Public Policy, Governance and Polarization

Making Governance Work

David K. Jesuit, Russell Alan Williams, David K. Jesuit, Russell Alan Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317197973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

Polarization is widely diagnosed as a major cause of the decline of evidence-based policy making and public engagement-based styles of policy making. It creates an environment where hardened partisan viewpoints on major policy questions are less amenable to negotiation, compromise or change. Polarization is not a temporary situation – it is the "new normal."

Public Policy, Governance and Polarization seeks to provide a theoretical foundation for scholars and policy makers who need to understand the powerful and often disruptive forces that have arisen in Europe and North America over the past decade. Academics and practitioners need to better understand this growing trend and to find ways in which it may be managed so that policy solutions to these threats may be developed and implemented.

Researchers and future policymakers in fields such as public administration, public management and public policy need to recognise how institutional design, corporatist interest group systems and different pedagogical approaches may help them understand, discuss and work beyond policy polarization. Edited by two leading political science scholars, this book aims to begin that process.

Part I
Polarized mass publics and electoral politics

1 Concerted action in complex environments

A comparison of industrial restructuring in mid-sized city-regions in Canada and the United States

Charles Conteh

Introduction

This chapter examines the structures and processes of navigating through political polarization in crowded policy environments that are nested within multiple tiers of jurisdiction. In particular, the discussion compares the challenges and prospects of managing divergent discourses and conflicting interests in industrial restructuring in two mid-sized city-regions in Canada and the United States, namely the Niagara and Rochester regions, respectively. The broader context of the two cases consists of the growing problems of industrial decline, economic stagnation, rising income inequality and persistent (if not increasing) pockets of poverty plaguing a growing number of mid-sized cities in North America. The key implication of these latest trends is that managing the political arena of urban spaces is now more than ever fraught with contestations as simmering socioeconomic tensions boil to the top of political discourse. The discussion analyzes how the two cases managed their tensions, and concludes with some practical and theoretical lessons for advancing our understanding of managing political polarization for more effective governance.

Polarization refers to the prevalence of intransigent divergent political, ideational, material and social schisms among key actors, with the potential to derail the institutions of governance and entrap policy discourses in a vicious cycle of vitriolic exchanges and loss of compromise. It should be noted that differences of opinion and the debates and contestations that follow such differences are an intrinsic part of the democratic ethos. However, when such conflicts become pathological, symptoms such as ideological intransigence and loss of interest in sound evidence start to cripple effective governance. These pathologies are the real causes for concern for scholars and practitioners alike (DiMaggio et al., 1996; Baldassarri and Gelman, 2008). There is an increasing trend in Canada and the United States in particular toward ideological mudslinging and vitriolic rhetoric that often indulges in demonizing opponents rather than relying on reason and evidence to guide public deliberation in policy choices (McCarty et al., 2006; Mann and Ornstein, 2012). In such an atmosphere of ideological trench warfare, the real victims are the age-old virtues of negotiation and compromise in navigating change and solving socioeconomic problems. The concept of “polarization” is thus a growing subject of interest in many research traditions within political science.

Polarizing fissures can manifest themselves along ideological lines, most formally expressed through party platforms and hyperbolic rhetoric. But they are more pervasive than that. In societies around the world, polarization can take ethnic, racial, religious and other sociocultural forms. In North America, these fissures have often manifested themselves through the lenses of class and race, with political parties and their fringe constituencies serving as the most visible platforms and conduits for expressing these tensions. At the local level, however, these tensions and divides are observed less as party clashes and more as conflicts among individuals and groups about the socioeconomic destiny of cities and how to allocate resources to combat economic stagnation, income inequality and chronic poverty. The crippling schisms of polarization in the policy discourses of city-regions are often exacerbated by the complexity of multi-tiered jurisdictions in which actors are drawn not only from across various sectors but also from various levels of government. Given the focus of the extant literature on political polarization at the national level, there is a lack of understanding of the manifestations of political polarization at the local level and how they are managed. Our focus in this discussion, therefore, is to address this vacuum in the literature. Attention is duly given to the nature of political contestation and attempts at resolution of differences among a constellation of actors within city-regions.

The term “city-region” is used in this discussion to denote a metropolitan area and its surrounding hinterland. City-regions would often consist of one or two relatively large cities forming a conurbation or urban zone along with a number of smaller towns and rural areas sharing resources such as one or more central business districts, a network of transport systems, a common labour market and certain natural attractions or amenities like waterfronts and conservation areas. A city-region does not presuppose a single administrative unit. Such entities tend to be characterized by multiple administrative districts like municipalities. However, to enhance the administrative efficiency of managing common resources and economic interdependency most city-regions in Canada and the United States have over the years developed regional administrative arrangements aimed at enabling such geographic zones to function as a single unit.

