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,...