In the 1960s, evaluation thrived in the sunshine of political support for our work. We also experienced the dark side of the force of politics: efforts to introduce partisan biases favorable to special interests. In response to politics as contamination, at least two families of stances developed: populist and public interest. The populist stances embraced the politics of extensive stakeholder involvement, democratic deliberation, collaboration, social justice, and empowering the disenfranchised. The public-interest-stances continued to explore strategies for carrying out evaluations of high-stakes, controversial, large-scale national policy issues, being wary of political bias in any form and from any source. How have these stances developed and played out over the past 25 years? Whether the originating theory is populist or public interest, we may have more in common in practice than we may think. These communalities could form a necessary political toolkit to join our methodological knowledge.
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