Policy Styles and Policy-Making

Exploring the Linkages

Michael Howlett, Jale Tosun, Michael Howlett, Jale Tosun

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351618465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Richardson et al.'s respected and seminal Policy Styles in Western Europe (1982) shed valuable light on how countries tend to establish long-term and distinctive ways to make policies that transcend short-term imperatives and issues. This follow-up volume updates those arguments and significantly expands the coverage, consisting of 16 carefully selected country-level case studies from around the world. Furthermore, it includes different types of political regimes and developmental levels to test more widely the robustness of the patterns and variables highlighted in the original book.

The case studies – covering countries from the United States, Canada, Germany and the UK to Russia, Togo and Vietnam – follow a uniform structure, combining theoretical considerations and the presentation of empirical material to reveal how the distinct cultural and institutional features of modern states continue to have implications for the making and implementation of public policy decisions within them.

The book is essential reading for students and scholars of public policy, public administration, comparative politics and development studies.

Part I
“Closed” bureaucratic-democratic regimes

2
Policy styles in the United Kingdom

A majoritarian UK vs. devolved consensus democracies?

Paul Cairney

Introduction

One aim of Richardson’s (1982) edited volume Policy Styles in Western Europe was to show the difference between country level reputations and actual policymaking practices. A sole focus on high-profile policymaking – as a small proportion of government business – exaggerates one type of policy style. If we analyse a central government’s policymaking practices as a whole, we find that countries often do not live up to their reputations. Indeed, one description of a policy style is too simple to capture a wide range of its activities, from top-down imposition in some cases to bargaining and routine administration in others. Nor does it capture the context in which its policymaking or ‘standard operating procedures’ take place, including the types of constraints imposed by policy environments that can be found in all political systems. Put simply, if all policymaking is characterised by bounded rationality and takes place in complex systems, policy styles are partly determined by the system and not controlled fully by governments. In such cases, policymakers usually find pragmatic ways to deal with uncertainty and their limited control over other actors and policy outcomes.

For example, the UK is often presented as the archetypal majoritarian system with a top-down governing style, but Jordan and Richardson (1982) found that its consultation practices and tendency towards incrementalism resembled the style of consensus democracies.¹ This argument became more difficult to maintain after the book was published. A period of ‘Thatcherism’ reinforced the UK’s majoritarian image and prompted some debate about a shift towards top-down imposition (Marsh and Rhodes, 1992a, 1992b). More recently, Richardson (2018: 215) himself identified ‘several trends that suggest that the British policy style has shifted towards the impositional end of the policy style spectrum, bringing it more in line with the traditional Westminster model of governing’.

Further, Flinders (2010) describes ‘bi-constitutionality’, in which the UK government created the conditions for devolved governments – in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland – to become closer to consensus democracies while reinforcing majoritarian politics and policymaking in Westminster. Since 1999, devolved governments have developed a reputation for relatively consensual policymaking, and participants describe devolved policy styles in contrast to the style of the UK government (Keating et al., 2009; Cairney, 2008, 2009a, 2011a, 2014). The pragmatic ‘British policy style’ of the late 1970s has allegedly been replaced by a new mix of majoritarian UK and consensus devolved government.

Yet, if we look beyond these policymaking reputations, based on headline-grabbing examples and incomplete testimony from participants, we find a more mixed picture in which all governments face similar drivers towards pragmatic policymaking styles. The UK combines assertive policymaking in a small number of issues with a hands-off style in most other issues. The devolved governments combine consensus building with partisan politics, and Scotland and Wales often appear to oversee mini-Westminsters (Cairney, 2016). This mix of styles often relates more to electoral dynamics and the types of policy issue than the types of system. Or, UK and devolved government differences are often a function of their size and capacity rather than the rhetoric of ‘new politics’, which was such a feature of the push for political reform and devolution in Scotland and Wales (McGarvey and Cairney, 2008; McAllister, 2000; Keating and Cairney, 2006).

