Truth and politics: Thinking about evidence-based policy in the age of spin'

Evidence-based policy and the contemporary politics of spin are said to characterise contemporary politics and policy. The paper asks firstly what sense is to be made of this coincidence, and then documents this coincidence. It then asks how credible is the conception of 'evidence' espoused by advocates of evidence-based policy when it is conventionally represented as an 'objective' counter to ideology, spin or opinion? It points to major problems with the conventional understandings of 'evidence'. It is suggested that while the evidence-based policy literature relies on the associations 'evidence' is presumed to have with 'sensory data', this is neither the case nor all that defensible. The paper reprises arguments advanced by Henry Mayer and Hannah Arendt that the relationship of politics to the empirical was and is a far more complex relationship than is conventionally understood to be the case.