Assessing incrementalism: Formative assumptions, contemporary realities
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 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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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