Delphi Method - Use in Policy-making

Use in Policy-making

From the 1970s, the use of the Delphi technique in public policy-making introduces a number of methodological innovations. In particular:

• the need to examine several types of items (not only forecasting items but, typically, issue items, goal items, and option items) leads to introducing different evaluation scales which are not used in the standard Delphi. These often include desirability, feasibility (technical and political) and probability, which the analysts can use to outline different scenarios: the desired scenario (from desirability), the potential scenario (from feasibility) and the expected scenario (from probability);
• the complexity of the issues posed in public policy-making leads to give more importance to the arguments supporting the evaluations of the panelists; so these are often invited to list arguments for and against each option item, and sometimes they are given the possibility to suggest new items to be submitted to the panel;
• for the same reason, the scaling methods, which are used to measure panel evaluations, often include more sophisticated approaches such as multi-dimensional scaling.

Further innovations come from the use of computer-based (and later web-based) Delphi conferences. According to Turoff and Hiltz, in computer-based Delphis:

• the iteration structure used in the paper Delphis, which is divided into three or more discrete rounds, can be replaced by a process of continuous (roundless) interaction, enabling panelists to change their evaluations at any time;
• the statistical group response can be updated in real-time, and shown whenever a panelist provides a new evaluation.

According to Bolognini, web-based Delphis offer two further possibilities, relevant in the context of interactive policy-making and e-democracy. These are:

• the involvement of a large number of participants,
• the use of two or more panels representing different groups (such as policy-makers, experts, citizens), which the administrator can give tasks reflecting their diverse roles and expertise, and make them to interact within ad hoc communication structures. For example, the policy community members (policy-makers and experts) may interact as part of the main conference panel, while they receive inputs from a virtual community (citizens, associations etc.) involved in a side conference. These web-based variable communication structures, which he calls Hyperdelphi (HD), are designed to make Delphi conferences "more fluid and adapted to the hypertextual and interactive nature of digital communication".