Chapter 8 Developing Policy Arguments Objectives

CHAPTER 8Developing Policy ArgumentsOBJECTIVESBy studying this chapter, you should be able to■Describe the structure of a policy argument.■Compare and contrast four types of policy claims.■Describe relations among different elements of an argument.■Explain how objections and rebuttals affect the strength of an argument.■Demonstrate how qualifiers change in response to objections and rebuttals.■Distinguish and illustrate different modes of policy argumentation.■Explain why formal and informal fallacies diminish the strength of claims.■Use argument mapping techniques to represent cases of foreign policy argumentation.What policy makers understand and analysts often forget is that policy argumentation is central to policy making.1 Policy arguments are among the major vehicles for communicating policy-relevant information and an important source of knowledge about the ways policies are made and put into effect. Because policy arguments are carriers of policy-relevant information, they are also important for understanding the use and misuse of policy analysis by policy makers.The ability to organize, structure, and evaluate a policy argument is central to critical analytical thinking. In contexts of practice, argumentation is not limited to the kinds of reasoning employed in formal logic or in the social sciences, for example, reasoning based on quantitative models designed to explain political behavior or