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Lecture 11 Understanding Public Policy

Instructor: Dr. Zhang Mengzhong Email: zmzmpa@yahoo.com Office Address: S3-B1B-68 Telephone: 67906796 (O)

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1) What is public policy analysis?2) What is incrementalist paradigm of public

policy?3) What is the rationalist paradigm of public

policymaking and implementation?4) What is strategic planning paradigm of public

policymaking and implementation?5) What are the roles of government associated

with the four kinds of goods and services?6) What are the six emphases of the incrementalist

paradigm?

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• Public policy is what public administrators implement.

• Public policy is a course of action adopted and pursued by government.

• Public policy analysis is the study of how government policies are made and implemented, and the application of available knowledge to those policies for the purpose of improving their formulation and implementation.

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Public Policy Analysis: A Brief History

• Efforts to analyze public policy can be traced back some 4,000 years to the Babylonian city of Ur.

• In 1937, Harvard University founded its Graduate School of Public Administration, and its curriculum reflected a clear public policy orientation.

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• In 1951, Daniel Lerner and Harold D. Lasswell published The Policy Sciences, which was the first book that defined the field as a responsibility of social scientists to make their findings and methods available to public policymakers.

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• Woodrow Wilson was the first president to hire social scientists in government.

• Herbert Hoover also used social scientists to conduct the first analyses of national economic and social trends

• but Franklin Delano Roosevelt set the standard

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• With the inauguration of Lyndon Baines Johnson as president in 1963, policy analysis was given a permanent place in the federal establishment.

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• Today, policy analyst is an official job description in the federal civil service, most state capitals, and many large local governments, and “policy analysis is one of the established knowledge industries” in the United States.

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Political Science, Public Administration, and Policy Analysis• One way of understanding the subfield of

public policy is to bisect it into broad branches.

• One branch is substantive, processual, descriptive, and objective. That is, it is concerned with the substance of some issue (such as the environment, crime, or whatever)

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• It focuses on the process of a public policy—that is, how the policy process works in a specific field—and attempts to describe that process objectively.

• This is the branch dominated by political scientists, and we call it the incrementalist paradigm of public policymaking and implementation.

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• The second branch is theoretical, effectual, prescriptive, and normative. That is, it is concerned with the development of theories of public policymaking, and the outputs and effects of those theories in practice.

• It focuses on prescribing better ways of making and implementing better policies, regardless of the substantive issues and areas that public policy may address.

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• This is the branch dominated by public administrationists, and we call it the rationalist paradigm of public policymaking and implementation.

• More recently, strategic planning has surfaced as a relatively practical paradigm of public policymaking.

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The Incrementalist Paradigm of Public Policymaking and Implementation

• Satisficing, organizational drift, bounded rationality, and limited cognition, among other terms of the literature of model synthesis reflect the basic idea of the incrementalist paradigm

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• Disjointed incrementalism, as a description of the policymaking process

--Charles E. Lindblom

Disjointed means that the analysis and evaluation of conditions and alternative responses to perceived conditions are un- coordinated and occur throughout society,

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and incrementalism means that only a limited selection of policy alternatives are provided to policymakers, and that each one of these alternatives represents only an infinitesimal change in the status quo.

Charles E. Lindblom originally called the concept “muddling through”

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• Basically, the incrementalist paradigm posits a conservative tendency in public policymaking; new public policies are seen as being variations on the past.

• Incrementalist policies are nearly always more politically expedient than are policies that necessitate basic redistributions of social values.

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Six emphases of the incrementalist paradigm

• Elitism• Groups• Systems• Institutionalism• Neoinstitutionalism• Organized anarchy

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The Elite/Mass Model

• The elite/mass model contends that a policymaking and policy-executing elite is able to act in an environment characterized by apathy and information distortion, and thereby govern a largely passive mass

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• Policy flows downward from the elite to the mass.

• Prevailing public policies reflect elite values.

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The Group Model (interest groups)

• Another way of describing the group model is the hydraulic thesis, in which the polity is considered as a system of forces and pressures acting and reacting to one another in the formulation pf public policy

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• Normally, the group model is associated with the legislature rather than the bureaucracy

• Agency administrators grow increasingly unable to distinguish between policies that are beneficial to the interests of the public and policies that are beneficial to the interests of the groups being regulated.

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• What is good for the groups is good for the nation, in the eyes of the regulators. Is this true?

