Analyzing Public Policy

Peter John

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136486418
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The fully revised and updated new edition of this textbook continues to provide the most accessible overview of the main approaches in the study of public policy. It seeks to review the most common and widely used frameworks in the study of policy analysis:

• 
  
  

• institutions
• groups and networks
• society and the economy
• individual interests
• ideas.

The book explains each one, offers constructive criticisms and explores their claims in the light of a variety of American, British and European examples.

Arguing that no one framework offers a comprehensive explanation of public policy; John suggests a synthesis based on different aspects of the approaches, introducing concepts/approaches of advocacy coalitions, punctuated equilibrium and evolution as more effective ways to understand public policy.

Combining both a clear summary of debates in public policy and a new and original approach to the subject, this book remains essential reading for students of public policy and policy analysis.

1 The study of public policy

The challenge of the policy-orientated approach

The study of politics is not just about elections, parties, and the behavior of politicians: it includes a wide range of public decisions. In democratic political systems, public office holders make choices about such diverse matters as the allocation of budgets, the enforcement of laws, and the introduction of new technologies. Then key personnel from the public and private sectors seek to influence these decisions and help carry them out. Even though most of these activities pass unnoticed by the media and the general public, the policies governments produce are probably more significant for ordinary citizens than the effervescence of much political debate. While highly profiled subjects, such as stories of political corruption, the personalities of political leaders, and changes in opinion polls, are important aspects of contemporary political life and deserve attention, citizens are more likely to be affected by such prosaic matters as the quality of education in schools, the performance of the economy, the efficiency of the public healthcare system, and the state of the sewage disposal infrastructure. Even though the activities of political leaders have meaning and significance in their own right, they need to achieve outcomes that the general public cares about.

Research on public policy seeks to explain how decision makers, working within or close to the machinery of government and other political institutions, produce public actions that are intended to have an impact outside the political system. The subject focuses on the decisions that generate outputs, such as transportation policies, the management of a public health service, the administration of a school system, and the organization of a defense force. No less important is how these decisions produce intended or unintended changes outside the formal political system, such as the effective use of transportation, rising levels of health, good educational performance, and effective defense in wartime—what are sometimes called policy outcomes. Researchers in public policy aim to explain how public decision making works, why societies get the policies they do, and why policy outputs and outcomes differ from place to place and across time.

The field of public policy encompasses the operation of the political system as a whole, whether in the neighborhood, city, nation-state, or international society—or across these arenas. That is public policy's main contribution to political science. A policy-orientated approach examines public decision making from the viewpoint of what concrete actions come out of the political realm. It considers how each element in policy making can cause a particular output and outcome. Public policy researchers study decision making in a policy sector or subgovernment, such as agriculture or energy, and observe the differences and similarities between these areas of activity and others. Each sector has all of the elements of a political system in miniature. It has identifiable participants: interest group representatives, bureaucrats, elected politicians, lobbyists, experts, and the interested general public. Even though the participants operate within complex institutional structures of voting systems, legislatures, courts, bureaucracies, and public agencies, as they negotiate and seek influence in various arenas and territorial levels, they usually relate to one principal field of activity. Thus one of the purposes of the policy-orientated approach is to sharpen up the analysis of politics by examining the links between decision makers as they negotiate with each other and seek influence over public actions that have consequences outside politics.

