The Argumentative Turn: Policy Institutions and Practices

Frank Fischer

Much of the discussion about arguments in public policy analysis derives from epistemological and methodological considerations, particularly those raised by criticism of the discipline's technocratic tendencies. By contrast, far too little attention has focused on the political regime shifts that have contributed to the argumentative turn. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, methodological shifts in policy analysis have often been influenced by basic shifts in the control of government (Fischer 1987). The failure to recognize the relationship between basic political changes and the practices of policy analysis has led to overly narrow interpretations of the discipline and its development. Too often understood within the confines of scientific terminology, policy analysis has frequently failed to perceive the deeper political forces that in many ways have given shape to the disciplinary project. The purpose of this essay is to illustrate how the argumentative turn emerges as much from larger political and institutional conflicts in the society as from methodological issues.

The first three sections focus on the critiques, both radical and conservative, of the Great Society of the Johnson administration, seen to be the paradigm case of the liberal technocratic strategy. My purpose is to illustrate the liberal strategy's reliance on policy experts and their technical discourses and to identify specific ways in which these discourses functioned to shape the Democratic party's reform agenda. Focusing in particular on the uses of policy analysis, the critics argued that it represented far more than a value-neutral scientific methodology designed to supply better information to liberal policymakers. More fundamentally, critics saw policy analysis as a key element of a technocratic strategy that served—both wittingly and unwittingly—to supplant the everyday, less sophisticated opinions of the common citizen with liberal "new class" arguments disguised and legitimated in the languages of technical discourses. According to the harshest critics, a growing emphasis on technocratic methodologies increasingly undercuts ordinary political discourse with the specialized languages of the social sciences (Banfield 1980:1).

The essay then examines the conservative political response to a liberal-technocratic reform strategy. As a direct challenge to the liberals' strategy, the conservative politics of the middle 1970s and the 1980s instituted an alternative policy approach that—rhetoric aside—can be interpreted as a conservative version of the liberal reform strategy. Contrary to the stated objectives of the conservative challenge—namely, to sever the political link between liberal politicians and leading policy experts—the primary result has been to politicize rather than eliminate the uses of policy analysis. I conclude with an assessment of the implications of this politicization of policy argumentation for the discipline of policy analysis.

Technocratic Discourse and the New Class

The theory of technocracy, a variant of elite theory, refers to a governance process dominated by technically trained knowledge elites. The function of the technocratic elite is to replace or control democratic deliberation and decision-making processes (based on conflicting interests) with a more technocratically informed discourse (based on scientific decision-making techniques). The result is the transformation of political issues into technically defined ends than can be pursued through administrative means.

The technocratic approach to policy-making emerged most visibly in the United States during the years of the Democratic party's Great Society and the Vietnam War. Critiques of this period, especially those of the radical Left, singled out the corporate welfare/warfare state and its managerial ideologies of expertise as fundamental political problems. During these years, the Left elevated concerns about the role of experts and intellectuals to a central position in its critique of society. Managerial and policy experts were seen as a "technical intelligentsia" who provided much more than a purely technical service to politicians, as suggested by mainstream interpretations. Indeed, writers such as Alvin Gouldner (1970), Noam Chomsky (1971), and Bertram Gross (1980) portrayed experts as a driving force behind the political process itself.

According to the radical version of the technocracy thesis, managerial and policy experts constituted nothing less than a new technocratic class or cadre striving for political power. Moreover, the ascent of this technocratic class was analyzed as a central governance strategy of the liberal corporate welfare state. Technocratic experts were portrayed, in fact, as the social engineers of a liberal political-economic formation fundamentally aligned with the political organization that ruled in its name, the Democratic party. Consider Gouldner's (1970, 500) words: "In the context of the burgeoning Welfare-Warfare State ... liberal ideologues serve ... to increase the centralized control of an ever-growing Federal Administrative Class and of the master institutions on behalf of which it operates." As technical cadres of a central governing strategy, these liberal technocrats produced "information and theories that serve to bind the poor and the working classes to the state apparatus and the political machinery of the Democratic party."

Every bit as interesting was the fact that somewhat later in the decade (and continuing well into the 1980s), remarkably similar refrains could be heard from the political Right, particularly from the so-called neoconservatives, who were largely disheartened Great Society liberals. Especially important here were such writers as Irving Kristol, Edward Banfield, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Nathan Glazer, and Samuel Beer (Steinfels 1979).

Neoconservatives were deeply disturbed by the uses (or misuses) of the social sciences in the Great Society era. Adhering largely to the tenets of traditional democratic theory, they singled out policy experts as a fundamental threat to the future of representative government. Although they distanced themselves from their radical...