Policy Analysis in the United States

John A. Hird, Hird, John A., John A. Hird

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781447346012
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Policy Analysis in the United States brings together contributions from some of the world's leading scholars and practitioners of public policy analysis including Beryl Radin, David Weimer, Rebecca Maynard, Laurence Lynn, and Guy Peters.

This volume represents an indispensable companion to other volumes in the International Library of Policy Analysis series, enabling scholars to compare cross-nationally concepts and practices of public policy analysis in the media, sub-national governments, and many more institutional settings.

The volume represents an invaluable contribution to public policy analysis and can be used widely in teaching at both graduate and undergraduate levels in schools of public affairs and public policy as well as in comparative politics and policy.

Part One

History, styles, and methods of policy analysis in the United States

ONE

Policy analysis in the United States

David L. Weimer

A narrow definition of policy analysis as a professional activity emphasizes client orientation and public perspective: ‘policy analysis is client-oriented advice relevant to public decisions and informed by social values’ (Weimer and Vining 2011, p 24). A full assessment of the role of policy analysis in the United States requires a somewhat broader definition that encompasses policy research by relaxing the requirement that the analysis be for a specific individual or institutional client. So, for purposes of this review, I define policy analysis as professionally provided advice relevant to public decisions and informed by social values. In addition to government employees who occupy positions specifically labeled as policy analyst, I include other public officials, such as public managers, who devote some of their professional time to policy analysis, as well as persons in the for- and nonprofit sectors whose professional duties involve providing policy-relevant advice. Under this definition many people in the United States work as policy analysts. What factors have shaped the emergence of policy analysis as a common professional activity in public life?¹

In this introductory chapter, I identify what I believe to be the four primary sources of demand for policy analysis in the United States: first, evidence-based support for reform (or advocacy); second, specialized expertise to inform legislative and executive decisions; third, a response to the increasing scope and complexity of government involvement in society; and fourth, a mechanism for politicians to discipline themselves and others from pursuing politically attractive policies that do not promote the public interest. For each of these sources of demand I briefly discuss its historical roots and sketch its implications for contemporary practice. I also note the incentives these demands have created for higher education to produce people with relevant policy-analytic skills.

Demand arising from the desire for reform (advocacy)

The United States has a plethora of nonprofit organizations with missions to bring evidence to bear in specific policy areas or in support of various governmental ‘reforms.’ As one person’s desired reform may be another person’s feared folly, perhaps advocacy would be a better term. Nonetheless, in retrospect, I believe that reform is the appropriate term for the first such organizations, the Municipal Research Bureaus, the first American ‘think tanks.’ Although reform remains a generally appropriate description of the goals of contemporary think thanks, increasing ideological differentiation sometimes brings competing reforms into conflict.

By the beginning of the 20th Century, the Progressive movement had scored a number of electoral victories in major U.S. cities. However, these victories were often reversed in subsequent elections by local political machines and consequently did not result in lasting improvements in terms of reduced corruption in, and increased efficiency of, municipal governments. An alternative approach, proposed by progressive reformers and funded originally by wealthy philanthropists, was the creation of organizations to gather data about municipal services and propose changes to operations that would make them more efficient and less prone to corruption.

The first such organization, financed by the likes of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, was founded in 1906 in New York (Schacter 1995). It became the model for similar organizations in other cities (Gill 1944; Schacter 2002). Within 10 years, the model had spread to 21 major cities under names such as the Citizens’ Bureau in Milwaukee, the Civic Federation in Chicago, and the Survey Commission in Atlantic City (Gill 1944). A primary tool of the bureaus was the systematic collection of data about the operation and organization of city governments through ‘surveys,’ which have been described as the empirical basis for the emerging field of public administration (Bertelli and Lynn 2006). These surveys were extensive. For example, the newly created Rochester Bureau of Municipal Research, supported by George Eastman and other local philanthropists, commissioned the New York Bureau of Municipal Research to do a survey of the City of Rochester government. The resulting report of 546 pages was packed with facts about municipal operations and recommendations to support its stated goals: ‘1. To get things done for the community through cooperation with persons who are in office, by increasing efficiency and eliminating waste. 2. To serve as an independent non-partisan agency for keeping citizens informed about the city’s business’ (New York Bureau of Municipal Research 1915).

The bureaus were certainly advocates for efficiency. However, they claimed that they were not trying to influence broad policy, but rather foreshadowing contemporary rhetoric about evidence-based policy making, that they were providing neutral facts and advice aimed at improving efficiency in the administration of policy. Nonetheless, advice about how to reorganize and staff municipal governments clearly meets the definition of policy analysis, both narrowly focused on operational issues and broadly focused on institutional design.

