Half a century of “muddling”: Are we there yet?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Half a century after the publication of Lindblom's seminal article “The Science of Muddling Through”, we revisit the heritage of incrementalism in this special issue, analyzing its legacy in public policy and public administration. The articles discuss the extent to which recent theoretical developments have transformed the original idea, reinforced it, or possibly rendered it obsolete. In this introductory article, we provide a short overview over the core elements of incrementalism and assess how the concept is used in scholarly publications and research today. We thereby focus on incrementalism as an analytical concept rather then a prescriptive theory. We argue that even after a half a century of “muddling”, we are not yet through with incrementalism. Some of the ideas that underpin the concept of incrementalism continue to drive research, often in combination with more recent theoretical approaches to the policy process. After half a century, incrementalism is still part of the policy scholar's tool kit.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it