EAssessing a public policy means assessing its impact, based on data and scientific methods. This may involve evaluating the impact of a vaccination campaign on public health, the impact of a tax reform on purchasing power, or the impact of splitting classes on the level of schooling. students.
The evaluation of public policies really started in France in the 2000s, 40 years after the United States. She is growing rapidly. But does it really serve to inform political decision-making?
In order to judge this, we have studied (“ What evaluations of public policies for what uses? », Adam Baïz et al., France Stratégie, June 2022) 262 laws passed between 2008 and 2020, in areas as varied as health, education, finance and security. And we sought to find out whether Parliament and the government really mobilize public policy assessments upstream and downstream of the passing of the law.
Here are our main results.
Prior to the passing of the law, Parliament and to a lesser extent the government do mobilize an increasing number of public policy assessments. For each law, they cite eight evaluations in 2008, and nearly 25 in 2020. These are mainly reports from public institutions (INSEE, ministries, Court of Auditors, etc.), parliamentary reports and reports from experts and researchers.
The economy, energy, more than tourism, security
These reports shed light on parliamentary debates in various ways, by providing expertise on comparable policies, feedback from the field or even international experiences. Rare are the laws for which no evaluation is cited; Conversely, for certain laws, such as the 2019 mobility orientation law, more than 100 evaluations are cited in parliamentary debates.
Once voted, nearly 40% of the laws were subject to at least one ex-post evaluation. This proportion also increases over time. Laws relating to labour, the economy, housing or energy were rated significantly higher than those relating to tourism, research, security and the police or the civil service.
These differences are due in particular to the political sensitivity of the laws, and to the quality of the data available. The most evaluated law was the subject of 18 ex post evaluations. This is the 2013 tax credit for competitiveness and employment (CICE), the costs of which proved to be significant in relation to the effects initially sought, hence its abolition in 2019.
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