This is a summary of the book Public Policy. This summary contains all the necessary chapters for the exam of Policy & Politics in Block 4 of the pre-master Sociology: Contemporary Social Problems.
Public Policy and Governance - Ch. 3 Central Institutions and Actors Summary
Samenvatting Literatuur Beleid & Politiek
Summary Politics and Policy Making
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Sociology: Contemporary Social Problems
Beleid & Politiek
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Samenvatting Public Policy
Chapter 1. Introduction
Lasswell: Politics is the study of influence and the influential.
- It’s about who gets what, when and how.
- How politics (incluence and the influential) determines public policy.
- Example: why do some governments provide specific welfare schemes (what) to
single mothers (who) whereas others abstain from doing so? Why is the retirement
age for females in Turkey 58 years but 64 years in Switzerland (when)? And why are
welfare benefits means-tested in the UK but universal in Sweden (how)?
The study of public policies covers the whole process of public-decision making. It also
includes the feedback policy-makers receive on their decisions. Example: in the form of
changes in welfare politics and levels of trust.
If policy outputs and policy effects are the core topics of public policy, their study generally
focuses on 2 fundamental issues: policy variation and policy change.
Policy variation = refers to the explanation of differences between public policies across
sectors and countries.
- To what extent does policy-making differ in relation to, say health policies, on the one
hand, and environmental or transport policies on the other? And how can these differences
be explained?
• There is an ongoing debate in the literature as to whether and to what extent the
shape of public policies is affected by sector- or country specific factors (Table 1).
Polity, Politics and Policy
In the political science, we generally find that there are 3 major subject areas that cut across
the different sub disciplines: polity, politics and policy.
1. Polity = refers to the institutional structures characterizing a political system
2. Politics = concentrates on political processes such as partly political cleavages and
voting behavior in legislative bodies
3. Public policy = puts the content of policies centre stage. Rather than focusing on
institutions or processes, the research interest is on the analysis of the outputs of
political systems (the decisions, measures, programmes, strategies and courses of
action adopted by the government of the legislative body (parlement).
,à Dimensions of polity and politics play an important role in explaining public policy. The
analysis of policy concern the policy implications of a country’ political institution (its
polities). DO polities have a crucial impact on policy-making? Which polities perform better
regarding the solving of a howsoever defined societal problem?
à Likewise, the decision-making (politics) in a country are important for public policy
choices: more or less stable patterns that characterize the policy proves (politics) which in
turn affect the nature and design of their policy.
Elements of public policy
Public policy = there is a general consensus that a public policy can be defined as a course of
action (or non-action) taken by a government or legislature with regard to a particular issue.
à this definition is very broad, it emphasizes 2 constitutive elements:
First: public policies refer to action of public actor (typically governments), although societal
responds to the basic idea of governance
Second: governmental actions focus on specific issues, implying that the scope of activities is
restricted to addressing a certain aspect of problem (such as air pollution control, animal
protection, internet content)
On one hand: policies are seen as governmental activities made in response to given societal
or political problems. In other words: policy-making is conceived as a problem-solving
activity.
On the other hand: policy-making can be regarded as a means of exerting power by one
social group over another. According to this perspective, the existence and particular design
of policies are intended to protect the interests of certain groups, while disadvantaging
others.
- Example: studies of political clientism deal with this aspects: the distribution of
selective benefits to individuals or clearly defined groups in exchange for political
support.
- It is true that ‘’all governments give greater weight to the preferences of those
citizens with more political power than to the preferences of those with less political
power’’.
Differences in Scope: Sectors, Targets and Instruments
The term ‘policy’ is used for activities of very different scope:
- First: it is often used to cover a whole range of different measures in a certain sector,
such as environmental policy, social policy, economic policy or fiscal policy. Used in
this way, the term grasps more than one legal act or political programme that
belongs to the whole range of legal and administrative activities that are related to a
particular distinctive policy field.
- Second: a similar approach is used to describe public activities in a field along certain
subthemes that cover functionally related measures. For example: environmental
policy: subsectors refer to water policy, clean air policy, climate change policy. In
social policy: subsectors include pension policy, unemployment policy and child
benefits.
- Third: even within policy subfields, distinctive policy issues or targets can be
identified: taking clean air policy as example: such targets include industrial
discharges of different pollutions, urban air quality and car exhaust emissions.
