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In fields like evaluation, where results are used not just for program improvement but for making policy decisions and determining funding, the climate in which the evaluation is done is often challenging and politically driven. In a time when there is increasing distrust of research and evaluation, doing evaluations becomes increasingly difficult. While in recent years the challenges have seemed to be greater, there has always been tension between science, including evaluation, and politics. In 2008, Chelimsky explained that since “our government’s need for evaluation arises from its checks and balances structure, evaluations working within that structure must deal not exceptionally, but routinely and regularly, with political infringement on their independence that result directly from that structure” (p. 400). She went on to point out the irony that “what should surprise us would be the absence of pressure on evaluators to make an agency ‘look good’ or the lack of effort by agency managers to try to manipulate the work of evaluators implementing legislative oversight” (p. 400).

Another way that politics can intertwine with evaluation is the political interest in “quick fixes” and the unwillingness to acknowledge underlying factors. As Thomas et al. (2018, p. 517) point out,

Evaluators are often asked to assess the effectiveness of social programs that are designed to yield a quick “magic bullet” to fix to problems derived from years of racial oppression. Here, race is and is not the problem inasmuch as racism fuels the disparities we witness. However, this reality is virtually absent in the discourse of numerous commentaries and policy makers who are quick to cite Black failure or pathology without examining the historical root causes. As a result, social programs seek to address outcomes, such as the achievement gap and health disparities, rather than the race-based structural inequalities in the social, economic, and political systems that contribute to these outcomes.

As the following case studies indicate, evaluation results can and at times do lose out to politics.