What is it about?
Policymakers often apply lessons from past policies that seemed to work well. But how do we know if a success in one place will really work in another? This article presents a simple model for thinking through that question, and shows why some famous cases (like reducing class sizes in schools or introducing large nutrition programs) failed when transferred to new settings.
Featured Image
Photo by Mae Jones on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Policies often fail when lessons are taken from one context and applied uncritically to another. Our model helps identify when such reasoning is strong and when it is flawed. This matters because it gives policymakers tools to avoid costly mistakes and to make better use of evidence in shaping future decisions.
Perspectives
Writing this article has been a rewarding experience. We were struck by how often policymakers rely on reasoning by analogy without noticing it. Sometimes this approach works, but other times it leads to costly failures. Our hope is that this work makes those reasoning steps more transparent, so that both researchers and policymakers can talk about them more clearly. More than anything, we hope readers find the model useful for thinking critically about how evidence is applied to new problems.
Qianru Wang
Ghent University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Analogical reasoning and evidence transfer in evidence-based
policy, Journal of Argumentation in Context, August 2025, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/jaic.24016.web.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
