Evidence of democracy? The relationship between evidence-based policy and democratic government
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The preceding decade has witnessed the production of a substantial volume of scholarship dedicated to exploring the concept of evidence-based policy – the idea that ‘at the heart’ of properly developed public policy is ‘the best available evidence’. Concomitantly, ‘evidence’ has secured an unparalleled pride of place (at least, rhetorically) among policy-makers, who will often refer to the conclusions of ‘the best available evidence’ when seeking to justify particular decisions. However, a number of additional considerations have been identified as desirably or otherwise influencing policy-makers’ decisions, including fiscal and time constraints, personal experience, societal values, and short-term/long-term political strategy, to name a few. Indeed, arguably, policy-makers in contemporary democratic polities have no choice but to incorporate such considerations into their decision-making if they genuinely wish to produce a policy proposal that is both politically and publicly viable. Does such a situation problematically impede the meaningful realization of evidence-based policy? This essay offers some preliminary observations concerning certain tensions between the idea of evidence-based policy and the practice of democracy and briefly considers the degree to which those tensions might and should be resolved. Key words: Public policy, evidence-based, democracy, political equality, majority rule.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.032 | 0.070 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".