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The Systems Model

• A third emphasis in the incrementalist public policy literature is the systems model. The systems model relies on concepts of information theory (especially feedback, input, and output) and conceives of the process as being essentially cyclincal. Policy is originated, implemented, adjusted, re-implemented, and readjusted.

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• The systems model is concerned with such questions as:

1) What are the significant variables and patterns in the public policymaking system?

2) What constitutes the black box of the actual policymaking process?

3) What are the inputs, “withinputs,” outputs, and feedback of the process?

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The Systems Model of Public Policymaking and Implementation.

• Inputs: demands, resources, support, opposition

• Outputs: goods, services, and symbols to public and other policymakers

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• The “black box” (or the “conversion process,” or “withinputs”):

• Structures, procedures, policymakers’ psycho-social framework

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• The Institutionalist Model focuses on the organizational chart of government: it describes the arrangements and official duties of bureaus and departments, but customarily it has ignored the living linkages between them

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• Constitutional provisions, administrative and common law, and similar legalities are the objects of greatest interest.

• The behavioral connections between a department and the public policy emanating from it are of scant concern.

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The Neo-Institutionalist Model

• The Neo-Institutionalist is an attempt to categorize public policies according to policymaking subsystems. For example, Theodore J. Lowi classifies policies by four arenas of power: redistributive, distributive, constituent, and regulative.

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• Distributive policy arena, e.g., agricultural subsidies (remote)

• Constituent policy arena, e.g., reapportionment of legislature (remote)

• Regulative policy arena, e.g., elimination of fraudulent advertising (Immediate)

• Redistributive policy arena, e.g., progressive income tax (Immediate)

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The Organized Anarchy Model

• John W. Kingdon’s classic Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies is an exemplary empirical representative of this literature

• Three streams that flow largely independently of one another and constitute the policymaking process.

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• The first is the problem stream, which involves focusing the public’s and policymakers’ attention on a particular social problem, defining the problem, and either applying a new public policy to the resolution of the problem or letting the problem fade from sight

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• The second stream is the political stream.

• It is in the political stream that the governmental agenda—in other words, the list of issues or problems to be resolved—is formed. This formulation occurs as the result of the interaction of major forces, such as the national mood, the perspective and clout of organized interests, and the dynamics of government itself, including personnel turnover, the settling of jurisdictional disputes among agencies and branches, and so forth

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• The primary participants in the formulation of the governmental agenda are the visible cluster. They include high-level political appointees and the president’s staff, members of Congress, the media, interest groups, those actors associated with elections, parties, and campaigns, and general public opinion.

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• The third stream is the policy stream. It is in the policy stream that the decision agenda or alternative specification is formulated.

• The major participants in the formulation of the decision agenda are the hidden cluster. These include career public administrators, academics, researchers and consultants, congressional staffers, the Office of Management and Budget, and interest groups.

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The Rationalist Paradigm of Public Policymaking and Implementation

• Rationalism attempts to be the opposite of incrementalism

• Rationalism tries to learn all the value preferences extant in a society, assign each value a relative weight, discover all the policy alternatives available, know all the consequences of each alternative,

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• calculate how the selection of any one policy will affect the remaining alternative in terms of opportunity costs, and ultimately select the policy alternative that is the most efficient in terms of the costs and benefits of social values.

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• The rationalist paradigm dwells on the optimal organization of the government structure that will assure undistorted information flow, the accuracy of feedback data, and the proper weighing of social variables

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• Optimality. Rational choice is concerned with Pareto optimality.

• A Pareto improvement is “a change in economic organization that makes everyone better off—or, more precisely, that makes one or more members of society better off without making anyone worse off”

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The Rationalist Paradigm of Public Policymaking and Implementation

(flow chart) (p.315)

• Input: Data in the form of accurately quantified social values and the administrative capacity to comprehend and use those data

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• Setting and weighting of operational goals• Preparation of a full set of alternative

policies• Establishing an inventory of values and

their weights.

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• Preparation of a full set of predictions of costs and benefits of alternatives

• Calculations of expected effects of each policy

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• Comparison of policy effects (using criterion of efficiency) and selection of policy with highest net expectation

• Policy output

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Four kinds of goods and services: private, toll, common-pool, and collective goods and services.

• Private goods and services are pure, individually consumed goods and services for which exclusion is completely feasible. There is no problem of supply.

