Note—The Logic of Policy as Argument

This paper is a review and evaluation of a policy argument in a recent issue of Management Science. Mitroff, Mason and Barabba presented a case study of a policy model, built around the problem of undercounting minorities in the U.S. Census, in a Toulmin format. We restructure this model as a Boolean system with both conditional and unconditional statements, preserving both the MMB arguments and the Toulmin format. It is shown that there is an error in the buildup of the MMB model. This error does not change the end result that their model is a contradiction, however it is much earlier to see this fact with the Boolean formulation than with a verbal presentation only. We discuss the potential usefulness of this type of modelling for policy capture, including some of the difficulties of employing the Toulmin format.