University of Helsinki
Economics holds a privileged and influential position in policy advice. Yet, it is also often criticized for failing to cope with real socioeconomic problems and crises, and thus it has been contested as a policy relevant social science. The tension between society’s confidence in economic expertise and the distrust in its actual capacities became manifest during the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Currently, the economic crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic—which is more massive in scale and reach than previous crises—may exacerbate this tension further.
To find a way out of this tension, economics will have to readjust to be (and be perceived as) more agreeable and useful than it has seemed during the last decades. That is, economics will have to become a more serviceable social science.
The main goal of ESSK is to assess the capacities of economics as a policy relevant social science and thereby contribute to steering scientific change in ways that enhance its usefulness without compromising its epistemic authority. ESSK advances a novel and richer framework for the assessment of the policy relevance of economics that embeds evidence-policy relations in a broad range of cognitive, organisational, institutional, and rhetorical processes, both in the scientific system and in the policy-making system.
ESSK‘s guiding Research Questions:
- On what conditions and to what extent should economic models and methods be trusted as guides to public policy despite the problems pointed out by the critics?
- How can economics adequately respond to the actual needs of social decision making, and be a policy-relevant science given the increasingly complex challenges it will face in the post-Covid-19 world?
- How can economics properly adapt to the demand for interdisciplinary collaboration, which is likely to increase in the post-Covid-19 world, given its imperialistic tendencies and unimpressive interdisciplinarity credentials?
Addressing these questions requires both advancement in answering longstanding questions about the status of economics as a science and progress in understanding the very idea of the policy relevance of science.
Work Packages
ESSK encompasses four closely connected Work Packages (WPs):
WP1. A philosophical account of policy relevance
In WP1 we are working on a more comprehensive characterisation of policy relevance by unpacking the different elements and relations involved in different instances of the policy-making process. We draw on insights from the literature on public policy studies to develop the basic elements of our approach to policy relevance and to science-policy interactions, which will then guide our analysis in the other work packages. In WP1 we also clarify the key notions of the debate (e.g., policy relevance, policy outcome, relevant evidence, external validity) to be able to analyse the failures, successes, and potentials of economics as a policy-relevant social science.
WP2. Models as serviceable policy tools
How well-justified are the policy conclusions derived from economics? Answering this question requires a thorough understanding of the theoretical and empirical apparatus of economics and how they relate to each other. WP2 focuses on how models are used to make policy inferences. First, we take models as argumentative devices that are used to derive policy conclusions. Paying attention to how inferences from models to policy are made and understanding how models are used in policy argumentation is crucial for seeing the gaps in policy-oriented thinking. Second, we adopt a multiple-models perspective to analyse the policy relevance of economic models. In practice, economists use multiple models to explain relevant phenomena and these explanations often guide policy proposals. This, however, is an underexamined topic in the literature.
WP3. Evidence and the policy-making process
WP3 analyses and evaluates current methods for producing, evaluating, and synthesizing evidence paying special attention to the trade-offs associated to their use for policy advice. To do so, we go beyond the analytical focus on the epistemic merits of different kinds of scientific evidence (prevalent in mainstream philosophy of science) to consider the details of the policy side of the science-policy interaction. On the basis of the approach to policy relevance developed in WP1, which takes policy making as a dynamic process of complex interactions, we analyse and assess how different kinds of evidence and evidential techniques play different epistemic (and non-epistemic) roles at distinct stages of the complex policy process, and for different types of policy goals.
WP4. Institutional preconditions
For economics to be of relevance to policymaking, certain institutional preconditions must be met. These shape the production of the epistemic capacities of the discipline of economics, its public image and perceived epistemic authority, the acknowledged expertise of its recognised representatives, as well as the ways in which its contributions are or are not channelled to be recognised, employed, and applied in policy. Furthermore, the policy process requires interaction and insights from several different disciplines, however it is likely that interdisciplinarity will not proceed flawlessly, and so the competition between disciplines for the attention of policy makers may intensify. In these circumstances the academic and extra-academic image of various disciplines would make a difference to their reception and actual influence in the policy arena. To gain insights into such institutional preconditions and disciplinary images of economics, in WP4 we combine current philosophical literature on pluralism, diversity, and interdisciplinarity with insights from the interdisciplinary literature on the public perception of science, including existing studies on the institutional rules that influence the policy relevance of science.
Funding
This project has received funding from the Research Council for Culture and Society of the Academy of Finland. The information and opinions on this website and other communications materials are those of the researchers of this project and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Academy of Finland.