Policymakers' Use of Social Science Knowledge : symbolic or Instrumental?

In (lie literature on the utilization of social science knowledge, the concept of legitimation has long stood for the position that, decisiontnakers seek research results mainly to back up convictions they already hold and decisions they have already taken. A second equally popular position defines utilization in terms of the meaning it has in natural and technological sciences: It expects political decisions to be replaced by scientifically derived objective necessities (Schelsky, 1965). Both positions seem equally extreme in their interpretation of the utilization process, and both positions are equally speculative, since hardly any data are available to support one or the other thesis. This chapter seeks to examine both assumptions by drawing from seventy face-to-face interviews done in 1974 with medium-level decision makers employed in Austrian federal and municipal government agencies (all located in Vienna) and directly involved with contract research. Since there are no lists of the universe of government officials who fund social science projects, the study cannot claim to be representative of the population; however, extensive search processes on the part of the project team suggest that the persons identified for the sample constitute a more-or-less complete set of government contractors in the city of Vienna, where more than 50 percent of Austrian social science government contract research is financed. The study included only government officials who had (during the last few years) financed at least one project in a social science discipline that had been finished at the time of the interviewing. The distribution of projects over disciplines was as follows: sociology, 51 percent; economics, 24 percent; educational sciences, 13.5 percent; urban and regional planning, 4.5 percent; political sciences, 4.5 percent; and others 2.5 percent. The frequency of projects classified as sociological reflects the predominance of social research and opinion surveys in government contract research. This predominance should be kept in mind when reading the analysis that follows.