A growing body of evaluation research has been reporting negative or lack of positive effects from a wide range of social policies and programs. Yet within the data presented one can frequently detect that relative ineffectiveness is far from uniform across time periods and/or population groups....

The implicit priorities of political science have been inhospitable to policy evaluation as a scholarly endeavor. Political science, at least as practiced in the West, draws from a philosophic tradition that views political life, and especially democratic political life, as a public objective,...

Although Schneider agrees with me that policy analysis does not occupy a central position in political science, she disagrees with my prescription for increasing its acceptance in the discipline. At the present time, political scientists are unwilling to address questions about how policy tools...