Executive Report 2008

The quality of applicants for Foundation grants in social policy continues to be impressive. To be sure, the movement to link social science theory and research to public policy actions is astonishing in its numbers as well as quality. This in itself augurs well for our foundation and its efforts to improve the results of this new fusion of theory and practice. It can hardly be over-emphasized that such a development takes place with a near complete absence of dogmatism, tendentiousness, or prejudicing of outcomes. The increased number of applicants itself speaks to this remarkable shift from ideology to science as a mode of policy analysis. As a consequence, we are proud to note that awards for 2007 applicants were the most in our history.

At the same time, certain serious problems remain, and are illustrated by the more than two hundred applications examined in depth for the 2008 awards. First, the large number of applicants that continue to confuse narrative description with policy recommendation. The simple outline of events over time does not satisfy the implicit notion that public policy carries analysis followed by programs for remedial activity. Second, many proposals simply assume that nation-building is the same as policy implementation; and this rests on a too often narrow empiricism in which general concerns of widespread applicability are absent beyond the examples cited.

What makes public policy based on social science data and theory so difficult to implement is the gap between ends and means. Some researchers presume that goals are self-evident and policies are calibrated to proper instruments. For others, goals are so cloudy as not to be worth the trouble of consideration. Either way social policy studies became mired in micro-management. In many examples, from HIV-AIDS research to environmental protection one finds a reticence of researchers to challenge commonly accepted verities, even though the evidence may point in different directions. This is a tension found even in outstanding research proposals. It might well be that such strains are pandemic to the conduct of social research as a whole, and are hardly confined to any sub-set of applications.

These issues speak to the need of our Foundation to move into a broader arena, one in which senior scholars are invited to provide stronger directions, and in which funds can be dedicated to generate new forms of data and field investigations. This will take greater fiscal investment on our part and a more decisive role in shaping current theory, rather than be confined to specific issues in social scientific policy analysis.

One such step is to sponsor a variety of senior level conferences in major centers of public policy. The information that follows on the new Transaction Division of the Foundation speaks to such needs. To move in these new directions indicates the need for our foundation to help shape a dialogue, not only with students and scholars, but ways in which we can advance a common vision with other like-minded policy agencies.