Overall, there is some danger that a useful concept to describe different standing operating procedures – policy style – will skew our understanding of policymaking if we focus only on headline-grabbing examples. To prevent misunderstanding, we need to analyse carefully and demonstrate the nature of their policy styles rather than base policymaking reputations on face value and anecdotal analysis. To do so, I first outline the original description of the British policy style to help identify the aspects of this argument that have changed and those that still hold to this day. Second, I identify subsequent UK developments from the Thatcher governments onwards to show that policymaking has changed, but qualify the idea that there has been a binary shift in policy style. Third, I pay close attention to Richardson’s (2018) most recent intervention: why does he identify such a shift in policy styles since his original edited volume in 1982? Fourth, I describe the ways in which devolved government styles could be more consensual, before comparing actual UK and devolved policy styles. Overall, I argue that the UK government often lives up to its majoritarian reputation, but there is often a great difference between its high-profile image and policymaking as a whole. Governments in the UK juggle two policy style stories, to reflect the electoral imperative to project an image of central government competence, and a pragmatic imperative to share responsibility for policymaking in a complex system.

The original policy style argument: key context and principles

The original ‘British policy style’ argument should be understood in relation to the literature on ‘policy communities’, developed by Richardson and Jordan (1979), and linked increasingly to studies of bounded rationality and policy-making contexts. The overall argument can be summed up as follows. First, most policy is processed out of the electoral and parliamentary arena, and the rules of policymaking beyond the public spotlight are different. They are more likely to prompt consensus seeking, bargaining, and pragmatism. Second, there is a widely applicable logic to policy communities, because policymakers can only pay attention to a small proportion of their responsibilities, and rely on many other actors to make and deliver policy. Third, different governments (from a different party, era, or country) can respond to this logic in different ways to develop their own policy styles, but their success is heavily reliant on contexts not of their own making.

One of Richardson and Jordan’s (1979) aims was to shift our focus from the exciting world of plurality elections, which produced single-party government, adversarial politics, and regular changes in government, towards the more humdrum business of government, which took place regardless of high-level ministerial changes (Jordan and Cairney, 2013). In short, actors changed, but their limited ability to control their policymaking environments did not.

Richardson and Jordan engaged initially with the ‘adversary politics thesis’, which had become linked strongly to arguments about the need for electoral reform: plurality elections exaggerate electoral swings, produce rapid changes in single party government, and destabilise the long-term progress that we might associate with the coalition-building and compromise of proportional systems (Finer, 1975). Such an argument is well rehearsed in the UK literature (see Jordan and Cairney, 2013). It relates strongly to the ideal-type ‘Westminster model’ that concentrates power in the hands of a small number of government ministers:

• plurality elections exaggerate the wins of single political parties
• one party gains a majority in the House of Commons and creates a government
• the party ‘whips’ its members in key votes to ensure that the government controls parliamentary business
• Secretaries of State control government departments, served by neutral civil servants in a hierarchical structure
• the prime minister controls the membership of cabinet
• the ‘government knows best’ culture reproduces the idea that a small core executive should determine policy, even if its decisions are unpopular.

(Blunkett and Richards, 2011; Richards and Smith, 2002: 3–4; McGarvey and Cairney, 2008: 23; Marsh et al., 2001; Bevir and Rhodes, 1999)

It also relates strongly to comparative politics archetypes. The classic distinction is Lijphart’s (1984, 1999) consensus versus majoritarian democracy (although both archetypes come from political systems with free and fair elections). In a consensus democracy, a proportional electoral system diffuses power among many parties, obliging them to cooperate and compromise with each other to govern. This need for ‘inclusiveness, bargaining and compromise’ helps promote a wider culture of cooperation, which extends to the relationships between policymakers and influencers. For example, governments may be more likely to encourage corporatism or similar forms of routine bargaining. In a majoritarian democracy, there is a ‘winner takes all’ mentality, in which parties compete with each other and feel no need to cooperate, and the party of government encourages a culture of top-down imposition and open competition between interest groups (Lijphart, 1999: 2–3).

