Theory and practice of deliberative participation in policy analysis

Abstract: The inclusion of a post-positivist thinking to policy making is a response to criticism raised against the limitations positivists impose on the policy making process. Policy-making and analysis are mainly seen as activities driven by empiricist ideals, quantitative facts, technocrats and experts while citizens’ (deliberative) views are excluded or marginalised. Participatory (or deliberative) public policy analysis is a supporting approach presented by post-positivists to embrace democratic ideals through a better informed public policy process that includes normative and valuative knowledge through mainly qualitative processes. This approach supports the notion of multiple methods of inquiry in the contexts of argumentation, judgment and public debate. In defining policy analysis, post-positivists have opened an opportunity for deliberative approaches. This provides an opportunity specifically to further enhance the policy process through participatory evaluation. In this article a logical qualitative inquiry accompanied by a theoretical analysis by way of a literature analysis was employed as the preferred strategy to determine the questions that are most significant to the topic, context and reliability of the research