The discussion is premised on the fact that most of the socioeconomic challenges of the twenty-first century are most evidently concentrated in mid-sized cities (Conference Board of Canada, 2014; Scott and Storper, 2015). Over the past two decades, global economic integration, technological change and emerging competition from newly industrializing economies have reshaped the world’s economic landscapes (Waits, 2000; Blakely and Leigh, 2010). The result is an unprecedented structural shift in economies, not unlike the shift from an agrobased to factory economy in the late 1800s or the shift to mass production in the mid-1900s (Atkinson and Correa, 2007; Kresl and Singh, 2012; World Economic Forum, 2013). Global economic integration is creating new opportunities and threats for nations and cities around the world (Bhagwati, 2004; Greenspan, 2007; Wiarda, 2007). From industrial decline to environmental degradation, and all of the social malaise in between, cities across the world have witnessed unprecedented challenges in an age of post-industrial restructuring and the reconfiguration of the world’s economic geography. Plant closures have decimated mid-sized cities’ downtown cores and deepened the plight of income inequality and economic marginalization. Globalization has thus imposed new forms of polarization and divergence within and among cities (Young, 2012; Conference Board of Canada, 2013; Conteh, 2013).

The key question addressed in this chapter is as follows: How are city-regions mobilizing key local resources and actors from public, private and non-profit institutions to engage in concerted action and address the local socioeconomic challenges of global economic restructuring? The chapter is structured as follows. The next section develops the conceptual framework that guides the empirical section of the discussion. This conceptual framework provides a lens for analyzing the institutional infrastructure underpinning the management of polarized and contentious policy environments. The two subsequent sections of the chapter examine the key features of concerted action (or lack thereof ) in the two cases. The concluding discussion raises a number of practical lessons and theoretical implications for overcoming polarization and pursuing concerted action in multi-actor policy environments.

The multi-actor implementation framework

The integrated conceptual framework developed in this section consists of combined insights from implementation theory, organization theory and the governance literature, and will be referred to as the multi-actor implementation framework. The goal is to combine the analytical strengths of these three distinct but parallel research traditions in order to contribute to our understanding of the prospects and challenges of concerted action in polarized policy environments. The rest of the discussion in this section briefly introduces the relevant elements of implementation research, organization theory and the governance literature for our present discussion, and then integrates these perspectives into a single framework. The chapter will then apply the integrated framework in our examination of concerted action in the Niagara and Rochester city-regions.

The term “implementation” as a popular concept in contemporary discourse among scholars of public policy dates back to the work of Pressman and Wildavsky (1973) in the early 1970s. Policy implementation research provides the essential link between political and economic analysis of policy implementation and the organizational or institutional analysis of public administration (Hjern and Hull, 1987). As policy implementation processes became influenced by structural changes in public administration toward decentralization, devolution of responsibilities, partnerships and restructuring of accountability relationships in service delivery, policy implementation research increasingly reflects these trends (Kettl, 2000; Pal, 2006; O’Toole, 2007). The result is an attempt by scholars to understand how policies are being implemented in concert with non-state actors in cooperative or contentious partnership arrangements (Kernaghan et al., 2000).

As a reflection of the transitions toward complex and contested multi-actor policy processes, one notices the emergent focus of implementation research on issues of polarization and concerted action among multiple actors from various loci and levels (O’Toole, 2000; Hill and Hupe, 2003; Lindquist, 2006). In federal systems, for instance, the different levels of policy action consist of federal, provincial or state and municipal jurisdictions and their agencies. The loci of policy action often consist of constellations of ideational and interest coalitions within and outside the state within a policy subsystem.

Organization theory also offers certain elements that can facilitate understanding of concerted policy action in polarized policy subsystems. From the standpoint of this literature, governance can thus be understood as a process involving a series of interactions among public agencies on the one hand, and between public agencies and organized target groups within the community and the private sector on the other (Sinclair, 2001; Schofield, 2004). Organization theory’s long tradition of examining the interactions between organizations and their external environment is particularly relevant for our discussion (Thompson, 1967; Denhardt and Denhardt, 2003). Portions of this literature referred to as open-systems analysis focus on understanding the relationship between public organizations and their strategic (or external) environment (Wamsley and Zald, 1973; Denhardt, 2004; Tompkins, 2005). As Jreisat (2002) succinctly put it, the open-systems approach broke fundamentally from the machine models (closed-systems) view of policy implementation, focusing instead on complex and contentious relations between organizations and the broader political context within which they operate. In particular, organization theory has been grappling with the need to re-examine policy intervention by public agencies as a highly complex process in which they engage other organizations (including community and private sector organizations), often as partners rather than subordinates. Kettl (2000) provides a compelling summation of the above-mentioned trends in his observation that organization theory, in particular, and public administration, in general, are revisiting and adjusting the discipline of public policy and public management’s analytical approach to allow for the view that agencies are adaptive organisms that respond to often contentious political and technical change in their environment in order to survive and be effective.

The governance literature’s concern with the dialectics of horizontal engagement between public agencies and non-state organizations is also relevant for the discussion in this chapter. Insights from governance theory, for instance, have accounted for the actions and strategies of organized target groups and other societal interests in less hierarchical policy settings (Agranoff and McGuire, 1998; Kooiman, 2000; Peters and Pierre, 2000; Rhodes, 2000). Although the concept of governance has escaped a clear definition, in the context of advanced democracies it generally refers to a wide variety of self-sustaining networks through which the state engages in sharing power and administrative responsibility with non-state policy actors. Governance liter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction and overview: polarization explained and applied
• Part I Polarized mass publics and electoral politics
• Part II An example of polarization: the climate change debate
• Part III Potential remedies to polarized policymaking
• Conclusion: managing polarization to make governance work
• Index