,To sum up: public policy can be understood in any of the following 4 ways:
1. Sector-specific measures (energy policy)
2. Subfield-specific measures (renewable energy policy)
3. Specific issues in the subfield (feed-in tariffs)
4. Regulatory instruments connected to the issues (level of feed-in tarrifs)
Basic Theoretical Perspectives on Public Policy: Rational Process Design, Muddling
Through or Just Chance?
We find different attempts at analyzing how public policies typically evolve or should evolve.
The Rationalist approach: defines an ideal conception of how policies should develop.
The inrementalist perspective: provides an explanation for the fact that in reality this ideal
is hardly ever reached.
A more radical view is the one advanced by the ‘garbage can’ model: which emphasizes that
public policies often reveal the opposite pattern to that envisaged by rationalist models.
Rationalist approach
The rationalist approach conceives of policy-making as a process of problem-solving.
- Rather than seeking to explain the policy proves, this approach prescribes an ideal
conception of how policy-making should be organized and evolve in order to achieve
optimal solutions to the underlying policy problems.
- How policies should evolve rather than a positive: how policies can be explained
perspective on policy-making.
This question of how to optimally develop public policies was at the heart of Lasswell’s
Thinking: he argued that ideally the policy process should be based on different steps that
follow a logical sequence:
1. Intelligence = collection and processing of all relevant knowledge and information
2. Promotion = identification and support of selected alternatives
3. Prespription = imposition of a binding decision
4. Invocation = policy enforcement
5. Termination = abrogation of policy
6. Appraisal = evaluation of policy effects against the backdrop of initial objectives and
intentions
Inceremtalist approach
The theory of incermentalism explicitly rejects the idea of public policy being made on the
basis of a fully rational decision-making process.
- It originates in Lindblom’s path-breaking article: The Science of Muddling Through
and was further formalized by Hirsham.
- Public policy is regarded as the political result of the interaction of various actors
processing different types of information. These actors need to make concessions,
and therefore policy-makers primairly concentrate on aspects that are less
controversial and more technical.
- This process of partisan mutual adjustment: can only lead to one outcome =
incremental policy change.
à Rather than an ideal, incrementalism purports to be a realistic description of how policy
makers arrive at their decision. This implies that policy-makers act within the context of
, limited information, the cognitive restrictions of their minds and the finite amount of time
available for policy-making.
This all refers to bounded rationality = rationality is limited when individuals make decisions.
As a consequence, decision-makers apply their rationality only after having greatly simplified
the choices available turning them into satisfices who seek a satisfactory solution rather
than the optimal one: policy making is serial and remedial in that it focuses heavily on
remedial measures that happen to be at hand rather than addressing itself to a more
comprehensive set of goals and alternative policies.
While incrementalism still presumes that policy-making is characterized by nan albeit
bounded rational process in which solutions are developed in response to existing problems,
the garbage can model questions even these less strict rationality assumptions and
disconnects problems, solutions and decision-makers from each other.
Garbage can Model
In contrast to the view that problems trigger decision making processes, the garbage can
model assumes that usually the involved actors within an organization go through the
‘garbage’ first and look for a suitable fix: the solution.
- In many instances, solutions are prepared without knowledge of the problems they
might have to solve.
- Organizations thus tend to produce many solution which are later discarded due to a
lack of appropriate problems.
- The extent to which an existing solution might actually be linked to a problem, is
affected by whether or not a choice for opportunities exists: occasions when
organizations are expected or perceived to be expected to produce a decision.
Stages of the Policy Process
We ask if and to what extent it is analytically useful to distinguish between different stages
of the policy process, notwithstanding the ambiguous picture that emerges from the
prevous theoretical discussion. The most common approach is the distinction of different
policy stages that can be integrated into a process model: the famous ‘policy cycle’.
This approach models the policy process as a series of political activities, which basically
consists of the following phases:
1. Problem definition and agenda-setting
2. Policy formulation and adoption
3. Implementation
4. Evaluation (with the potential consequence of policy termination or reformulation)
à The policy cycle model is interpreted as a sequential development, hence following
closely the idea underlying the rationalist approach.
à Policy process starts with the identification of a societal problem and its placement on the
government’s agenda, Various policy proposals are formulated, from which one will be
adopted by the decision-making. In the next stage, the adopted policy is enacted, before
finally its impacts are evaluated. This last stage leads straight back to the first, indicating that
the policy cycle is continuous and unending.
- The policy stages are criticized: it has been emphasized that the model hardly
corresponds to empirical reality, as the different stages might often overlap. For
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