ABSTRACT
The extent to which government interventions contribute to measured results is central to public sector evaluation. If some political ideology dominates the executive and legislative branches of government for a substantial period of time, civil servants will become used to working for certain types of people, who take an interest in certain types of problems. The thesis about the direction of change may be widened to include any new group of political masters who turn their attentions to new issues and problems. Most important among the intervention design components are clarity, technical complexity, and the validity of the intervention theory. Unclear priorities ensue when interventions embody several objectives, occasionally even catalogues of objectives. Intervention theories thus consist of three parts. At the heart of any intervention theory is a causal hypothesis about the influence of one or more determinants on the behavior that the program seeks to modify.
