Social Science and the Policy-Making Process

Abstract

social science in policy making simpliciter as if there were one constant relationship between two fixed and stable entities. Instead, to address this issue sensibly, one must talk about the uses of different modes of social scientific inquiry for different kinds of policies under various circumstances. In some cases, the influence of social scientific research is direct and tangible, and the connection between the findings and the policy is easy to see. For example, the statistical and social scientific analyses of data generated by the census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and similar government surveys are the bases upon which a wide variety of legislative and administrative decisions are made. Similarly influential have been large-scale social surveys directed at specific policy issues, such as the studies of educational policy conducted by the sociologist James Coleman. However, in other (perhaps most) cases, the influence of social scientific research on policy is indirect-one small piece in a larger mosaic of politics, bargaining, and compromise. Occasionally, as with the Coleman studies, the findings of social scientific research are explicitly drawn upon by policy makers in the formation, implementation, or evaluation of particular policies. More often, as Charles E. Lindblom and David K. Cohen and others have taken pains to point out, the categories and theoretical models of social science have an indirect bearing on policy by providing a general background orientation within which policy makers conceptualize problems and frame policy options.' At times, the influence of social scientific work is cognitive and informational in nature; in other instances, policy makers use social science primarily for symbolic and political purposes in order to legitimate pre-established goals and strategies. This latter situation is probably inevitable in our own or any other political system, but many social scientists-particularly those who have been bloodied by their occasional forays into the political arena-find it deeply disturbing because it seems to compromise the intellectual integrity of the social sciences. Nonetheless, amid this diversity, troubling general questions persistently arise and these became a central part of our project. They concern the epistemological validity of social scientific knowledge and its applicability, the proper

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