Journal Articles

Synthesizing Legislative Evaluations: Putting the Pieces Together

---

Laws are important vehicles for policy. They are generally complex and involve various interventions. Despite their pervasive presence and numerous evaluation studies, laws have not been a topic of meta-analytical interest among social scientists. As a result, we lack an overall picture of the type(s) of interventions involved in laws, of the chains of events these are expected to set off and of the outcomes. Nor do we know much about the contents and quality of legislative evaluations. In a first attempt to address this gap, we developed a method to review legislative evaluations inspired by the sociology of law and by the realist synthesis approach. The article presents the results of a review of 75 legislative evaluation reports, which were completed between 1998 and 2005 in the Netherlands. These reports address laws in a variety of policy domains, from justice to health care and from social affairs to education. First, we subjected the reports to a methodological quality assessment procedure, after which 59 reports of acceptable quality remained for inclusion in a synthesis. Among other things, our method revealed that laws very often contain (new) public management interventions directed at executive bodies, rather than regulatory or economic interventions directed at citizens and businesses. The chains of events to be activated by these interventions remain vague. Nevertheless, we were able to come up with a preliminary typology of these programme ‘mechanisms’, which can be used as input for future research. Our method also demonstrated that contexts affected these chains of events in a variety of ways.

---

Availability

No copy data

Detail Information

Series Title

Evaluation

Call Number

-

Publisher

Thousand Oaks, CA : Sage Publication., 2009

Collation

-

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

1356-3890

Classification

-

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

Vol. 15, No. 4, October 2009.pp. 403-425

Subject(s)

Evaluation methods
Legislative evaluation
Realist synthesis
Synthesizing Legislative Evaluations

Specific Detail Info

-

Statement of Responsibility

-

Other version/related

File Attachment

Comments

---

You must be logged in to post a comment