Towards a Generative Policy Analysis: Elaborating the fit between policy analysis and the political

1. Introduction. Elaborating the fit between policy analysis and its subject: three features of political reality. Since Brian Fay (19750 argued for the social and political embeddedness of epistemology in policy analysis, the argument has been picked up by other policy scholars who have attempted to break down the conventional wall between science and social-political reasoning. Fay built upon arguments put forward by phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophers, and further developed by Winch, that empiricist social science is incommensurate with the subject matter of the social sciences, and that only an interpretive approach could do justice to its normative and meaningful nature of social reality. In a similar vein, Taylor showed that neutrality in political science is a myth as every explanatory framework necessarily implies a conception of the good (Taylor, 1985). In the wake of this " restructuring of social and political theory " (Bernstein,…) the emergence of a critical, post-empiricist policy analysis from the mid-1970s onwards, by scholars such as Martin Rein, Lawrence Tribe, Frank Fischer, Deborah Stone, and John Forester was predicated on the conviction that traditional policy analysis failed to address the normative, argumentative dimension of policymaking. Later Dryzek argued that policy analysis for it to be relevant to its subject must address its political setting, the world of public policy, which is characterized by contestation, uncertainty and intense interaction. In a delightful small textbook he and Bobrow developed one of the consequences of a policy analysis that follows its subject: it can never be unitary. A post-empiricist policy analysis relevant to its subject is by implication pluralistic, realizing that no conceptual scheme and no methodological approach fully exhausts the infinitely rich and elusive world of collective human activity, and that each approach, depending upon our way with the world, is able to throw a relevant light on it.