Assessing incrementalism: Formative assumptions, contemporary realities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Lindblom's 1959 article on incrementalism is one of the most cited works in social science.1 This article examines and probes five of the theory's basic, underlying assumptions in light of current empirical and theoretical approaches. The five assumptions are: (1) the limited nature of rationality and the weak powers of human cognition, (2) the emphasis on practical reason and applied knowledge, (3) partisan mutual adjustment conceived as interactions and conflicts among singular, distinct, and disconnected entities, (4) policy decisions made incrementally can be remediated and reversed, and (5) the United States political system is taken as the model for incremental politics. In our assessment, incrementalism holds up quite well with more recent thinking on public policy process with respect to the first and second assumptions. The third assumption has been confronted by new work on networks. The fourth has been challenged by theories on path dependency. The fifth assumption betrayed a national focus and strong value consensus – globalization and “culture wars” have rendered it untenable. The article therefore gives only qualified support for the continued relevance of incrementalism as a theory of the policy process.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.039 | 0.147 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".