Richard Simeon and the Policy Sciences Project

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

E-ISSN: 1744-9324|49|4|703-720

ISSN: 0008-4239

Source: Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, Vol.49, Iss.4, 2017-01, pp. : 703-720

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Abstract

In his classic 1976 article on the state of policy studies in Canada, Richard Simeon explicitly warned against following the path toward a policy science. Simeon was suspicious of the normative agenda embedded in the policy sciences project and worried that it would submerge politics in a broader set of interdisciplinary concerns. Was Simeon right? The policy sciences have not developed the way their principal proponent, Harold Lasswell, had anticipated or hoped, but neither has the study of public policy developed exactly as Simeon advocated. Both Lasswell and Simeon believed strongly in an empirical orientation and Lasswell, more than Simeon, focused on creating a tool kit of techniques. Schools of public policy have moved beyond both critique and technique to estimate risk, ameliorate error and mobilize knowledge. This new agenda requires students of public policy to acquire and employ practical knowledge steeped in the particular and instructed by policy narratives.