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• Toll goods and services are pure, jointly consumed goods and services for which exclusion is completely feasible. Toll goods can be supplied easily by the marketplace, and excluding consumers from using them is entirely practicable.

consumption of toll goods is joint rather than individual

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• As the number of users increase, the cost per user decreases. E.g., cable television, electric power, and water supplies. Government action may be required to assure that monopolies are created and granted in the first place and then regulated so that proprietors do not exploit their monopolistic privileges unfairly.

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• Common-pool goods and services are pure, individually consumed goods and services for which exclusion is not feasible. The sky and air are common-pool goods. In the case of common-pool goods, we do not have supply problems. There is neither a requirement to pay for common-pool goods nor any means to prevent their consumption; they are, in the short term, free.

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• Common-pool goods bring us to the problem of what Garrrett Hardin called the “tragedy of the Commons”—that which belongs to everyone belongs to no one.

• The problem of common-pool goods is that they easily can be squandered to the point of exhaustion. An example would be the clean air supply.

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• Government has a much larger role in the administration of common-pool goods than it does in private and toll goods because it makes sense for government to regulate common-pool goods so that they are not destroyed by overconsumption.

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• Collective, or public goods and services, which are pure, jointly consumed goods and services for which exclusion is not feasible. The marketplace cannot supply these goods because they are used simultaneously by many people, and no one can be excluded from consuming them.

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• Individuals have an economic incentive to exploit collective goods without paying for them, and thus become what public choice theorists call “free riders.”

• National defense, broadcast television, and police protection provide examples of collective goods.

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• Collective goods differ from common-pool goods on the basis of consumption. Common-pool goods are individually consumed.

• Collective goods are jointly consumed without diminishing the quality or quantity of the goods and services themselves.

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• It is in the area of collective goods that government has the greatest responsibility for management and regulation.

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The Strategic Planning Paradigm of Public Policymaking and Implementation

• This third approach has since acquired the title of strategic planning, or, less frequently, strategic decision making or strategic management, and it is an eminently useful concept in that it attempts to combine the strongest features of incrementalism and rationalism, yet avoid their pitfalls.

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• Strategic planning emerged largely in the world of business.

• Strategic planning recognizes that “organizations have both localized, short-term, and bottom-line demands and all-organization, long-term, and investment-strategies-for-the-future demands. They must live with the familiar today, yet also must be forever looking out for how to live in a very different tomorrow.”

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• Strategic planning is done by the top line officers of the organization, from the chief executive officer through the upper levels of middle management.

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• What a strategic plan does is place line decision-makers in an active rather than a passive position about the future of their organization. It incorporates an outward looking, proactive focus that is sensitive to environmental changes, but does not assume that the organization is necessarily a victim of changes in its task environment.

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• Because it is decision oriented, strategic planning blends economic and rational analyses, political values, and the psychology of the participants in the organization.

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Strategic Planning: The Public Experience

• Public strategic planning can be defined as the development, articulation, prioritization, and communication of significant policy goals by public and nonprofit organizations, and the integration of those goals into the management, budgeting, and performance measurement systems of these organizations.

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• The Strategic Planning Paradigm of Public Policymaking and Implementation is a combination of incrementalist resources and rationalist resources

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Incrementalist resources:

• Traditions, values, and aspirations of agency and its personnel.

• Budgetary, political, managerial, and intellectual resources of agency and its line personnel.

• Agency leadership: abilities and policy priorities

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Rationalist Resources

• Analyses of long-term environment trends: threats and opportunities

• Analyses of short-term political trends: threats, opportunities, perceptions, and directions

• Interagency competition: perceptions and directions.

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The Scope of Public Strategic Planning

• Federal Strategic Planning. At the national level, the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 requires, for the first time in federal history, that agencies submit multi-year strategic plans to Congress and the Office of Management and Budget. The first-ever government-wide strategic plans appeared in 1998.

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• The Results Act also mandates that a government-wide performance plan be included in the president’s annual budget request, which, in the words of the act, provides “a single cohesive picture of the annual performance goals for the fiscal year.”

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The Implementation of Public Strategic Planning.• Federal Implementation. The federal

government’s first government-wide plan has much work that remains to be done in two critical areas: strengthening weak agency plans aimed at improving performance, and the attainment of “an integrated, government-wide perspective throughout the plan.” These are daunting challenges.

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Nonprofit Strategic Benefits.

• Using strategic planning in the independent sectors seems to reap more measurable rewards than in the governmental sector. Strategic planning associates with nonprofit organizational growth, both in funding and membership, higher performance, greater effectiveness in attaining the non profits’ social and organizational mission, and improved effectiveness by their boards of directors.

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The End

•Thanks!