Making Public Policy Decisions

Expertise, skills and experience

Damon Alexander, Jenny Lewis, Damon Alexander, Jenny M. Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317697718
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Öffentlichsarbeit & Verwaltung

To understand public policy decisions, it is imperative to understand the capacities of the individual actors who are making them, how they think and feel about their role, and what drives and motivates them. However, the current literature takes little account of this, preferring instead to frame the decisions as the outcomes of a rational search for value-maximising alternatives or the result of systematic and well-ordered institutional and organisational processes.

Yet understanding how personal and emotional factors interact with broader institutional and organisational influences to shape the deliberations and behaviour of politicians and bureaucrats is paramount if we are to construct a more useful, nuanced and dynamic picture of government decision-making. This book draws on a variety of approaches to examine individuals working in contemporary government, from freshly-trained policy officers to former cabinet ministers and prime ministers. It provides important new insights into how those in government navigate their way through complex issues and decisions based on developed expertise that fuses formal, rational techniques with other learned behaviours, memories, emotions and practiced forms of judgment at an individual level.

This innovative collection from leading academics across Australia, Europe, the United Kingdom and North America will be of great interest to researchers, educators, advanced students and practitioners working in the fields of political science, public management and administration, and public policy.

1 Making public policy decisions

Damon Alexander and Jenny M. Lewis

DOI: 10.4324/9781315778853-1

Public policy making as a field of inquiry is marked by a variety of competing perspectives. The rational action paradigm has long dominated the field, however, as have rational choice models of decision making and problem solving more generally. As Allison (1971: 28–29) describes, such models posit human behaviour as being purposive, goal-directed activity, made consistent through the application of reason. From this perspective, the policy decisions and actions taken by politicians and public administrators are generally framed as the outcomes of a rational search for value-maximising alternatives or as the result of systematic and well-ordered institutions and organisational processes.

The rational perspective is by no means alone in the field though—particularly when what is crucial is an examination of how policy is actually made, rather than an idealised model of the process. Beyond the bounded rationality and sequencing of stages found in Herbert Simon’s seminal contributions on behaviour and rational choice (Simon, 1947; 1955), and many discussions of policy stages or the policy cycle, there is a variety of alternative explanatory frameworks. These include disjointed incrementalism (Lindblom, 1959); garbage can models (Cohen et al., 1972; Kingdon, 1995); punctuated equilibrium (Baumgartner and Jones, 1993); the advocacy coalition framework (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1988) and other subsystem (network) models (Rhodes, 1997); and discursive approaches (Edelman, 1967; Fischer and Forester, 1993).

With every different approach taken towards understanding the policy process, actors (individual and collective) are granted a particular place in the story of how policy decisions are made. Depending on which framework is preferred, actors hold either more or less important positions and are able to exercise more or less influence in how any particular policy decision unfolds. Contrasting frames lead to some important differences in how the policy process is understood and how it is analysed. Regardless of which frame of reference is adopted, the vast majority of scholarship on the making of public policy decisions downplays the role and influence of individual actors. As is shown in Chapter 3, there is a stream of biographical work that focuses on particular individuals within the political-administrative elite and how they go about their everyday work. Some have made a point of focusing on psychological concepts in addressing decision making, particularly cognition (for example, De Zavala, 2012; Metselaar, 2012), while others (for example, Simonton, 1988; Barber, 1992; Hargrove, 1993; 2002); Greenstein, 2001; 2005; 2006; 2009) have linked individual personality traits of political leaders with decision making and performance, providing a picture of what sorts of attributes are required for successful political leadership.

In general, approaches which focus on individual actors or small teams within the field of policy studies are few and far between. Research which examines how individual-level attributes such as skill, expertise, creativity, or cognitive style shape how policy actors (politicians, political advisors, public administrators, and street-level bureaucrats) respond to problems and opportunities is rare. Analyses which explore how affective factors such as emotions, beliefs, feelings, and intuitions impact upon how policy makers ply their craft are even more so. In general, such human attributes are either completely ignored, cast as no more than pollutants or cast as barriers to ‘rational’ policy-making processes.

