The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis

Reissued with a new introduction by B. Guy Peters

Aaron Wildavsky, B. Guy Peters, B. Guy Peters

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783319586199
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis is a classic work of the Public Policy discipline. Wildavsky's emphasis on the values involved in public policies, as well as the need to build political understandings about the nature of policy, are as important for 21st century policymaking as they were in 1979. B. Guy Peters' critical introduction provides the reader with context for the book, its main themes and contemporary relevance, and offers a guide to understanding a complex but crucial text.

Part I
Resources Versus Objectives

The mainstreams of social science analysis and of the political consensus of the 1960s were the products of two converging currents of American history. The first of these currents, flowing from the Depression and the Second World War, was the conviction, unusual in American history, that the federal government was a beneficent and uniquely competent force for effecting social and economic change. The Depression carried the message that a market economy could be saved from economic catastrophe only by informed governmental management of the economy. The Second World War was a bloody titanic morality play in which the U.S. government successfully led the struggle to suppress totalitarian evil and following which the U.S. government aided war stricken countries around the world. The War was viewed as a triumph of governmental coordination and leadership.

The second current was the stream of civil rights activities that produced landmark legislation of the 1960s assuring legal equality to Blacks and other minorities. The issues of poverty and civil rights, of course, are logically and factually distinct. But they became joined because Blacks suffered more poverty and unemployment than did Whites for reasons that could be traced to legal and political discrimination. Whether one favored greater general equality or not, one could agree with Theodore Lowi’s assertion that “the real task of our time was to attack injustice and to change social rules of conduct in order that poverty become and remain a random thing.…”

Together these currents led to the outpouring of social legislation that followed President Kennedy’s assassination, and they shaped the research agenda and conclusions of the swelling cohorts of social scientists then emerging from graduate schools.

Moods changed in the late 1960s and early 1970s for three distinct reasons. The first was the collapse of that bubble of faith that government action is a force for good. Between the War in Vietnam and the revelations that led to the resignation of Vice President Agnew and President Nixon, the vague residual presumption that governmental actions could be guided to benign purposes by dedicated leaders was utterly obliterated.

The second cause of the changed mood was the formal success of the civil rights revolution that exposed a latent ambiguity in the goals of supporters of the War on Poverty and the Great Society. Many who had supported equal rights as a final objective had allied with others whose ultimate objective was equality of results. The coalition that united around the civil rights revolution had embraced both those who sought a fair process and those who wanted what they perceived as fair outcomes. When formal victory in the civil rights revolution removed it from the agenda of salient political issues, the coalition that had been organized around it dissolved.

A third reason for the change in the political mood in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the collapse of the intellectual consensus about the nature of and solution to the problems of poverty and unemployment, about how to improve education and training, about how to control inflation, and about many other objectives of social legislation.

How serviceable remain the faiths that motivated the reformers of the 1960s for the 1970s and beyond? The twin spectres of the Second World War and the Great Depression, both banished by governmental action, recede into the fog of past history, replaced in contemporary consciousness by another war without valid purpose or tangible success, by economic and social dilemmas still poorly understood, and by a recognition that modes of government action suitable to the past may be inadequate today. Fear of nuclear catastrophe, initially a source of shared responsibility, has turned to dull awareness. The moods of the post-war, post-depression years, the sense that humanity must act to improve the world and secure it from disaster while time remains, have ended. The almost mad sense of urgency will not be missed. But sober attempts rationally to solve increasingly complex problems may be advanced if we retain a bit of that sense of mutual obligation and community that flowed from economic catastrophe and the holocaust.

From a speech by Henry Aaron,

Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation,

Department of Health, Education and Welfare

The last words of this policy tale of our times return us to our task: how to retain a sense of mutual obligation in our political community amid the ruin of failed hopes without the deathly prod of war or the human waste of depression. The generation of the sixties has grown more wary about the fallibility of human design, but will it also become more wise? Pretending something that won’t work, will, is of no use; we are too sophisticated for that and, besides, the institutionalization of these errors has already caught up with us. A self-conscious society has no choice except to think. Knowing what we know, that is, knowing more about what to avoid than what to do, we must nevertheless act. Looking life in the eye, knowing now that there are no permanent solutions, but only permanent problems, the question for us is how to make our failures more instructive and our dilemmas more expressive of our moral selves.

My aim is to alter the prevailing conception of policy analysis from problem solving to problem succession. The supposed sequence by which solutions are found for preexisting problems, as if they were fixed in quick-setting concrete, should give way to the notion that man-made solutions also create man-made problems. Policies don’t succeed so much as they are succeeded. It is not resolution of policies but evolution that should interest us. How well, we should ask, have we detected and corrected our errors? More to the point, are we better able to learn from today’s errors than we were from yesterday’s? Do the problems we cannot solve today help us understand better what we ought to attempt to solve tomorrow? And will our future failures make better people of us than our past difficulties have?

The surveys and appraisals of American social policy that make up this section can be simply summarized: when citizens, acting through government, have tried to alter basic patterns of individual behavior involving large numbers of people, this effort has failed; but when citizens have sought to get government to reallocate resources, they have often succeeded. When the change lies within millions of people, their behavior remains the same, but when it is within government, basic changes do take place. Here is the evidence: although reading, crime, and health rates remain sticky, expenditures on social welfare have doubled and defense expenditures have remained the same, reversing their respective positions in 1960.

