The Public Policy Theory Primer

Kevin B. Smith, Christopher Larimer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429973987
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Public policy is a broad and interdisciplinary area of study and research in the field tends to reflect this. Yet for those teaching and studying public policy, the disjointed nature of the field can be confusing and cumbersome. This text provides a consistent and coherent framework for uniting the field of public policy. Authors Kevin B. Smith and Christopher W. Larimer offer an organized and comprehensive overview of the core questions and concepts, major theoretical frameworks, primary methodological approaches, and key controversies and debates in each subfield of policy studies from the policy process and policy analysis to program evaluation and policy implementation. The third edition has been updated throughout to include the latest scholarship and approaches in the field, including new and expanded coverage of behavioral economics, the narrative policy framework, Fourth Generation implementation studies, the policy regime approach, field experiments, and the debate of program versus policy implementation studies. Now with an appendix of sample comprehensive exam questions, The Public Policy Theory Primer remains an indispensable text for the systematic study of public policy.

CHAPTER 1

Public Policy as a Concept and a Field (or Fields) of Study

The field of public policy studies is sort of like the Loch Ness Monster: a lot of people believe in it even though no one is really sure it exists. Perhaps this is because the study of public policy is concentrated in no single academic discipline, has no defining research question, is oriented toward no fundamental problem, has no unifying theory or conceptual framework, and employs no unique methods or analytical tools. As the introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Public Policy puts it, the study of public policy is “a mood more than a science, a loosely organized body of precepts and positions rather than a tightly integrated body of systematic knowledge, more art and craft than a genuine ‘science’” (Goodin, Rein, and Moran 2006, 5). Even the field’s best-known scholars can be openly skeptical of its coherence; Ken Meier once described policy research as “65 variables explaining 25 cases” (Meier 2009, 9).

Despite this ambiguity, there is no question that a lot of people are studying public policy. Public policy courses are undergraduate curriculum standards in fields such as political science, public administration, and economics. Indeed, prestigious institutions such as Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy offer graduate programs in policy studies. There are professional societies for the study of public policy (e.g., the Policy Studies Organization, the Society for the Policy Sciences) and entire academic journals devoted to promoting and disseminating the best of academic public policy scholarship (e.g., Policy Studies Journal, Policy Science, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management). Outside academia, thousands of professional students of public policy—typically called policy analysts—are scattered throughout all levels of government, with some agencies (e.g., the Congressional Budget Office, the Government Accountability Office, state-level legislative reference bureaus) focusing almost exclusively on studying public policy. Outside government, there are plenty of think tanks, interest groups, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and private sector consulting firms producing cost-benefit analyses, program evaluations, decision-making methods, and alternate public policy options on everything from watersheds in Colorado to counterterrorism strategies in the Middle East. And none of this is limited to the United States; studying public policy is a global activity and has been for some time (Blume, Scott, and Pirog 2014, S33).

Is there anything that ties all of this together? Is there some common thread that unites such a varied group of people and activities? In short, is there really such a thing as a distinct and definable field that can be called public policy studies? The primary purpose of this book is to seek an answer to these questions. The goal is not just to provide an overview of how policy is studied and why, or to tour the major conceptual models and methodologies commonly employed in the study of public policy, though we hope to do both in what follows. The real core of the task we have set ourselves is to help readers draw a reasoned conclusion about the nature, and future, of the field of public policy studies.

A central difficulty for the beginning (and often the experienced) student of public policy is gaining just this sort of coherent perspective on and orientation to the field. It is so all-encompassing, in terms of both its potential subject matter and its promiscuous attachments to wildly different academic disciplines, that it seems less a noun (“I study policy”) and more an adjective (“I am a policy economist” or “I am a policy political scientist”). Studying public policy takes so many forms, from so many different perspectives, that stitching its constituents into an overall systematic pattern is an undeniably daunting task. Nonetheless, that is the goal of this book. In what follows, we claim that it is possible to integrate the many strands into a coherent whole and to present a systematic picture of a field that is at least as much a science as it is an art or a craft.

