Evidence-based Policy-Making

Knowledge that enlightens or limits the development of Employment Policies?

Abstract

In recent years we have faced an increasing demand for evidence-based knowledge – understood as systematized knowledge about the connection between an intervention and its effect – in the development of the Danish Employment Policy. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of Regimes of Truth, this paper critically analyses how the epistemological and methodological assumptions of Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT), and other effect evaluations, promotes specific goals, interventions and understandings of the unemployed. The analysis finds an inherent reduction - ism in the methods and rationales of evidence-based knowledge, which promotes a certain political comprehension of the unemployment problem. Firstly, the evidence-based knowledge fixates the policy goals in simple, measurable terms, so the only criteria of success is the complete fi - nancial self-sufficiency of the unemployed. Secondly, the method of RCT-studies constructs the unemployed as a rather homogenous group with similar (and non-com - plex) problems. Thirdly, the evidence-based research has an inherent bias in rating disciplining activation measures more highly than skill-enhancing activation measures. Based on these findings, the article argues that evidence-based knowledge cannot merely be understood as instructive for policy-making. This knowledge seems to consolidate and promote certain political interests in securing a high labour-supply, while at the same time discrediting goals relating to improving the social security and human capital of the unemployed. It is therefore important to advance the research on the possible consequences, pitfalls and risks of furthering an evidence-based employment policy on a very narrow set of methodological assumptions.