Acceso usuarios
Frank Fischer
This article examines public policy expertise and policy deliberation from the perspective of the “ argumentative the turn ” that emerged in the fields of policy studies and planning in the 1990s (Fischer & Forester, 1993). While discussion of policy analysis and advice-giving in politics is in no way new, the practices of expertise and advice has been changing over the later part of the past of the 20th century. The article seeks to show that the argumentative turn can be usefully employed to interpret these changing patterns, as well to offer a number of potentially useful prescriptions.
Toward this end, the discussion begins with a brief discussion of the long history of thought about political expertise and advice in the United States.
It then examines the limits of the social scientific approach and presents the new argumentative approach that has emerged as its challenger espe- cially as reflected in the field of policy analysis. On its tenets is outlined, in particular, the often pro- blematic border between facts and values