Further, ‘… while the bureau movement is based upon the fact-finding approach, bureaus must not be regarded as mere thinking machines. As the director of the Detroit agency has said: “The bureaus think, dream, consult, stimulate, educate, irritate and somehow change governmental outlook and public conscience of the city if they are good”’ (Gill 1944, p 37).

In addition to the spread of private municipal bureaus, a number of cities created their own units, usually called efficiency bureaus, to do research on city operations (Lee 2008). One of the earliest examples was a research agency established in Milwaukee by its socialist administration in 1910 (Gill 1944). The efficiency bureaus conducted studies similar to the surveys done by municipal bureaus and many evolved into the municipal offices that currently advise city officials on budgets and other fiscal matters.

Expanding the perspective beyond specific cities, a number of think tanks, now commonly defined as public policy research, analysis, and engagement organizations (McGann 2005), were created to provide research relevant to national policy. In 1916, the Brookings Institution began providing fact-based research relevant to national policy issues. Subsequently, a number of other think tanks were created, including the National Bureau of Economic Research in 1920, the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy in 1938, Resources for the Future in 1952, and the Urban Institute in 1968. The growth of think tanks in the United States has accelerated over the last 20 years with the total now exceeding 1,830 with almost 400 located in Washington, D.C. (McGann 2016, p 31).

Although many of the early think tanks were created at least in part to advocate for some type of reform, until the 1980s most of the prominent think tanks could be described as either universities without students or contract research organizations, with the former providing more policy research and the latter more policy analysis (in the narrow definition). However, since then a third type, the advocacy tank, has proliferated.

Advocacy tanks combine a strong policy, partisan or ideological bent with aggressive salesmanship and an effort to influence current policy debates. Advocacy tanks synthesize and put a distinctive ‘spin’ on existing research rather than carrying out original research. What may be lacking in scholarship is made up for in their accessibility to policymakers (Weaver 1989, p 567).

Advocacy tends to be along identifiable ideological lines (McGann 2005, pp 11–13): conservative (for example Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Manhattan Institute), libertarian (for example Cato Institute, Reason Foundation), center-Right (for example Center for Strategic and International Studies), centrist (for example Resources for the Future, National Bureau for Economic Research, Public Policy Institute of California), center-Left (for example Urban Institute, Brookings Institution), Left (for example Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Center for American Progress).

The growth and increased public and political prominence of think tanks have both positive and negative implications for policy analysis. On the positive side of the ledger, they provide venues for policy research and analysis more directly relevant to public policy issues than is often the case with academic policy research, which is usually driven by disciplinary rewards for generality rather than relevance to public policy decisions. Their sheer number also creates many opportunities for policy analysts to work outside of the constraints imposed by government employment. Their incentives to please donors and gain favorable media coverage encourage them to invest in translating research and analysis into information directly relevant to policy decisions and disseminating it widely. On the negative side of the ledger, ideological orientations not adequately disciplined by widely accepted research standards may undercut the credibility of analysis generally and lead to ‘dueling studies’ rather than a search for the best available answers to policy-relevant questions. Concern about the reaction of potential donors may also affect think tank agendas. It has even been suggested that the dominance of think tanks at the ‘crossroads of the academic, political, economic, and media spheres’ has ‘undermined the value of independently produced knowledge … by institutionalizing a mode of intellectual practice that relegates its producers to the margins of public and political life’ (Medvetz 2012, p 7). However one tallies the ledger, think tanks certainly play an important role in policy analysis in the contemporary United States.

Demand arising from the need for expertise

From its very beginning, the executive branch of the federal government sought advice from committees of citizens—President Washington convened the Whiskey Rebellion Commission, among others, to supplement the meager capacity of the fledgling executive branch for gathering and applying information to policy problems (Smith 1992, p 14). As early as 1842, Congress attempted to limit expenditures on the numerous advisory committees that had been created, but use of advisory committees continued to grow in step with the expanding role played by the federal government in the economy (Croley and Funk 1997). By the time the current framework requiring that advisory committee membership be balanced, their functioning transparent, and their durations limited was put in place by the Federal Advisory Committee Act (P.L. 92-463) in 1972, the federal government had almost 1,500 advisory committees. The number had fallen to approximately 800 by 1978 (Petracca 1986, p 85) but had grown to over 900 by 2008 (U.S. GAO (Government Accountability Office) 2008, p 1) and currently exceeds 1,000 (U.S. GSA [Government Services Administration] 2015).