Defining Public Policy

A logical place to begin is to establish what the field is actually studying. That sounds simple enough, but public policy is maddeningly difficult to pin down. Public policy is in one sense like pornography. As US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously commented in his concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), definitively defining hard-core pornography might be nigh impossible, “but I know it when I see it.” Public policy is like that: an intuitive concept that is difficult to define precisely.

A small academic industry has dedicated itself to defining public policy. Some definitions are broad. Policy is “whatever governments choose to do or not to do” (Dye 1987, 1); “the relationship of a governmental unit to its environment” (Eyestone 1971, 18); or “the actions, objectives, and pronouncements of governments on particular matters, the steps they take (or fail to take) to implement them, and the explanations they give for what happens (or does not happen)” (Wilson 2006, 154). Such definitions are accurate in the sense that they cover pretty much everything that might conceivably be considered public policy, but are so general that they do little to convey any idea of what makes policy studies different from political science, welfare economics, or public administration. They lay down no clear boundary to isolate the intellectual turf of the policy scholar and differentiate it from, say, the political scientist who studies institutions or even voting behavior (what elected governments choose to do or not to do is, after all, ultimately tied to the ballot box).

Other definitions are narrower. James Anderson’s widely used undergraduate textbook, for example, defines policy as a “purposive course of action or inaction undertaken by an actor or set of actors in dealing with a problem or matter of concern” (1994, 5). This definition implies a distinguishing set of characteristics for public policy. Policy is not random but purposive and goal oriented; public policy is made by public authorities; public policy consists of patterns of actions taken over time; public policy is a product of demand, a government-directed course of action in response to pressure about some perceived problem; public policy can be positive (a deliberately purposive action) or negative (a deliberately purposive decision not to take action). Others seek to extract common characteristics by isolating common elements of broader definitions. Theodoulou (1995, 1–9) used this approach and ended up with a list that overlaps considerably with Anderson’s, but she also added that public policy has distinct purposes: resolving conflict over scarce resources, regulating behavior, motivating collective action, protecting rights, and directing benefits toward the public interest.

Defining public policy by trying to distill a set of characteristics at the core of the underlying concept, as Anderson and Theodoulou have done, is no doubt a useful exercise. However, this sort of approach is vulnerable to the criticism that it simply takes a different route to end up at the same conceptual destination of the more succinct “it’s what government does.” The list of characteristics becomes so long that taken together they still add up to the “everything and nothing” approach captured more succinctly by Dye and Eyestone. A purposive course of action or inaction to address a problem or matter of concern covers a lot of ground.

The bottom line is that there is no precise and universal definition of public policy, nor is it likely such a definition will be conceived in the foreseeable future. Instead, there is general agreement that public policy includes the process of making choices, the actions associated with operationalizing those choices, and the outputs and outcomes produced by those actions; that what makes public policy “public” is that choices or actions are backed by the coercive powers of the state; and that, at its core, public policy is a response to a perceived problem (Birkland 2014).

Consensus on generalities, though, does not automatically provide conceptual specifics. The lack of agreement on what policy is and thus what policy scholars are actually studying is a key reason why the field is so intellectually fractured. As Bobrow and Dryzek put it, policy studies is “a babel of tongues in which participants talk past rather than to one another” (1987, 4). This is not surprising. If we cannot agree on what we study, it is difficult to talk about it coherently. The fact that we cannot universally define the concept public policy, however, does not mean we cannot define the field (or fields) of policy studies.

Defining the Field(s) of Public Policy Studies

The lack of a universal definition means students of public policy are free to adopt the definition that makes the most sense for their own purposes without worrying too much that other policy scholars seem to be studying something very different. From this perspective there is not a field of public policy studies; there are fields—plural—of public policy studies. This plurality is not necessarily a bad thing. For one thing, it frees the study of public policy from the insular intellectual silos that constitute traditional academic disciplines. Policy scholars can easily jump fences, picking whatever disciplinary pasture seems most suited to the issue or question at hand. The policy sciences have been described as “a-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary,” with scholars adopting and adapting theories and methods from multiple fields depending on what works best for the question at hand (Pielke 2004, 216).

