The overt politics of evidence: bias and the pursuit of political interests

Politics as competition and contestation As has already been discussed, a common critique of the EBP movement is how many discussions under this heading seem to address evidence use without any direct engagement with the concept of politics. This is despite numerous authors explaining that the nature of policymaking is inherently political, and the role of evidence in such cases will therefore be fundamentally different to instances of technical problem solving (cf. Cartwright and Hardie 2012; Davies, Nutley and Smith 2000; Greenhalgh and Russell 2009; Nutley, Walter and Davies 2007; Parsons 2002; Weiss 1991). This chapter, however, presents the first of two explorations into how the political nature of policymaking may result in different forms of technical and issue bias. Specifically, it describes instances of bias that arise from the pursuit of political interests within a contested and competitive political environment.