Frédéric Varone and Steve Jacob, varone@spri.ucl. ac.be jacob@spri

							                               " Institutionalising Policy Evaluation :


                             A Comparison of Western democracies "



                        Frédéric Varone and Steve Jacob,
                   varone@spri.ucl.ac.be jacob@spri.ucl.ac.be
       Association Universitaire de Recherche sur l’Action Publique (AURAP)
                    Université Catholique de Louvain – Belgium

Does policy evaluation assure a higher quality of public management and
State action? If there is no clear answer to this question, one should
nevertheless note that policy evaluation has been a governmental
preoccupation in many industrialized countries. This is partly due to the fact
that Western democracies currently face actually a legitimacy crisis.
Furthermore, for several years, Western governments have aimed at policy
rationalisation in order to stop the increasing State interventionism and\or the
structural deficits of public spending. In such a context, policy evaluation
tends to facilitate the a priori choice between various modes of public action.
A posteriori, policy evaluation shows the (in)effectiveness of public action
programmes and can thus be used as justification for the adaptation,
reorientation or elimination of a public policy.

The main objectives of our contribution are:
   1. To describe the level of institutionalisation of policy evaluation within
      various Western democracies,
   2. To identify the main factors enhancing these institutionalisation
      processes and,
   3. To answer the following question: “Is institutionalisation of policy
      evaluation a pre-condition for organisational memory, learning and
      capacity building?”

Thus, we intend to examine if "the development of policy evaluation is
dependent upon the type of State in which it occurs and the nature of elites
being able to carry it, and upon more cultural elements through which the
public sector finds its definition and justification "1.

Our contribution will proceed in five stages:
   1. Definition of a theoretical institutionalisation index, based on indicators
      such as the existence of a society of professional evaluators, quality
      and ethical "evaluation standards", formal authorities in charged of
      policy evaluation (near the executive and\or near the legislative power),
      "evaluation clauses" in legislative texts, etc.



1
    P DURAN, « Les ambiguïtés politiques de l’évaluation », Pouvoirs, Paris, PUF, n° 67, 1993, p. 137.
   2. Description of the evolution (1970-2000) of the Degree of Evaluation
      Institutionalisation in the Western Democracies (empirical application of
      the index),
   3. Quantitative Study of the structural factors (e.g. parliamentarism,
      presidentialism vs. consensus democracy, federalism vs. unitary
      States, level of economic development, etc.) influencing the degree of
      institutionalisation (analysis based on the data set of A. Lijphart,
      Patterns of Democracy, 1999),
   4. Qualitative cases studies of the process of institutionalising policy
      evaluation in some countries (e.g. USA, Canada, Switzerland, France,
      The Netherlands) and,
   5. A Comparison of “Evaluator States" in order to determine if there are
      specific configurations explaining the emergence of evaluation
      practices within the various Western democracies.

From there we'll draw conclusions and formulate recommendations for
enhancing policy evaluation in democracies where this practice is not yet
institutionalised.