The intensity of knowledge use in the policy-making process: an empirical assessment

This paper aims at investigating the factors explaining the intensity of knowledge use in everyday policymaking in the context of a national administration – namely, the central government and administration in Spain. Drawing from the literature on knowledge utilization (Boswell, 2009), policy capacities (Wu et al., 2018), and theories of the policy process, several factors will be assessed: 1) the technical nature of the issues dealt with in the subsystem, and more precisely, the extent policy discussion and solutions in the area deal with technical issues; 2) The importance of ‘political’ functions in 2) the degree of subsystem contentiousness and politicization of the issues at hand; 3) The policy analytic and managerial capacities of the administrative bodies; 4) the types of tasks performed by administrative bodies (policy formulation, implementation tasks, organizational management); 5) public officials’ perceptions about the functions knowledge plays in policy-making in a given policy area; and 6) the preferences of individual policymakers on the use of evidence-based knowledge in the policy process. The influence of these factors in the intensity of the use of scientific knowledge in the policy process will be investigated by using the data collected in a recent survey to top policy-making and political officers (from junior ministers to deputy directors) in all ministries in the central government and administration in Spain.