The magician’s hat: Evidence and openness in policy making

This paper focuses on evidence and openness in policy making, drawing primarily on hands-on experience in innovation and industrial policy in the UK. We suggest that much of the current debates use unhelpful juxtapositions and are insufficiently focused on what is happening in the darkness of the policy making ‘magician’s hat’. We use a post-positivist perspective to tease open key features of openness and evidence in policy making, showing similar and intertwined social processes at work in the supposedly distinct worlds of political, administrative officialdom and expertise. From there we map out a range of external influences on policy making, putting evidence, expert knowledge and other inputs into context. We then focus on knowledge generation and what we term the breadth and depth of policy definition to introduce a novel typology of policy making. This helps us to identify the different forms that openness and the use of evidence and expertise take.