Policy analytics: An agenda for research and practice

Abstract

The growing impact of the ‘‘analytics’’ perspective in recent years, which integrates advanced data-mining and learning methods, is often associated with increasing access to large databases and with decision support systems. Since its origin, the field of analytics has been strongly business-oriented, with a typical focus on data-driven decision processes. In public decisions, however, issues such as individual and social values, culture and public engagement are more important and, to a large extent, characterise the policy cycle of design, testing, implemen-tation, evaluation and review of public policies. Therefore public policy making seems to be a much more socially complex process than has hitherto been con-sidered by most analytics methods and applications. In this paper, we thus suggest a framework for the use of analytics in supporting the policy cycle—and conceptu-alise it as ‘‘Policy Analytics’’.