Embracing the future of the policy sciences

Abstract

While the emergence of big data raises several concerns regarding governance and public policy, it also creates opportunities for diversifying the toolkit for analysis for policy sciences as a whole, i.e., research and practice concerning both policy analysis as well as policy studies. However, it is not clear to what extent this opportunity is being realized in public policy research and teaching. In this study, we examine the prevalence of big data analytics in public policy research and pedagogy using bibliometric analysis for the former and content analysis of course titles and descriptions for the latter. We find that despite significant scope for application of various big data techniques - across machine learning and text mining - the use of these analytic techniques in public policy has been largely limited to a few institutions in a few countries. Further, data science has received limited attention in policy pedagogy, once again with significant geographic variation in its prevalence. We conclude that, to stay relevant, policy sciences need to pay more attention to the integration of big data techniques in policy research, pedagogy, and practice.