Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 317

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 50 of the 50 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Intelligent Policy Making for a Complex World: Pragmatism, Evidence and Learning

Sanderson, Ian·2009·Political Studies

Abstract

The credentials of the evidence-based policy movement appear to be increasingly subject to challenge based on research that has highlighted the limits on the use of evidence in policy making. However, moves towards a more ‘realistic’ position of evidence-informed policy making risk conflating prescription with description and undermining a normative vision of better policy making. This article argues that we need to review the ideas that underpin our thinking about evidence-based policy making, and move beyond the territory of instrumental rationality to a position founded upon two intellectual pillars: our developing knowledge about complex adaptive systems; and ideas from a pragmatist philosophical position – especially those of John Dewey – about social scientific knowledge and its role in guiding action to address social problems. This leads us to a conception of ‘intelligent policy making’ in which the notion of policy learning is central.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2009.00791.x

Cites

50 of 50 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 50 references

Cited by

See all 317

Metadata

Authors
Sanderson, I.
Venue
Political Studies
Published
2009-12
Volume
57
Issue
4
Pages
699-719
ISSN
  • 0032-3217 (ISSN-L)
  • 1467-9248
OpenAlex
W2018254624
Cited by
317
References
50
FWCI
16.69
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Intelligent Policy Making for a Complex World: Pragmatism, Evidence and Learning. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2009.00791.x
The paper
Sanderson, I. (2009). Intelligent Policy Making for a Complex World: Pragmatism, Evidence and Learning. Political Studies. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2009.00791.x

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.