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We turn now to the third question posed above—regarding how generic knowledge is used by policy specialists. An understanding by scholars of the nature and scope of usable knowledge, we believe, will be enhanced if they understand how it can enter into policy analysis and decision-making.

How Can Scholarly Knowledge Be Used by Policymakers?

To move toward bridging the gap between theory and practice, both scholars and policy specialists need a realistic understanding of the limited and (often indirect, but still important) impact that scholarly knowledge, theory, and generic knowledge can have on policymaking.529 Academics need to understand how policymakers arrive at their decisions.

Theory and generic knowledge are best understood as a source of inputs to policy analysis of specific problems within the government. They are an aid, not a substitute for policy analysis and for judgments that decision-makers make when choosing a policy. Even the best theoretical conceptualization of a problem and the most highly developed generic knowledge of a strategy cannot substitute for competent analysis by governmental specialists who must consider whether some version of a strategy is likely to be viable in the particular situation at hand. In addition, for policymakers to judge which action to take, they must take into account a number of considerations that cannot be anticipated or addressed in generic articulations of strategies.

One or another of seven different types of judgments, most of which involve trade-offs, must be made by top-level decision-makers. Such judgments can be aided only to a limited extent by theory and generic knowledge—or even by policy analysis within the government. These include:

• trade-offs between the quality of decisions, the need for political and bureaucratic support for policies adopted, and the prudent management of time and political and policymaking resources;

• judgments of political side effects and opportunity costs of given courses of action;

• judgments of the utility and acceptable risks of different options;

• trade-offs between short-term versus long-term payoffs;

• judgments as to whether to satisfice or optimize;

• judgments as to how best to deal with the value complexity imbedded in decisional choice; and

• judgments as to when to make a decision.530

The critical role of judgment in policymaking was emphasized by George Ball, undersecretary of state during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He described the complexity of the problem faced by policymakers during the crisis: “We were presented … with an equation of compound variables and multiple unknowns. No one has yet devised a computer that will digest such raw data as was available to us and promptly print out a recommended course of action.”531

No theory or systematic generic knowledge can provide policy specialists with detailed, high-confidence prescriptions for action in each contingency that arises. Such policy-relevant theory and knowledge does not exist and is not feasible. Rather, we must think in terms of an analogy with traditional medical practice, which calls for a correct diagnosis of the problem before prescribing a treatment. Policy-applicable theory and knowledge facilitate two essential tasks of policymaking: the diagnostic task and the prescriptive one. We emphasize their contribution to the diagnosis of new situations rather than their ability to prescribe sound choices of policy, largely because top-level decision-makers must take into account factual information about the situation and trade-off judgments that are not covered by theory and generic knowledge. Various theories of rational decision-making have been designed to help policy specialists to make decisions of high analytic quality, but as yet no theory of effective decision-making guides policymakers in making the seven important judgments noted above. The policymaker, like the physician, acts as a clinician in striving to make a correct diagnosis of the problem before determining