Traditionally, social research has relied on systematic methods to control variation in the collection of data in order to validate relationships observed among the social phenomena under study. Ironically, many critical problems in the actual operation of public organizations are not amenable...

Public policy disputes involving complex scientific issues usually entail conflicts not only over those scientific issues, but also over the distribution of gains and losses. The presence of scientific or technical dimensions to a dispute should not be allowed to mask underlying distributional...

France has adopted an explicit policy of countering the decline of its old industrial areas, by encouraging a process of reindustrialization in those regions. The French experience illustrates the challenge that such an approach encounters, including dificulties arising out of policies of the...

As the ongoing debate among philosophers and social scientists suggests, interpretation of cause and effect in human action is often extremely difficult. Especially complicated for the policy analyst is the problem of determining whether causal relationships are inferred from the evidence or...

The future of public policy evaluation in France seems at once promising and uncertain. Although the signs of development are evident-increasing numbers of evaluations, aroused public and parliamentary interest, active administrative involvement-the process is not uniform, codified, or generally...