Because of the breadth and depth of policy studies, the subject has the capability to transform both the topics and the methods of political science. The focus is less on discrete fields of political activity, often occurring within political institutions. Public policy scholars pay particular attention to the links between different decision makers, the many people and organizations concerned with public policy, whether in public or private bodies. Because public policy crosscuts many aspects of politics, the task of explaining decision making requires theories that connect such diverse activities. The same theory needs to cope with such contrasting activities as the salience of public opinion, the operation of the legislature, and the detailed application of public legislation. In order to capture the scope of the subject and the varying types of activity, analysts of public policy often adopt a more open and multidisciplinary approach to their subject than other political scientists. To theorize about policy making, writers use insights from sociology, the study of organizations, management sciences, economics, law, and psychology, as well as specialist knowledge from their policy sector, whether it is, for example, housing studies, criminology, or educational research. Policy-orientated research uses methods attuned to the highly variable relationships that occur within the decision-making process. For example, network analysis, the study of links between individuals and organizations (see chapter 4), is well placed to understand the complexity of policy making. While there are many difficulties that arise from studying the complex pattern of relationships between the decision makers, groups, and publics, the potential is for a richer account of political life than more discrete and institutionally defined research topics can offer, such as studies of voting behavior or political attitudes, and is much broader than studies of the internal management of public organizations.

The origins of the subdiscipline

The neglect of the study of public policy in political science was partly due to the dominance of the North American behavioral social science. Scholars in the US—and many in Europe—tended to examine readily observable phenomena, such as voting in legislatures and party strategies to win elections, usually the inputs of the political system. With their concern to study easily measurable behavior, researchers isolated the sociological and cultural determinants of voting, party systems, and the organization of political parties, and assumed these phenomena reflect the political traditions of each country, such as the experience of war or the progress of economic modernization. Behavioral social science sought to understand the particular constellations of social structures that produce the form of voting, interest group interaction, or type of party system under study. The political system was usually looked at as part of a chain of events leading from social change to political behavior. With some notable exceptions (for example, Lasswell 1951), policy appeared as a separate and less important activity occurring at the end of the process.

The belief that the discipline of political science left out the most significant aspects of political life created modern policy studies. It is true that the study of public administration had always been important. In the UK, for example, scholars had long examined the structure of the civil service and the means whereby Parliament sought to scrutinize the executive (for example, Chester and Bowring 1962, Walkland 1968). There had also been much research into the organization of local government (for example, Robson 1948). In the United States of America too, there had been a long and productive tradition of studying public administration, particularly after those in the reform movement of the early years of the twentieth century proposed neutral administrative structures to overcome the excesses of party politics. Yet these studies tended to concentrate on the procedures of administration rather than on the practice of policy making in sectors like agriculture or health. Traditional institutionalists investigated the details of administrative decisions, but they were more concerned with the search for political accountability and the efficiency of the procedures of government than in explaining decision making. Writers rarely mentioned the word policy. Even the quantitative study of public administration is more concerned with the internal practices of bureaucracies rather than decision making generally. Partly as a result of this gap, scholars found a need for a subdiscipline or field of research to comprehend the totality of public decision making and to investigate the complex links between inchoate public demands and detailed implementation of policy choices.

It is no coincidence that the study of public policy emerged at the same time as most Western states expanded the scope of their responsibilities. While the twentieth century saw the rapid expansion in the range of activities undertaken by governments and an acceleration of the proportion of national income taken up by taxes and government expenditure, the 1960s was the period when the rate of growth accelerated. In the late nineteenth century the state had taken responsibility for many public goods that the market could not effectively provide, such as sanitation and public health. After 1945, it extended its reach to economic policy and to combating unemployment. But it was in the 1960s that public action expanded to encompass antipoverty programs, efforts to combat racial discrimination, policies to improve public healthcare, and many other measures. The US, for example, started to emulate western European states by introducing and implementing some far-reaching social policies. Lyndon Johnson, after he was elected president in 1964, persuaded Congress to introduce the Great Society programs and the War on Poverty. Other Western states also increased public expenditure and strove to ameliorate public problems, such as urban deprivation and racial disadvantage.