We argue that understanding how these individual-level factors interact with broader institutional and organisational influences to shape the deliberations and behaviour of policy actors is crucial if we are to construct a more nuanced, dynamic, and ultimately useful picture of government decision making. Given the current social, economic, and political environment and the increasingly complex nature of the problems facing policy actors, knowing what skills and attributes they value, how they read and frame policy problems, and what shapes and motivates their decisions and actions has become even more significant.

Rather than an orderly and rational process, the conceptual framework behind this edited collection sees policy decision making as a form of developed expertise that fuses formal, rational techniques and acquired qualifications and skills with beliefs, cognition, dispositions, emotions, and learned behaviours that result in practised forms of judgement, ultimately by individual policy makers. The underlying theme unifying the contributions to this book is a basic assumption that when it comes to understanding public policy and managerial decision making, grasping the capacity of individuals is crucial. This is not to deny or diminish the importance of structure, of institutions, or of processes. Rather, we seek to question and counter the ‘anti-individualist’ bias which authors such as Chabal (2003) suggest characterises much social science research and to stake a claim for more than a residual place for individuals in the field of policy analysis.

The puzzle that the book and its contributions address is centred around two primary questions. The first question is, what are the individual skills, attributes, and capacities of policy actors, and how do these qualities shape the policy actors’ approach to making public policy decisions? Our aim here is to explore the skills and attributes that policy actors draw upon when they are confronted with policy problems and the need for policy decisions and also to investigate how such capacities develop over time. These attributes, skills, and expertise are likely to be important for the performance of government (Headey, 1974; Beckman, 2006; Alexander et al., 2013), but there is remarkably little scholarship devoted to identifying them, to exploring how they develop with experience, or to exploring how they might be sharpened through training.

The second and related question is, how does emotion and affect shape how policy actors read, respond to, and cope with policy problems? We already know that emotions play a significant role in decision making, including decision making in the policy process. Positive emotions, for example, lead groups to use less time to make decisions, to use fewer dimensions in decision making and to reconsider the same information less often (Isen et al., 1982). Negative emotions such as fear or anger have been found to impact significantly upon how we process information and reach decisions. Research by Geva and Skorick (2006: 215) into the role of emotion in foreign policy decisions, for example, notes how negative emotions towards a target dramatically influence the type of cognitions focused on an object. Emotions such as fear trigger avoidance behaviour, while anger tends to lead to more aggressive and radical decision making (Huber, 1986).

It is also now becoming more widely understood that information processing is often biased by affect. A dual-processing model proposed by Lodge and Taber (2006) suggests that triggering events bring forward deeply ingrained beliefs, feelings, and intentions instantaneously and that these affective factors then shape more demanding and conscious judgements and evaluations, such as those presumed by rational models. Daniel Kahneman has similarly argued that there are two systems of thinking—one that operates automatically and quickly with little or no effort and without a sense of voluntary control and one that includes the mental activities that require more effort, including complex computations (Kahneman, 2011). The important point of this distinction between the two systems of thought is that it is the first that drives most of our decision making, allowing us to jump to conclusions quickly based on data with limited validity (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974).

While these kinds of considerations are increasingly being recognised in the literature on decision making, they remain almost completely ignored in the usual rational explanations of the policy process. With this in mind, we are particularly interested in the emotional experiences of politicians and bureaucrats—in what it ‘feels’ like to be engaged in devising, delivering, and administering public policy and public services; how this emotional content shapes the policy maker’s actions, behaviour, and role perceptions; and how these actors cope with the increasingly difficult and demanding nature of their policy roles.

This edited collection explores how policy actors, from prime ministers to individuals delivering front line public services, respond to complex policy, administrative, and managerial challenges in the twenty-first century. The collection is underpinned by the basic assumption that to understand public policy decisions, it is imperative to understand the capacities of the individual actors who are making them, how they think and feel about their roles and what drives or motivates them. Drawing on a variety of approaches, the contributors to this collection provide important new insights into how individuals working at the political apex of government, working within government departments, or delivering public services navigate their way through complex issues and which skills and attributes they draw on in doing so.

