evidence use

Evidence use in pesticide policymaking

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by Ueli Reber, Karin Ingold and Christian Stamm

Swiss lawmakers have debated pesticide regulation for nearly a decade, often drawing on different types of scientific and policy evidence to support their positions. In Reber et al.’s recent study, the authors analyse how problemoriented evidence (highlighting environmental or health risks) and solutionoriented evidence (emphasising policy effectiveness) were used strategically in parliamentary discussions. 

Analysing parliamentary texts with computational methods 
To study this, the authors compiled a corpus of 1,738 parliamentary documents — including written requests and plenary debate transcripts — containing references to pesticides. Using keyword searches, they retrieved 10,642 paragraphs. They then applied finetuned transformerbased text classification models to each paragraph to classify (1) the position expressed — either in favour of policy change (“change”) or defending existing policy (“status quo”) — and (2) whether the paragraph invoked evidence, and if so whether that evidence was problemoriented (highlighting risks) or solutionoriented (emphasising the effectiveness or sufficiency of existing or alternative policy measures). 

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Scientific evidence in referendum campaigns: politicisation or enrichment?

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Digital Printing SystemCaroline Schlaufer

An extended version of this post was originally published  in the Policy Briefing section of Discover Society which is provided in collaboration with the journal Policy & Politics. The original post is available at http://discoversociety.org/category/policy-briefing/.

Referendums are increasingly used worldwide to allow citizens to directly decide about important policy issues. However, there is growing concern about whether citizens are properly informed when they make their choice in these usually complex referendum questions. For example, many commentators and editorials have argued in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum that facts and scientific evidence was politicised and not correctly used during the referendum campaign. Citizens, so it is argued, had made their decisions based on twisted facts.

However, in the context of a referendum campaign, facts, data and scientific evidence are always used politically. In other word, politicians, interest groups and governments always select those findings and data that fit their position and interpret scientific evidence in accordance with their political conviction. So yes, scientific evidence is politicized in referendum campaigns, but is this necessarily a bad thing? Based on the findings of a multiyear research project on the political use of scientific evidence in Swiss direct-democratic campaigns, I argue that scientific evidence, even when politically used, has the potential to enrich a referendum campaign in several ways. Continue reading →