IEN Seminar - 12th June
Policy Evaluation and Good Government, Professor Niamh Hardiman
Policy evaluation plays a somewhat contested role in policy-making and implementation. The literature on 'policy cycles' gives evaluation a central role in the policy process, while alternative theories contend that evaluation plays little or no role in policy formation and implementation. But policy evaluation is not necessarily only a matter of optimizing technical solutions, since evaluation depends on normative judgements about goals and methods.
Moreover, whether policy evaluation is initiated at all, and whether any significant consequences follow, depends on where it fits in a wider set of institutions and practices. Among the relevant considerations are the role of party competition, the framework of political accountability, and practices of administrative accountability. The argument is that we need more and better policy evaluation, but that what this means can vary depending on the policy area in question, and that it cannot be divorced from democratic political debate.
Niamh Hardiman is Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy. She studied in UCD (BA, MA) and at Nuffield College, Oxford (DPhil), and worked for a time at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin. For several years, she was a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, where she was the Tutor in Politics, before moving to the School of Politics and International Relations (SPIRe) in UCD. She is currently Director of Graduate Studies in SPIRe, and Director of the interdisciplinary Public Policy Programme. She has blogged at Crooked Timber.
Her research interests centre on political economy and public policy. She is interested in the politics underlying policy outcomes; the politics of how public policy priorities are formed and implemented; the implications of institutional design for 'good governance'; and the political economy of growth, distribution and redistribution. She was awarded an Irish Research Council (IRC) Senior Research Fellowship in 2003/4. In 2012, she held a Research Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, working on fiscal responses to the Eurozone crisis. She led an IRC-funded project that gave rise to the Irish State Administration Database, and is now leading a project on Building State Capacity, as part of a programme of research on 'Innovative Public Policy'. She is also currently leading an international IRC-funded project on The Political Economy of the European Periphery, the book from which will published by Oxford University Press. She will convene an ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop in Warsaw in March 2015, jointly with Sven Steinmo (EUI), on The New Politics of Taxation. Among her recent papers are work on comparative fiscal response to crisis, methodological challenges arising from analysis of fiscal policy choices, the political economy of housing bubbles, new approaches to thinking about the European 'periphery', the effects of crisis on state structures, the implications of state structures for vulnerability to crisis, and the fiscal foundations of the state.She is a Research Fellow and member of the Executive of UCD Geary Institute, and a Fellow of the Dublin European Institute. She has been a member of the blog collective Crooked Timber