Pathways From Research Into Public Decision Making: Intermediaries as the Third Community

Scholars and practitioners in public administration have often been referred to as the two communities, reflecting their differing incentives, constraints, and foci. In this paper, we examine the knowledge surrounding the use of empirical evidence in public decision making from both the academic and practice of policymaking literatures. After identifying points of convergence, we compare the important factors identified in each literature to four known cases of impact of empirical findings. We discuss how well each set of literature explains our cases and identify an important third community underidentified in the current conceptualizations of evidence translation—knowledge intermediaries.