Evaluation, Policy Learning and Evidence-Based Policy Making

The increasing emphasis on the need for evidence-based policy indicates the continuing influence of the 'modernist' faith in progress informed by reason. Although the rationalist assumptions of evidence-based policy making have been subject to severe challenge from constructivist and post-modernist perspectives, it is argued that the attempt to ground policy making in more reliable knowledge of 'what works' retains its relevance and importance. Indeed, its importance is enhanced by the need for effective governance of complex social systems and it is argued that 'reflexive social learning' informed by policy and programme evaluation constitutes an increasingly important basis for 'interactive governance'. The expanded use of piloting of new policies and programmes by the current UK Government is considered to provide limited scope for evaluation to derive reliable evidence of whether policies work. There is a need for greater clarity about the role of evaluation in situations where piloting essentially constitutes 'prototyping'. More emphasis should be placed on developing a sound evidence base for policy through long-term impact evaluations of policies and programmes. It is argued from a realist position that such evaluation should be theory-based and focused on explaining and understanding how policies achieve their effects using 'multi-method' approaches.     

The institutionalization of identity: Micro adaptation, macro effects, and collective consequences

Constructivist approaches to the emergence and stability of collective identities are now widely accepted. But few of the assumptions of constructivist theory regarding repertoires of identities and their mutability in response to changing circumstances have been examined or even articulated. The article shows how different conditions of a fluid and changing environment affect the stabilization or institutionalization of an identity as dominant within a polity. We used the Agent-Based Identity-Repertoire (ABIR) model as a simulation tool and confined our attention to relatively simple identity situations. Strong evidence was found for the emergence of identity institutionalization, the existence of a “crystallization” threshold, the effectiveness of divide-and-rule strategies for the maintenance of an identity as dominant, the efficacy of a network of organic intellectuals, and hegemonic levels of institutionalization. Thresholds leading to hegemony were not observed. Preliminary results from experiments examining more complex identity situations have been corroborative. Ian S. Lustick is professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author ofUnsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank/Gaza. His current research involves development and expansion of agent-based modeling techniques for the study of identity politics, learning, globalization, and terrorism. Dan Miodownik is a doctoral candidate in the University of Pennsylvania Department of Political Science. His dissertation integrates statistical, historical, and agent-based modeling techniques to explore the relationship between changing communications technologies and competition among identity projects in Europe.     

Contingent and Non-Contingent Working in Local Government: Contrasting Psychological Contracts

Given that the contingent worker is likely to be a familiar presence in the public service workplace of the future, this paper explores the consequences of contingent work arrangements on the attitudes and behaviour of employees using the psychological contract as a framework for analysis. Drawing upon survey evidence from a sample of permanent, fixed term and temporary staff employed in a British local authority, our results suggest that contract status plays an important role in how individuals view the exchange relationship with their employer and how they respond to the inducements received from that relationship. Specifically, contingent employees are less committed to the organization and engage in organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) to a lesser degree than their permanent counterparts. However, contrary to our hypothesis, the relationship between the inducements provided by the employer and OCB is stronger for contingent employees. Such findings have implications for the treatment of contingent and non-contingent employees in the public services.     

The Echo of a Sentimental Jurisprudence

This article revisits what the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge termed the ‘rage of metaphysics’, the grand intellectual engagement that defined the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Enlightenment. It does so in order to retrieve an alternative jurisprudence, one that described itself as much in terms of sentiment as of sense. It is suggested that one of the most striking expressions of this jurisprudence can be found in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. This attempt to retrieve a sentimental jurisprudence chimes with a wider intellectual movement, headed by the likes of Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, which seeks to reinvest a ‘new’ humanism in both domestic and trans-national legal and political order. It speaks more particularly to recent debates surrounding the nature of human and civil rights, and enjoys an added resonance in the context of recent attempts to fashion a jurisprudence of ‘reconciliation’ in South Africa and elsewhere. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Criminology post-Maastricht

My objectives in this paper are to try and identify the range of challenges that now confront critical criminologists who work in, and are attentive to, the “new Europe” whose construction was so clearly signalled by the Maastricht Treaty (the Treaty on European Union) of 1993. I want to concentrate here on two issues — firstly, the challenge of situating the work of criminology in relation to the process of political union (and enlargement) of the European Union, and, secondly, the articulation of an agenda of work for critical criminology, that derives, from an understanding of this broader context. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.