The new policies stimulated political scientists to study aspects of politics that were hitherto thought to be unimportant, such as the new agencies and procedures for administering these programs. Moreover, for a time social policy issues dominated electoral, presidential, and legislative politics in the US. In the 1960s, it became more plausible to believe that public action could solve perennial social problems, a view that reflected the optimism and confidence of the decade. Just as US governments could put human beings in space, so they thought they could eliminate social problems. The optimism affected the social sciences and convinced scholars that research could contribute to the success of public action. Part of the stimulus for the policy-orientated approach was the belief that all of the disciplines of the social sciences could contribute to the grand project of socially aware public intervention. Governments became eager to deploy the insights of research when designing responses to public problems. As a result, in the US and later in Europe, policy-orientated research institutes were established, and the employment of political scientists in government became fashionable. Research councils and professional associations sponsored conferences and publications on policy matters (Parsons 1995: 28). The new subdiscipline of public policy came into being.

Even though the interest in the Great Society programs waned after the election of President Nixon in 1968, the association of politics with policy grew in the 1970s and 1980s, partly because experts and advocates got more involved with decision making and took a more prominent public role. If the optimism stimulated the initial involvement of political scientists in public policy studies, it was the perceived failure of many 1960s programs that led to a more critical and analytical approach. The conventional wisdom about the policies of the 1960s was that, in spite of all the effort and money that went into them, they did not achieve their objectives. These programs were even supposed to have adverse effects, often the opposite of their original intentions (Moynihan 1969). In response, public policy researchers wanted to know why these policies failed, and in order to do that they had to devise models and theories of the policy process. Even though some of the self-confidence of public policy researchers waned in the 1970s and 1980s, interest in the subject grew largely because it is so hard to solve public problems. The challenge of explaining policy failure was intellectually stimulating even though it was politically depressing.

Reflecting the importance of the subdiscipline, mainstream political science research itself has become more policy orientated. For example, the study of elections has established that the public votes consistently on policy matters rather than just according to party affiliations and class loyalties (Heath et al. 1985, Clarke et al. 2009). The policy role of Parliament is examined in several studies (for example, Judge 1990). The US Congress is the subject of many investigations of its policy-making machinery and the way it processes public issues (for example, Cox and McCubbins 2005). The European Union, a topic that was formerly the purview of lawyers and institutionalists, has become the object of the policy-orientated approach (for example, Richardson 1996, Wallace et al. 2010). The Union has a highly decentralized and fragmented set of decision-making procedures that public policy analysis is well placed to analyze. The interest in policy has grown, as represented by journals (for example, the European Journal of Public Policy, the Journal of Public Policy and the Policy Studies Journal), the numbers of books with the word policy in the title, and textbooks with the mandatory chapter on the topic—as well as many courses, particularly at postgraduate level.

Today the interest in public policy extends from the practitioner world of government and public agencies to subject specialist areas, such as studies of crime and health, and across to the academic discipline of political science. Governments still implement policies but do not know enough about why they are successful or fail. Bureaucrats and experts struggle to understand the complexity of the decision-making arenas they are involved with. Political scientists are trying to retreat from their ivory towers of abstract theory to show the relevance of politics and decision making for the wider society—the impact agenda.

Policy sectors

The concept of policy weakens some of the certainties in the discipline of political science. The variability of policy making challenges the unitary character of modern states and other political organizations, an assumption upon which much of political science rests, particularly in Europe with its strong national governing structures. National-level analysis predominates even in federal countries, such as analysis of Congress and the president in the US. Once researchers relax the assumption of a singular or unitary political system, they can observe the different kinds of political actors and institutions in a policy area in all their complexity. The type of issues, the pattern of bargains, and structures of opportunities and constraints within each sector create particular types of politics that may or may not resemble those implied by national political traditions and constitutional norms, and may extend across institutions to other levels of governance at the subnational level or in supranational institutions. One key claim of policy studies is that the relative influence of politicians, bureaucrats, and interest group representatives differs according to the sector of activity, whether it be, for example, health, education, or transportation. Each policy sector varies by the extent to which actors cooperate to achieve their goals. The policy sectors are also different in the way decision makers can achieve outcomes and whether success or failure of a policy feeds back into the rest of the political world. The policy-orientated approach shows that the practice of decision making, the balance of power, the type of outputs, the likelihood of policy success, and the specific beneficiaries are often a function of the type of activity public action seeks to regulate. For example, health policy produces a certain type of relationship between professionals and politicians because of the specialized and technical nature of healthcare. Politicians find it very hard to regulate medicine because they lack expert information, something they seek to overcome, often by reforming the institutional and legal framework.