The book chapters that follow traverse a good deal of territory that is rarely visited in studies of the policy-making process. Many of the chapters are concerned with expertise, whether it is considered as information processing, cognition, and knowledge structures (Chapter 2); as an artefact of experience and training (Chapter 3); as an organisational logic (Chapter 5); or as an attribute that is utilised in performing collaboration, getting policy change, or enacting reform agendas (Chapters 6, 8, and 10, respectively). Cognition appears in a number of the chapters too: its importance for problem solving is considered in Chapter 2, its value as an attribute in Chapter 3, and its relation to cognitive complexity and belief change is central in Chapter 4. Conflict and stress are examined in Chapters 2 and 7; in the first instance in relation to cognitive performance and in the second, in relation to the coping strategies practised at street level.

Beliefs and dispositions are considered as important in Chapter 4 on belief change by political leaders and in Chapter 9 on how chiefs of staff to prime ministers do their work. A number of chapters explicitly address the role of affect, emotion, or mood: Chapter 2 discusses their impact on problem solving, Chapter 3 discusses the importance of emotional resilience in combating the trials and tribulations of policy work, and Chapter 6 discusses the role of affect, emotion, or mood in identities and performance. Ethics are important to the discussion in Chapters 6 and 7 in relation to (respectively) working in collaboration and dealing with moral conflicts. Finally, social skills, relationships, and the complementarity of individuals’ personalities are explicitly dealt with in Chapter 3 (in the context of interpersonal skills such as networking, teamwork, and communication) and in the final three contributed chapters in regard to recruiting support for policy change (Chapter 8), working in a close personal relationship (Chapter 9), and being part of a reforming tandem (Chapter 10).

The contributed chapters

Richard Marcy’s contribution (Chapter 2) draws on the fields of information processing and leader cognition to better understand the role that processes of expertise play in the performance of public sector leaders. Marcy describes these processes in order to provide a detailed exposition of issues involving expertise, leadership, and organisational responses in a public sector context. The chapter outlines the importance of case-based knowledge for public sector leaders and notes that while novices tend to primarily focus on goals and outcomes, experts account for additional causes and contingencies. Mental models (abstract cognitive representations of a particular situation) are a second major foundation upon which expertise is built, and the amount and variety of different descriptive mental models, as well as skill at connecting these to the situation at hand, are important for effective decision making.

Marcy follows with an examination of expertise itself, defining it as “consistently superior performance on a specified set of leadership tasks.” In a sweeping review of the literature, the chapter reports that experts have knowledge structures that are bigger, deeper, and more easily accessed than those of novices; they make more strategic use of their knowledge; and they tend to reason forwards using stored scripts and cognitive strategies. Importantly, Marcy notes that experts also have their limitations: the efficient pathways they are accustomed to using can lead them astray in dynamic environments, and they can become inflexible if the problem is unfamiliar. However, experts do tend to cope and problem solve better than novices in complex and stressful situations. The link between mood and performance is also discussed—positive orientation is good for idea generation and implementation (‘getting on with it’), but a negative orientation is better for problem identification and idea evaluation (deliberation). Finally, Marcy notes that more emotional distance from a problem is linked to a greater investment in substantial cognitive resources during an analysis.

Marcy concludes the chapter by listing a set of implications for the relationship between expertise, stress, affect, and emotional distance and public sector leadership and problem solving. This chapter provides an excellent overview of recent work in the area of individual-level expertise, and it reveals some important findings about the relationship between decision making and a number of cognitive concepts.

The chapter by Alexander, Lewis, and Considine (Chapter 3) focuses on exploring the qualities that individual policy actors value and draw on in dealing with complex policy problems and examines how these qualities are developed. The chapter begins by reviewing the relatively small body of literature focusing on the skills and attributes required by policy makers, noting how the lack of scholarship reflects a more widespread failure o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Half Title Page
• Other Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Making public policy decisions
• 2 Not only what, but how: the role of expertise in developing public sector leadership
• 3 How governments think: skills, expertise, and experience in public policy making
• 4 A matter of personality? Stability and change in EU leaders' beliefs during the Euro crisis
• 5 The impact of expertise on crisis management
• 6 Performing a ‘collaborative self’
• 7 Decision making at the front line: exploring coping with moral conflicts during public service delivery
• 8 Policy entrepreneurs, creative teamwork, and policy change
• 9 Prime ministers' chiefs of staff: coping with wild treachery and weirdness
• 10 Leadership of reforming governments: the role of political tandems
• Index