Evidence Regimes and the Role of Social Sciences in Parliaments

Since the 1950s, North America and Europe have been consistently urged to 'integrate' the social sciences into organisations responsible for producing evidence-based policy. However, the relationship between evidence-based policymaking and the social sciences is challenging (Stoker and Evans 2016). Ideal policy models assume rational political actors and clear processes. They ignore the cognitive limitations of policymakers and the unpredictability of the environment (Cairney 2016). Beyond methodological debates within academia, political stakeholders also have demands and expectations regarding the conditions under which knowledge will be produced on which they will rely. In this contribution, I aim to address the following question: What counts as social scientific evidence for policymakers? One place where this question is regularly asked is parliaments, not only in parliamentary technology assessment offices (Moawad and Ludwicki-Ziegler 2025), but also in plenary sessions. This contribution explores the expectations of MPs regarding scientific results from social sciences within the Assemblée Nationale, the Bundestag and the House of Commons. Using transcripts of parliamentary debates from France, Germany, and the United Kingdom between 2012 and 2022, 184 documents were identified that explicitly referenced the term 'social sciences' (70 for the Assemblée Nationale, 63 for the Bundestag, and 51 for the House of Commons). These documents were then used to conduct a qualitative historical-conceptual analysis (Palonen 2014) of 'social sciences' and its associated concepts, by looking at comparisons or associations made by MPs that redraw the conceptual map of social sciences. Firstly, this contribution examines how knowledge and levels of evidence are organised within MPs' discourses, who either bring social sciences closer to STEM or highlight certain sub-disciplines rather than others. Secondly, it illustrates the intertwining of social science data, evidence and ideas within the three parliaments. Finally, by examining MPs' perceptions of the role of social sciences, it identifies the markers of contiguity, similarity, and contagion that facilitate transitions between multiple ‘regimes’ of evidence (Foucault 2009). I delineate how the figure of the ‘social science expert’ facilitates passage between these regimes (Haapala and Moawad forthcoming) and the dimensions that social scientific evidence takes on in MPs' discourses, such as its roles as a technology, a producer of reality and a procedure of subjection. References Cairney, P. (2016). The politics of evidence-based policy making. Springer. Foucault, M. (2009). Le courage de la vérité. Le gouvernement de soi et des autres II – Cours au Collège de France. Gallimard. Haapala, T. & Moawad, L. (forthcoming). Expertise. In Coman, R., Ponjaert, F. & Paternotte, D. (eds.). Handbook of Social Science Impact. Routledge. Moawad, L., & Ludwicki-Ziegler, S. (2025). Social studies, technology assessment and the pandemic: a comparative analysis of social studies-based policy advice in PTA institutions in France, Germany and the UK during the COVID-19 crisis. Evidence & policy : a journal of research, debate and practice, 21(2), 166–185. https://doi.org/10.1332/17442648Y2024D000000043 Palonen, K. (2014). Politics and Conceptual Histories. Nomos. Stoker, G., & Evans, M. (eds.) (2016). Evidence-based policy making and social science. Policy Press.