tested in public discussion. 5
The more democratic a society, the more ready it will be to listen to different

97
interests and views. It is precisely the hallmark of democracy that, unlike dictatorship, it allows differences of opinion - dissent if one will.
And there is every reason here to remind research of its traditional role of
dissent. Like democracy, research is based on the ideal of free dialogue. But
science not only tolerates deviant views; in its self-understanding it decidedly
encourages criticism. For science, nothing is sacred in principle. On the contrary, established truths must be subjected to critical scrutiny. And this is perhaps where research can make its most significant contribution to politicoadministrative debate: in the arena of critical scrutiny. There is therefore
reason to warn against the tendency of the age to make extra-scientific factors
into criteria of validity for scientific postulates. If the mode of dissemination
and application of scientific hypotheses and results are made the criteria of
their validity and benefit, research loses its fundamental justification and is no
different from other interests whose most important function is to kowtow to
power. Critical research must, on the contrary, be based on the rules and procedures for testing the validity of scientific hypotheses which exist in the
research communities. This does not necessarily make research popular with
the court and the king. But it benefits public debate. And it safeguards the
self-respect of research.

Acknowledgements
For valuable criticisms and suggestions, I am grateful to Carol H. Weiss and
the editor and two anonymous reviewers of Policy Sciences.

Notes
1. In fact, it is ironic that Herbert Simon, who was educated as a political scientist at Chicago
under Charles Merriam, ended up as a Nobel laureate in economics, whereas Charles Lindblom, who was trained as an economist, became one of the great intellectual figures in political science.
2. Though similar, Lindblom's and Popper's positions are not identical. Popper's 'critical
rationalism' is modelled on a quasi-positivist image of experimentation in the natural sciences - as was Donald Campbell's idea of an experimenting society (Campbell, 1969). Lindblom's 'incrementalism' and 'probing' are not (cf. Braybrooke and Lindblom, 1963: pp. 2 5 4 255).
3. In the course of time Lindblom's incrementalism has been subjected to hard criticism, both
as an empirical model and as a prescriptive ideal. For example, Robert Goodin (1982)
shows in his in-depth critique of Lindblom how a number of decisions clearly cannot be
mapped out in terms of incremental changes; on the contrary, they have grown up against the
background of a highly-developed theoretical understanding of the measures adopted and
their implementation. Goodin mentions the American space research program as an
example. On the whole, Goodin argues convincingly that theoretical knowledge cannot be as
absent from the politico-administrative decision-making process as incrementalism in Lindblom's earlier versions sometimes suggests. Furthermore, Lindblom, because of his defense
of incrementalism as a normative ideal, has gained a reputation as a conservatively biased

98
political theorist. For incrementalist decisions must necessarily have their point of departure
in, and thus reflect, the status quo - which in turn means the interests of the most powerful
social groups. According to Lindblom's critics, the model makes no allowance for criticism
of the prevailing order of things. From a social and ethical point of view, therefore,
incrementalism may mean error-reinforcement rather than error-correction.
4. Even among the greatest advocates of the consistent use of individual, rational, benefitmaximizing behavior as the fundamental axiom in the study of social phenomena, the rational choice theorists, there has been growing acknowledgement in recent years of the constitutive function of language for human action. Listen for example to one of the front-line
figures of rationai-choice-inspired neoinstitutionalism:'All processes of choice are mediated
by languages that enable human beings to acquire capabilities not achieved by lions, bears,
and wolves. Rationality is bounded by access to knowledge and communities of shared
understanding; every individual is fallible; and everyone endures the costs of choices made
under ignorance and misconceptions' (Ostrom, 1993: p. 175).
5. It is precisely by reverting to the democratic ideals inherent in the Enlightenment notion of
reasoned debate that we have been able to point to a post-positivist, participatory potential
in policy analysis as a strategy for reconciling knowledge and politics (cf. Peach, 1985;
Torgerson, 1986).

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