LIST OF PANELS

The growing embrace of evidence informed policymaking has begun to collide with the recent growth in so-called 'post-truth politics' in a number of countries. Post-truth politics can be seen to be typified by situations where science and evidence are ignored and manipulated by those in positions of political authority- and truth itself is of secondary concern to achieving political victory. Beyond the rejection of individual inconvenient facts, however, there can also be strategic attacks on public administrative institutional bodies that serve to provide data, evidence, or independent review of evidence to inform policy debates.

This is particularly a problem when societies are increasingly polarised, leading to greater rejection of inconvenient facts and evidence by the citizenry – either though unconscious cognitive biases, or conscious acceptance – or even embrace - of untruths as part of a view that such efforts reflect a greater intelligence than ones opponents - a clever ways to beat an opponent who should be defeated at all costs.

While the reasons for strategic misuse of evidence may seem apparent - political victory or financial gain for politicians and those who support them - the implications of widespread abuse of evidence, and of attacks on evidence providing systems, is profound. The premise of the policy sciences – as efforts to improve the lives of the public - rests on the ability to undertake rational evidence-informed analyses and have some common acceptance or norms of truth. Yet the effect of post-truth politics can be to undermine the ability for evidence to serve this role in promoting the public good.

The current environment thus raises a number of important questions around both why and how policy-relevant evidence may be strategically misused in particular political environments, but also about the factors that can enable, or oppose the misuse of evidence in policy spaces. This panel will call for papers that either conceptually or empirically explore aspects of evidence use, in relation to political manipulation or resistance.

Example questions of interest to this panel could be:

- How do political environments relate to the public's acceptance or rejection of attacks on evidence/truth?
- How does polarisation specifically shape individual's acceptance of the misuse of evidence?
- How do features of the political system - such as institutional arrangements, party structures, etc. - relate to evidence use and the ease of which evidence might be misused?
- When are norms and institutions of evidence attacked or ignored? (And/or) What are the implications of this for future evidence use?
- What factors or structures may buttress systems of evidence use against political manipulation or assault?
- How does polarisation affect citizens' trust in evidence or evidence providing institutions?

This panel invites both conceptual and empirical papers that reflect on the use of evidence for policy in relaton to elements of polarisation and 'post-truth' politics.

Comparative analyses (e.g. of political envionments, of institutional factors, of party systems, etc.) in relation to these topics would be particularly welcome.