Public Policy (5): Evaluation

Fischer's Protocol of Performance Evaluation

Fischer (2006) adopts a mixed approach, through exploring the evaluation of a classic American policy intervention, the Head Start programme, to enhance the educational achievements of disadvantaged children, showing how different conclusions may be drawn about its evaluation results in terms of four considerations:

(1) Verification: a typical positivist evaluation measuring the achievement of stated objectives (did the test scores of children in the experiment increase more than those not in it?);

(2) Validation: raising issues about the relevance of the programme in terms of definitions of the problem it claims to address (recognising that Head Start might be about more than education performance, for example about reducing cultural exclusion);

(3) Vindication: asking whether the programme contributes value for society as a whole (raising questions about whether Head Start was an appropriate response to the issues about social exclusion);

(4) Social Choice: raising wider ideological questions about what the programme is trying to do (suggesting that there are wider questions about social exclusion in society and about the role education plays in relation to it).

Marsh and McConnell's Indicators of Dimensions of Policy Success

Source: Abridged version of Marsh and McConnell, 2010.

Theodoulou and Kofinis (2004) Four Types of Policy Evaluation

(1) Process Evaluation: analyzes how well a policy is being administered, to determine what can be done to improve the implementation, the aspects of service delivery, of the policy. It does not directly address whether or not the policy achieves the desired outcome or impact on the target.

(2) Outcome Evaluation: concerned with outputs, whether the policy produce the desired behavioral change initially sought, for example, if the stated goal of a welfare policy is to reduce the number of people receiving welfare benefits, then a determination is to see if less people are receiving welfare benefits after program implementation than before.

(3) Impact Evaluation: to determine whether or not a given public policy is achieving the intended impact as visualized by the various policy actors, who either supported or opposed the given policy, for example, what happened to the people who used to receive the welfare benefits and who have been forced off the system because they are no longer eligible.

(4) Cost-Benefit Evaluation: the comparison of the costs associated with a policy to the benefits generated by the policy, yet the technique is controversial as it is difficult to calculate intangible costs, such as those borne by those individuals who are no longer eligible to receive welfare benefits, as a result of the new policy to restrict the number of people on the welfare roles.

Title: The Public Policy Process (7th Edition)

Author: Michael Hill, Frédéric Varone

Year: 2016

Region: UK

Publisher: Routledge

Genre: Politics, Social Sciences

Score: 6.5/10