Deliberative Democratic Evaluation in Practice

Conclusion

Many evaluators already implement the principles we explicate here without any urging from us. They have developed their own approaches, their own intuitions, and their own robust senses of justice. Nonetheless, such principles are too important to leave to chance or intuition all the time. It may help to have a justification and checklist to remind evaluators caught in the complexities of difficult evaluations what evaluation in democratic societies should aim for: deliberative democracy.

If we look beyond the conduct of individual studies by individual evaluators, we can see the outlines of evaluation as an influential societal institution, one which can be vital to the development of democratic societies. Amidst claims and counter-claims of the mass media, amidst public relations and advertising, evaluation can be an institution that stands apart, reliable for the accuracy and integrity of its claims. And it needs a set of explicit principles to guide its own practice and test its intuitions.