Why failure in “micro” social policy and success in “macro” movement of expenditures? Because we know how to do the latter and we don’t know how to do the former. Because we find it easier to command government to change itself than to change ourselves. Why, for individual policies, has there been “The Strategic Retreat on Objectives in American Public Policy”? Because most people, including those in governmental agencies, seek to construct an intelligible universe within which they can lead lives they can justify to themselves. Building in failures from the beginning by seeking objectives that can’t be met is not justifiable. Unless pious words are a substitute for good deeds, feasibility is part of morality. Reconsidering objectives, rethinking where we want to go, as well as how to get there, helps construct meaning, and revamp the values and beliefs we call culture.

But why, with all our experience at “standing on the shoulders of giants,”¹even if they are only giant failures, do solutions become problems faster than we can cope with these new difficulties? When we speak of the welfare state or of growing government, one thing we mean is that there are many more large programs than there used to be, with many more unanticipated consequences, about which we are slow to learn, because these programs and those consequences influence each other faster than we have been able to catch up with them. We may be smart, but life is smarter.

In attempting to deal with social difficulties, public agencies propose programs that themselves act on the environment, thus becoming part of the problem with which they are supposed to cope. Of course, policies don’t act, only people do. But once policies are no longer intentions but become actual programs, they implicate many people—those who operate them as well as those served by them. It is the people behind or, more accurately, within the policies who act, but that which they act upon, like any other idea embodied in action, has an independent existence. If it had not, programs (the specific embodiment in action of general policy ideas) would be mere shadows, puppets without will. Yet, we know no one will turn off social security or food stamps as easily as one cancels a performance, or turns up sick at work, or just decides to try a new idea. The solution for stabilizing policy—a new or bigger organization—is also part of the problem; namely, resistance to change.

There is tension between the organizational clients of policy analysis, who stress stability, and analysts, who champion change. Analysts may also welcome constraints because, by limiting feasible action, restrictions help make calculations manageable. If everything is possible, nothing or everything (which amounts to the same thing) need be done. Too many constraints, however, convert calculability into immobility. The bureaucratic response is to retain intelligibility by maintaining boundaries; if consequences of policies cannot be predicted, they can at least be contained by monopolizing the means of response within the boundaries circumscribing each substantive sector (health, highways, energy). Thus the force of the external world is blunted by restricting the variety of internal response. If Mr. Outside becomes Mr. Inside, we can also better understand bureaucratic responses that appear divorced from environmental stimuli.

If the organized sectors of society restrict responses to particular problems, how is it that the direction of total spending has been so responsive to popular preferences? One part of the answer is evident: they expand into the private sector. Because no sector gets smaller and most grow larger, why should they protest? The other part is so utterly obvious it has escaped attention: social-welfare expenditures have gone way up because, in effect, we the people want it that way. It is our communal conviction that has led us along this path. It is true, as everyone knows, that opposition to skyrocketing welfare and medical costs is widespread; it is just that whenever access to medicine or welfare has to be sacrificed to cost, it is always access that wins.

The moral meaning of public policy becomes clear in considering how there can be “Coordination without a Coordinator.” What gives social-welfare policies as a whole, from medicare to aid for dependent children to unemployment compensation, their coherence and consistency is their adherence to moral norms, which affirm that need is more important than cost, that to include the deserving is more important than excluding the undeserving, to protect the elderly against inflation is more important than to protect workers against increased payment, and so on. When tax money is taken from some people and transferred to others, moral judgments are being made. Even when no moral declarations are made, we can see citizens’ opinion influencing policy because now much more goes for welfare than for warfare.

Before we can turn to trends in public policy, however, we must first exorcize the ghost of rationality, which haunts the house of public policy. If all that matters is means, how hard you try, not what good you do, is all that counts. If all virtue is attached to ends, accomplishments are everything and aspirations nothing. Thinking of rationality as all effort or all ideal, as only resources or only objectives, is immoral as well as ineffective. It is immoral because people who depend on policies require results, not only remedies. It is hard to warm the home with promises. It is ineffective because this does not connect what we want with what we can get. My purpose in “Policy Analysis Is What Information Systems Are Not” is to rehabilitate rationality, not as either resources or objectives, but as the relationship between them.

Note

1. Robert K. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965).

© The Author(s) 2018

B. Guy Peters (ed.)The Art and Craft of Policy Analysishttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58619-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Policy Analysis Is What Information Systems Are Not

Aaron Wildavsky¹

(1)

University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA

End Abstract

The task of analysis is to create problems, preferences tempered by possibilities, which are worth solving. A difficulty is not necessarily a problem; that depends on what I can do about it, including whether it is worth my while to try. My inability to go to Mars, a famous gap between aspirations and actuality, is not a problem but a longing to overcome my limitations. My inability to explain the influence of the tides on the rise and fall of the stock market is not a problem unless I have a hypothesis suggesting how I might influence factors by which the two events might be linked. Only by suggesting solutions, such as programs linking governmental ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Resources Versus Objectives
• 2. Social Interaction Versus Intellectual Cogitation
• 3. Dogma Versus Skepticism
• 4. Policy Analysis
• Backmatter