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Fischer, Frank, Reframing Public Policy: Discursive Politics and Deliberative Practices. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 266 pp.
For more than two decades Frank Fischer has been at the forefront of attempts to construct critical alternatives to the technocratic and positivist idioms in policy analysis that have pervaded both academic thinking and policy professionalism. Reframing Public Policy represents both the latest iteration in this work and a systematic explication of the elements of the program developed by Fischer himself and an ever-increasing band of supporters. As such the book is a major statement that deserves widespread attention.
Fischer identifies the main enemy as 'empiricism' and accordingly his own approach is avowedly 'postempiricist'. The appellations 'positivism' and 'postpositivist' would do just as well. Positivism/empiricism is a dead duck in the philosophy of science, deader still in the actual practice of science, with a stake through its heart when it comes to social science. Nobody can defend any longer the position that it is possible to produce covering laws based on logical deduction from a fixed set of premises that then get verified empirically and added to the stockpile of true theory. Still less does anyone really believe that it is possible to develop such a stockpile in social science, which could then be the basis for policy interventions in the causal web that constitutes social systems.
But positivism lives on as a kind of temper or rhetoric, which, when it comes to policy analysis, is revealed in continued technocratic aspirations. Thus, positivism loosely conceived involves any attempt to establish and confirm stable causal relationships, some of which may then be used as the basis for manipulations of social systems on the part of policy makers. In this sense, positivistic approaches would include (say) microeconomic and rational-choice analyses, policy evaluation methods that stop at the measurement of causal impact, and some popular models of the policy process (such as the advocacy coalition framework, of which more shortly).
Fischer shows not just that a formidable array of criticisms can be brought against policy analysis rooted in the positivist temper, but also more constructively that alternative approaches are now available. Most of the critique is grounded in a linguistic conception of the world of public policy. Language is not a...