Policy sectors vary according to the instruments and resources available to decision makers. Instruments, for example, can have a variety of forms: they can be legal, that is, laws that compel people and organizations to do things; financial, allocating funds to encourage or penalize organizations and people; institutional, creating rules to facilitate coordination and effective decision making; organizational, applying bureaucratic power to solve problems; informational in transmitting encouraging signals to individuals and organizations; or the property of a network that allows those at the center to persuade others to achieve its goals (Hood 1986, Hood and Margetts 2007, John 2011). Tools to manage the environment are very different from those used for agriculture, for example. The environment is difficult to legislate for because it is harder to influence outcomes. Because of the size of the problem, the environment involves many more organizations and participants. There are contrasting local, national, and supranational dimensions to environmental problems. In contrast, agriculture involves a smaller number of interest group representatives, mainly farmers and representatives from the agricultural industry (although other groups, such as environmentalists and health professionals, are becoming much more important in recent years). It is relatively easy to apply financial instruments to achieve limited policy goals, such as encouraging the cultivation of more land and protecting rural incomes (though farming problems are now much less easy to solve with crises of overproduction, poor hygiene, and the growing concerns about the wider environment).

The breakthrough in the study of public policy was Lowi's 1964 and 1972 articles that distinguish between different types of policy making. Lowi distinguishes between distributive politics of subsidies and tariffs, which is characterized by logrolling (interest groups trading-off costs and benefits with each other) and a passive form of executive leadership; the constituency politics of boundary changes and electoral organization; regulatory politics, such as the control of competition; and redistributive politics, which is more ideological in character, producing policies like progressive income taxes. The type of activity affects how groups and branches of government interact, thus creating the four subsystems. Lowi's formulation challenges writers who argue that US policy making changed with the evolution of its political system, from the unregulated politics before the 1930s to the federal intervention of the New Deal. Lowi argues that several types of politics, all involving different relationships between the different levels of government, coexist at the same time.

Several writers doubt the distinctions Lowi proposes and detect a more messy reality. There is no empirical verification of his classification, partly because no one can agree on what counts as the various types of policy making and the typology is difficult to apply (Heidenheimer 1985). Some writers believe Lowi's scheme better describes types of democratic systems and forms of elite behavior rather than explaining variation according to policy sector (Peters et al. 1977). Peters et al. find that consociational and depoliticized democracies (regimes characterized by long-term coalition politics) produce regulative and redistributive policies. More fragmented systems have distributive policies. Countries with homogenous political cultures and competitive elites, such as those with two-party systems, formulate regulatory policies. Lowi's scheme seems better able to describe differences across countries rather than within them.

However, it is not the exact application of Lowi's typology that is important. What is crucial is his argument that each policy sector should be studied in its own right and has a unique politics of its own, and this is what triggered a different approach to studying public decision making. So today, instead of books about education, crime, and the economy being written solely by educationalists, criminologists, and economists, students of public policy also write books on these topics, such as on the politics of education, the public agenda of crime, and the electoral constraints about managing the economy (for example, Klein 2006, Baggott 2007). It is the characteristics of decision making and the impact of political factors, such as the prospect for reelection on the behavior of incumbents,...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgments to the second edition
• Acknowledgments to the first edition
• 1 The study of public policy
• 2 Stages
• 3 Institutions
• 4 Groups and networks
• 5 Exogenous determinants
• 6 Rational actors
• 7 Ideas
• 8 A synthesis
• 9 Conclusion
• Glossary
• References
• Index