This document covers in-class notes as well as some integrated notes from the readings (although this is not explicitly stated when this is the case). It helped a lot to go over this summary a few times, and trying to memorise the specifics, and this summary eventually helped me get a high grade (8...
LECTURE 1
1) Why public policy?
Examples: public policy in action
- EU/Turkey Deal: Diminishing stream of refugees to Europe
- A form of policy making
- Did not play out to its intention => Policies do not always affect society in an intended
manner
- Status of EU citizens in UK after Brexit
- An acute problem that needs acute action
- 2008 economic depression: October package
- Bailing out banks, policy made in 2 days => Contradicting the notion that policy is
usually a slow process
Other examples of PP
So, what can we conclude?
- Policy is everywhere!!!
Think about how much policy is needed for your trip home
Without policy?
- “Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” - Hobbes
Policy helps us to
- Set goals and invent solutions
- How are we going to get there?
- Allocate means to achieve solutions
- What do we need to achieve goal?
- Coordinate efforts to work on solutions
- Government needs to coordinate through rules and regulation
- Divide tasks gov and non-gov
- Where does it become corrupt? => If corrupt = not predictable
- Where does government tasks stop?
- Make gov predictable
- Under rule of law => Government is predictable (confined to certain formal rules)
- There is the need to make policies to make government predictable
- Influence behavioural change
- Force as means to change behaviour
- For instance in relation to climate change (because of collective action
problem)
Positivist take
- Focus on facts and proof => More in line with rationalist
- Bounded rationality => Actors have to filter information because they have limited capacity of
knowledge of which they can process
- Behave according to interest
- Institutional constraints => How rules, whether informal or fomal, determine how actors can
behave
- Importance of resources
1
, - Technocratic aspects prevail => Policy made by civil servants which among others might be
engineers or experts
- Rely on scientific expertise
- Interested in causality (Where is the cause of the problem)
Constructivist/interpretavist take
- Not one truth, fact, or proof (Actors can use knowledge to own interest)
- All aspects of policy = debate (Almost always impossible to reach 100% consensus)
- Information is never complete: guesses, hunches, expectation + there are always alternative
ways to look at certain things
- Strategy: manipulation of info
- In communities self-interest and altruism co-exist
- Interpretations more powerful than facts
- Example: Trump calling CNN fake news
- Limited rational elements
- There is a political element in policy
- Similarity to Positivist take => Constructivist also claim that the actors take in all possible
information
- However: All information is subject to interpretation
No competition
- Just different ways of looking at policy/policy-making
Knill and Thosun
- Definition of Public Policy:
- A course of action taken by government/legislature on a particular issue
- Problem-solving activity
- Focus on outputs of political system
- Studying whole process of decision-making
- Policies intended to benefit certain groups (with more political power)
LECTURE 2
1) The public element
What do we mean with public?
- Something opposed to private
Characteristics of publicness
- It can be physical
- A square, a park, a public library
- It can be a social category
- A collectivity of citizens: Black lives matter, sufragettes
- A public event: commemorating the death of Wim Kok
- It can be a concern
- A collective concern about the quality of schools
- Concerns change over time
- It can be an opinion
- Collective beliefs, discourses
- Often measured through surveys or polls
- Four our purpose: Public as collective that gathers to deal with matter of public concern
2
, Dewey on publics
- “All those who are affected by the indirect consequences (externalities?) of transactions to
such an extent that it is deemed necesarry to have those consequences systematically cared
for”
- Transaction (an instance of conducting “business”) = mutual and reciprocal influence of
individuals on each other
Examples of publics
- Social movements => Important for agenda
- #Metoo movenement putting sexual consent on the agenda in Sweden
- NGOs
- Citizens’ initiatives
- Democratic governments
- Sometimes private actors, for instance fighting cybercrime
- For instance the British Railway system
From Dewey to Stone
- Public = community
- Public concern = public interest
- In politics never full agreement
- Hence polis is very political: communities struggle over the public interest
Commons problems I
- Public and private interest bite each other in polis
- Coal fired power plant: power for private families + polluting the environment
- Problem family creating unsafe neighbourhood
- Commons problems = self-interest and public interest coming together => Private <=> Public
- Most policy problems are commons problems due to broader effects then intended
Commons problems II - Imrat’s addition
- Does government produce commons problems?
- Yes, if two public interests collide
- Climate goals Paris agreement = public interest
- Offshore wind park
- Side effect: harm local economy because built within 12-mile zone = public interest
- Regional economy vs. reduction of Co2
Complexity of public interests
- Why is dealing with public interests so complex?
- Commons problems are power struggles:
- Where do peoples’ privacy end?
- Government closing coal-fueled power plants
- Moving problem family somewhere else
- Building within 12-mile zone
- Levers of power:
- Influence, cooperation, loyalty, strategic control of information > see Stone for more
explanation
1) The policy element
Policy, polity, politics
- Polity:
3
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