Cycling the Treacherous Path: Which Policy-Making Models Will Cope with the Depletion of Objective Knowledge in a Post-Positivist World?

This paper will examine the challenge to policy theories that have been grounded in objectivity and rationality posed by post-factual policy deliberations. For decades, scholars have worked on developing and refining models that seek to explain the public policy making process in a world that strives to assess problems rationally. Alternative policy making approaches, often pursued outside Western democracies, were presumed to lack validity because they relied upon tacit knowledge and beliefs in addition to, or sometimes instead of, factual evidence. Within this conceptual framework of evidence based analysis, the policy cycle model has become the longest serving heuristic for illuminating the interaction of political actors, the engagement of ideas, and the structural influence of institutions on policy making. In recent years, a mix of policy anomalies, disruptive technology, and disinformation flowing over new communication channels, have mounted a major challenge to the modernist approach to advancing welfare through evidence based policy analysis. The subjective values that policy scientists were intent on confining to transparent political deliberations have returned to infuse all aspects of policy making, including the application of evidence to policy analysis. The policy cycle model endures as a point of departure for those seeking to understand the interplay of policy subsystem participants when problem solving. This paper will examine whether the policy cycle model can sustain its utility through a new wave of analytical perturbation in the policy sciences – the erosion of evidence based analysis due to the proliferation of alternative facts into the policy making process.