In this context, Richardson and Jordan’s (1979: 73–74) initial impact was to shift our attention to images that better sum up the totality of government business, which is:

administered between a myriad of inter connecting, interpenetrating organisations. It is the relationship involved in committees, the policy community of departments and groups, and the practices of co-option and the consensual style, that better account for policy outcomes than do examinations of party stances, of manifestos and parliamentary influence.

According to Jordan and Cairney (2013: 236), the initial aim had not been to challenge the traditional story associated with the Westminster model. Rather, their empirical work showed consistently that parliament was generally peripheral to the policy process, and that regular changes of government, prompting a cabinet to be populated by a new party, did not produce the major policy impact that people expected; indeed, ‘the traditional model of Cabinet and parliamentary government is a travesty of reality’ (Richardson and Jordan, 1979: 91).

To make this argument, they provide a key distinction between the ‘interesting cases’ most worthy of media attention, which exaggerate ministerial and parliamentary involvement, and ‘normal policymaking’, in which policy communities were central: ‘This distinction between the “high-octane” controversies and “below-the-radar” negotiations became central to a focus on “real” politics and the relationships between groups and governments’ (Jordan and Cairney, 2013: 236–237).

The ‘normal’ or most pervasive policy style takes place out of the spotlight of media, public, and parliamentary attention. In the absence of a need to play adversarial politics, policymakers identify and follow very different rules based on two considerations:

1. The motive to act. In an adversarial arena, there is a high incentive to compete with your opponents to maintain an electoral edge. In a bureaucratic arena, there is a higher incentive to seek consensus and bargain to produce policy outcomes that many actors can support.
2. The need to appear competent but be pragmatic. In a high profile arena, parties compete to present the strongest image of governing competence, which requires ministers to pretend to be in control of all relevant government business. In a bureaucratic arena, they recognise the limits to their power and seek pragmatic ways to delegate responsibility.

The more enduring contribution from the ‘policy communities’ literature relates to a much wider argument about the limits to policymaking power and the need for policymakers to find pragmatic solutions to those restrictions. The limits to ministerial power relate primarily to two considerations: (1) bounded rationality, and (2) the constraints provided by policymaking environments, or the overall context in which policy takes place (Simon, 1976; Cairney and Weible, 2017). Put simply, policymakers can only pay attention to a tiny proportion of issues for which they are responsible (Baumgartner and Jones, 2009), and their environment consists of a series of factors that limit their control of policy outcomes (Heikkila and Cairney, 2017):

1. Actors. The policy environment contains many policymakers and influencers spread across many levels or types of government (or many ‘venues’).
2. Institutions. Each venue exhibits distinctive practices because it contains a collection of informal and formal rules that guide behaviour. Formal rules include constitutions or other laws prescribing conduct. Informal rules are harder to identify but no less important (Ostrom, 2007). Policymakers ‘inherit’ these institutions when they enter office (Rose, 1990).
3. Networks. Each venue exhibits relationships between the policymakers with formal responsibility and the actors with informal influence. The latter, described by Jordan et al. (2004) as ‘pressure participants’, include interest groups and businesses but, in multi-level systems, government bodies in one level also become pressure participants in others.
4. Ideas. Different government departments, or other national and subnational venues, contain distinct ways of thinking about policy problems, which can determine the attention they receive and the solutions that seem feasible. Ingrained ways of thinking – described variously as core beliefs, paradigms, hegemons, or monopolies of understanding – are often taken for granted in their own venues.
5. Socioeconomic conditions and events. Policymakers need to take into account many conditions that often appear to be out of their control, including a political system’s geography, demography, and economy. These conditions also help to create unpredictable events such as environmental or political crises.

To all intents and purposes, Richardson and Jordan (1979) identified the pervasiveness of policy communities in that context of bounded rationality and policymaking environments. To do so, they outlined the logic of policy ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I “Closed” bureaucratic-democratic regimes
• Part II “Open” democratic-popular regimes
• Part III “Closed” one-party authoritarian regimes
• Part IV “Open” electorally competitive authoritarian regimes
• Conclusion
• Index