Instead of defining a single concept as the core focus of different activities, then, perhaps it is better to define the field (or fields) rather than the core concept. Some may argue that this restates the definitional problem rather than solving it. The field of policy studies, for example, has been defined as “any research that relates to or promotes the public interest” (Palumbo 1981, 8). Such a broad definition makes the field of policy studies as vague and general as the concept of public policy appears to be. Definitions of the “policy sciences”—for our purposes, a synonym for “policy studies”—include the “application of knowledge and rationality to perceived social problems” (Dror 1968, 49) and “an umbrella term describing a broad-gauge intellectual approach applied to the examination of societally critical problems” (deLeon 1988, 219). From the field-level perspective, then, the study of public policy is about identifying important societal problems that presumably require government action to be effectively addressed, formulating solutions to those problems, and assessing the impact of those solutions on the target problem (deLeon 2006).

Under this general umbrella is a range of subfields that have developed quite independently of each other. These include policy evaluation, policy analysis, and policy process. Policy evaluation seeks to systematically assess “the consequences of what governments do and say” (Dubnick and Bardes 1983, 203). Policy evaluation is typically an ex post undertaking that uses a wide range of methods to identify and isolate a causal relationship between a policy or a program and an outcome of interest (Mohr 1995). The fundamental question in policy evaluation is empirical: What have we done?

Whereas policy evaluation is largely an empirical exercise, policy analysis is more normative. Policy analysis focuses on ex ante questions. The most fundamental of these is: What should we do? The object is to determine the best policy for public authorities to adopt to address a given problem or issue of concern (Weimer 2009). The challenge for policy analysis is coming up with some comparative yardstick to measure what is “best.” Efficiency and effectiveness, for example, are both defensible criteria for judging what is, or is not, the best policy to address a particular problem or issue of concern. Yet the most efficient policy is not necessarily the most effective, and vice versa.

If policy evaluation asks questions about what we have done, and policy analysis asks questions about what we should do, policy process research is focused on the how and why of policymaking. Those who study policy process are interested in finding out why governments pay attention to some problems and not others (agenda setting), why policy changes or remains stable across time, how individuals and groups affect policy, and where policy comes from.

Imposing organization and order on the field of policy studies through a taxonomy of its constituent subfields such as policy analysis, policy evaluation, and policy process can in one sense lead us back to the definitional dead ends we found when trying to squeeze specificity and clarity out of the underlying concept of public policy. Most of these fields have an intellectual history that mimics the definitional struggles surrounding the concept of public policy. Policy analysis, for example, has been defined as “a means of synthesizing information including research results to produce a format for policy decisions” (Williams 1971, xi) and as “an applied social science discipline which uses multiple methods of inquiry to produce and transform policy-relevant information that may be utilized in political settings to resolve policy problems” (Dunn 1981, ix). Parsing out such definitions leads either to loopholes (shouldn’t the definition say something about who is using the information, and for what purposes? See Weimer and Vining 2005, 24) or to vacuous generalities (policy analysis covers everything dealing with government decision making).

This approach, however, does provide at least one clear advantage. By carving the field into broad, multidisciplinary orientations such as policy or program evaluation, policy analysis, and policy process, we are able to identify within each some roughly coherent framework. If nothing else, this approach clarifies a series of research questions central to the field of public policy studies as a whole: How do public authorities decide what problems or issues to pay attention to? How does government decide what to do about those problems? What values should be used to determine the “best” government response to a particular problem or matter of concern? What do government actions intend to achieve? Have those goals been achieved? If so, to what extent? If not, why not? These questions systematically sort and organize different policy subfields such as policy process (the first two questions), policy analysis (the second two questions), and policy evaluation (the last three questions). And within each of these particular orientations identifiable conceptual frameworks have been either constructed or appropriated to provide systematic answers to the underlying questions. Even accepting the difficulties in defining the concept of public policy, most would agree that these are important questions and finding the answers is important, both to improve the lot of society and to better understand the human condition generally.