A driving force for the use of advisory committees was the difficulty of maintaining specialized expertise within the bureaucracy, initially because of its limited capacity overall and later because civil service rules made hiring and firing more difficult and therefore less amenable to adding personnel with needed expertise quickly. The need for such expertise was especially urgent during wartime. In 1863, during the Civil War, Congress created the National Academy of Science at the request of President Lincoln to advise federal departments on scientific matters. The increasing demand for scientific expertise during World War I led to the creation of the National Research Council to provide administrative infrastructure for the National Academy of Science in 1916. Increasingly, the National Research Council, which now serves the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine, undertakes projects requested by Congress as well as by administrative agencies (Morgan and Peha 2003). These projects often involve the production of policy analyses that assess social problems and compare possible alternative policies for addressing them.

World War II created demand not just for expertise drawn directly from the natural sciences, but also for expertise on how to use scarce resources more efficiently both across and within organizations. This expertise, drawing on mathematics, statistics, and the new game theory, eventually became known as operations research. Motivated by the analytical successes of the British ‘Blackett’s circus’ during the Battle of Britain, operations research units were set up throughout the U.S. military (Fortun and Schweber 1993). They worked on topics ranging from intelligence questions, such as how to use serial numbers on captured equipment to estimate enemy rates of production (Champkin 2013), to operational issues, such as the size of convoys that would maximize the ratio of U-boat losses to merchant ship losses (Hitch 1953).

The U.S. military maintained capacity in operations research following the War. It also became the primary client for newly established contract research organizations such as the RAND Corporation. Analysts in the Pentagon and the RAND Corporation were resources for the implementation of Program Planning and Budgeting Systems (PPBS) in the Department of Defense, which focused attention on programs rather than categories of inputs. For example, rather than focusing budgeting on categories of expenditures, such as personnel and equipment aggregated across programs, PPBS sought to organize budgets by purposes, such as air defense or logistical support. It was initiated in 1961 by Secretary Robert McNamara, who had been an operations researcher during the War and later President of the Ford Motor Company. The apparent success of PPBS in the Defense Department led President Johnson in 1965 to ask all agency heads to implement it. It had at best modest success, largely because the circumstances that yielded benefits in the Defense Department, including analytical capacity, relevant information, and clear goals, generally were not present in most other federal agencies at the time (Wildavsky 1969). Nonetheless, failed efforts to implement PPBS and its successors, such as Zero-Based Budgeting during the Carter Administration, required the addition of technically trained personnel, some of whom outlasted these top-down initiatives and contributed to the development of analytical capacity within agencies in the longer run. (See also the chapter by Lynn in this volume.)

Several factors encouraged state and local governments to adopt PPBS (Harty 1971). The Ford Foundation funded the George Washington University State-Local Finances Project, which worked with five states, five counties, and five cities to assess the feasibility and desirability of adopting PPBS. This effort was subsequently supported by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and encouraged through incentives in federal legislation. As was the case at the federal level, these efforts generally did not implement the full PPBS model and appear to have produced modest improvements in budgeting processes but relatively little increase in general capacity in policy analysis (Harty 1971, Exhibit 1).

Another sort of expertise began to be demanded by the federal government in the late 1960s as those implementing President Johnson’s Great Society searched for ways to address poverty. Large-scale social experiments, with random assignment of participants into treatment and control groups, offered the possibility of assessing whether programs could produce desired outcomes. Beginning with the New Jersey Income Maintenance Experiment in 1968, federal agencies have funded contract research organizations to conduct over 240 major social experiments (Greenberg and Schroder 2004). These experiments require expertise in research design, implementation, and statistical analysis, within both the contracted organizations and the bureaus that conceive, select, fund, and monitor them. Beyond the specific information these experiments created, they also contributed to the general capacity of the federal government to do and support policy research.

The New Deal greatly expanded the role of the federal government in the economy, both through programs implemented by existing federal bureaus, such as the Department of Agriculture, and newly created agencies, and through increased economic regulation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the organization that replaced the Bureau of Corporations, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In the 1970s, the federal role in health and safety, so-called social ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Notes on contributors
• Editors’ introduction to the series
• Introduction
• Part One: History, styles, and methods of policy analysis in the United States
• Part Two: Policy analysis by governments
• Part Three: Policy analysis outside of government
• Part Four: Policy analysis education and impact internationally