Designing a Scale for Measuring the Quality of Cultural Policymaking Process in Higher Education

Without measuring governance, it is extremely difficult to talk about improvement. Public policy-making is the tool of governments in governing various areas of society. Policies that are formulated and implemented to solve problems and meet public needs can only achieve their ultimate goal of public interest if they are of good quality in the process of agenda setting, formulation, implementation, and evaluation. Knowing the quality of policies in each of these stages requires accurate and valid measuring tools and metrics. This will be doubly important when it comes to the cultural sphere of the society. In this study, based on the evaluation model of the cultural policymaking process and using the ten-step methodology of designing the measures of Ruther and Jones, and a survey of 10 active experts in the field of culture, a questionnaire for measuring the quality of cultural policies has been designed. The scale, containing 55 questions, has made it possible to measure the quality of cultural policies in five dimensions: problem-identification, solution-taking, legitimization, implementation and evaluation. The problem-identification dimension has a component called cultural excellence with four indicators: deepening of religious and value beliefs, social development, identity-creating and insight-giving. The legitimization dimension has a component of cultural support with two indicators: persuasiveness and legal protection. The implementation dimension has the component of cultural policy-making which includes soft contextualization with indicators like commitment and the potency of the administrators. Finally, the evaluation dimension has the component of cultural monitoring with indicators like, purposeful, continuous, and realistic monitoring.