Although it is not immediately clear what connects the work of a political scientist studying the formation of policy subsystem coalitions to, say, a program evaluator running randomized field trials on job training programs, those connections definitely exist. For one thing, most (if not all) of the subfields under the policy studies umbrella trace back to a common historical root. There may be fields (plural) of policy studies rather than a field (singular), but the original intent was to till all with a common intellectual plow.

The Policy Sciences: A Very Short History of the Field of Policy Studies

Though its historical origins can be legitimately debated, most scholars consider the field of public policy studies to be a fairly recent development. Public administration, economics, and political science consider their respective policy orientations to be no more than a century old. Many claim a lineage of less than half of that. Some political scientists attribute systematic policy analysis to the development and adoption of cost-benefit analyses by the federal government (mostly for water projects) in the 1930s (Fuguitt and Wilcox 1999, 1–5). Others trace the roots of policy analysis back no further than the 1960s (Radin 1997).

Whereas any claim to identify the absolute beginning of the field of public policy studies should be taken with a grain of salt, most histories converge on a roughly common starting point. That starting point is Harold Lasswell, who laid down a grand vision of what he called the “policy sciences” in the middle of the twentieth century. Even though his vision has been at best imperfectly realized, most of the various policy orientations discussed thus far share Lasswell as a common branch in their intellectual family trees.

Lasswell’s view of the policy sciences was in some ways a vision of what political science should become (see Lasswell 1951a, 1956). Yet though he gave political science a central place in the policy sciences, his vision was anything but parochial. The policy sciences were to draw from all the social sciences, law, and other disciplines. The idea of the policy sciences was an outgrowth not just of Lasswell’s academic interests but also of his practical experience in government. He was one of a number of high-profile social scientists who helped government formulate policy during World War II. At the time, Allied governments—particularly the United Kingdom and the United States—drafted experts from a wide range of academic fields to apply their knowledge, with the aim of helping to more effectively prosecute the war. Out of such activities was born a more rigorous and often quantitative approach to studying and making policy decisions. Lasswell was one of these experts drafted into government service. His expertise was in propaganda—he wrote his dissertation on the topic—and during the war he served as the chief of the Experimental Division for the Study of War-Time Communications. This experience helped solidify Lasswell’s idea that a new field should be developed to better connect the knowledge and expertise of the social sciences to the practical world of politics and policymaking.

Lasswell’s vision of the policy sciences, and of the policy scientist, was expanded and refined in a series of publications between the 1940s and his death in 1978. The foundational article, “The Policy Orientation,” was published in an edited volume in 1951. Here Lasswell attempted to lay out the goals, methods, and purposes of the policy sciences. He began with a clear(ish) notion of the concept of public policy, which he viewed generically as “the most important choices made in organized or in private life” (1951b, 5). In his view, then, public policy was the response to the most important choices faced by government. The policy sciences would be the discipline that was developed to clarify and inform those choices and to assess their ultimate impact. Specifically, Lasswell laid out the following distinguishing characteristics of the policy sciences:

• Problem oriented. The policy sciences were defined by their focus on the major problems an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Illustrations
• Chapter 1: Public Policy as a Concept and a Field (or Fields) of Study
• Chapter 2: Does Politics Cause Policy? Does Policy Cause Politics?
• Chapter 3: Who Makes Decisions? How Do They Make Decisions? Actors and Institutions
• Chapter 4: Whose Values? Policy Design
• Chapter 5: Where Does Policy Come From? The Policy Process
• Chapter 6: What Should We Do? The Field of Policy Analysis
• Chapter 7: What Have We Done? Impact Analysis and Program Evaluation
• Chapter 8: How Does It Work? Policy Implementation
• Chapter 9: New Directions in Policy Research
• Chapter 10: Do the Policy Sciences Exist?
• Appendix: Questions for Discussion or Comprehensive Exam Prep
• References
• Index