The argumentative turn in the development of the field in the United States emerged from a practical problem. Early into the development of policy analysis it became apparent that much of the work was either of questionable value or even useless to policymakers. Toward the end of the 1970s scholars were becoming increasingly aware of the significant disjunction between social research and the practical world of policy decision making. An effort to explain this became a pressing question for the newly emerging discipline. It was in response to this disturbing problem that the argumentative turn had its origins.

The discussion here opens with a discussion of the basic issues involved in the effort to establish a discipline capable of offering effective advice for policy decision makers. The focus then shifts to problems that appeared in the initial stages of the field by the application of empirical social scientific methods to policy problem solving. Two competing perspectives for confronting these difficulties are outlined, one political in nature and the other dealing with epistemological and methodological issues. The focus then turns to the methodological orientation as delineated in the argumentative turn. Finally, after presenting a logic framework for policy argumentation, the chapter closes with a discussion of the implications of the approach for the relation between citizens and policy analysts.

Knowledge, politics, and policy: early developments

The role of political and policy advice are not new questions in politics and governance. The significance of politically-relevant counsel, together with the question of who should supply it, is found in the earliest treatises on political wisdom and statecraft. It is a prominent theme in the philosophy of Plato, in Machiavelli's discussion of the role of the Prince, St. Simon and August Comte's theory of technocracy, the ‘Brain Trust’ of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the writings of the U.S policy intellectuals during the Great Society of the 1960s, and modern-day think tanks since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, just to name a few of the more prominent instances (Fischer 1990). Today it is a prominent topic in the discourses of policy theory.

From the outset, a basic theme running through such writings has focused on replacing or minimizing political debate with more rigorous or systematic modes of thought. Within this tradition we recurrently find the idea that those with knowledge should rule (Fischer 1990).