The Policy Paradox
Deborah Stone
Index:
Part I: politics (chapter 1)
Part II: Goals (chapter 2-6)
Part III: Problems (chapter 7-11)
Part IV: Solutions (chapter 12-16)
Chapter 1, the Market and the Polis
A theory of policy politics must start with a simple model of political society. Polis, the Greek word
for city-state, seems a fitting name for a model of political society because it conjures up an entity
small enough to have very simple forms of organization yet large enough to embody the essential
elements of politics. In building a model of political society, it is helpful to use the market model as a
foil because of its predominance in contemporary policy discussions. The contrast between the
models of political society and market society will illuminate some ways the market model distorts
political life.
A market can be simply defined as a social system in which individuals pursue their own welfare by
exchanging things with others whenever trades are mutually beneficial. Participants in a market
compete with each other for scarce resources; each person tries to acquire things at the least
possible cost, and to convert raw materials into more valuable things to sell at the highest possible
price.
In the market model, individuals act only to maximize their own self-interest. ‘Self-interest’ means
their own welfare, however they define that for themselves. The competitive drive to maximize one’s
own welfare stimulates people to be very resourceful, creative, clever, and productive, and
ultimately, competition raises the level of economic well-being of society as a whole.
With this description of the essence of the market model, we can start to build an alternative model
of the polis by contrasting more detailed features of the market model and political community.
Community
Because politics and policy can happen only in communities, community must be the starting point of
our polis. Public policy is about communities trying to achieve something as communities. Unlike the
market, a model of the polis must assume collective will and collective effort, even though there is
almost always conflict in a community.
A community must have members and some way of defining who is a member and who is not.
A model of the polis must also include a distinction between political community and cultural
community.
A political community is a group of people who live under the same political rules and
structure of governance.
A cultural community is a group of people who share a culture and draw their identities from
shared language, history, and traditions.
In most nations, the political community includes diverse cultural communities. Cultural diversity
creates a profound dilemma for policy politics: how to integrate several cultural communities into a
single political community without destroying their identity and integrity. These issues can’t be
adequately understood in terms of individuals pursuing their self-interests.
Membership in a community defines social and economic rights as well as political rights. In the polis,
mutual aid is a good that people create collectively in order to protect each other and their
community. It might be the strongest bond that holds individuals together as a community
,Altruism
Humans are social creatures and care about others as well as themselves. A model of political
community must recognize altruism as a powerful human motive. ‘Altruism’ means acting in order to
benefit others rather than oneself.
Altruism is so much a part of our existence that we take it for granted. But the rationality paradigm
makes altruism almost invisible.
There is a paradox, however: when people act to benefit others, they feel satisfaction, fulfilment, and
a sense that helping others gives their lives meaning. The strict self-interest paradigm, therefore,
makes altruism impossible by definition. (Altruism is only possible if an individual receives nothing in
return).
In the polis, people have both self-interest and altruistic motivations, and policy analysis must
account for both of them.
Public Interest
In the polis, there is a public interest. ‘Public interest’ might mean any of several things.
It could be individual interests held in common, things everyone wants for themselves, such
as a high standard of living.
It could mean individuals’ goals for their community. Often people want things for their
community that conflict with what they want for themselves.
It could also mean those goals on which there is a consensus. In this interpretation, the
public interest is not necessarily permanent. It’s whatever most people want at the moment,
and so it changes over time.
Finally, it could mean things that are good for a community as a community. The members of
a community almost always have an interest in its survival, and therefore in its perpetuation
and its self-defence.
There is virtually never full agreement on the public interest, yet we need to make it a defining
characteristic of the polis because so much of politics entails people fighting over what the public
interest is and trying to realize their own definitions of it. The concept of public interest is to the polis
what self-interest is to the market. They are both abstractions whose specific contents we do not
need to know in order to use them to explain and predict people’s behaviour. We simply assume that
people behave as if they were trying to realize the public interest or maximize their self-interest.
Commons Problems
Because people often pursue a conception of public interest that differs from their conception of
self-interest, the polis is characterized by a special problem: how to combine self-interest and public
interest, or how to have both private benefits and collective benefits. Situations where self-interest
and public interest work against each other are known as ‘commons problems’, and, in the polis, are
common. These problems are also called collective action problems because it is hard to motivate
people to undertake private costs or forgo private benefits for the collective good.
In market theory, commons problems are thought to be the exception rather than the rule. Most
actions in the market do not have social consequences. In the polis, by contrast, commons problems
are everything.
Fortunately, in the polis the vast gap between self-interest and public interest is bridged by some
potent forces: influence, cooperation and loyalty.
Influence
Influence is inherent in communities. Actions, no less than ideas, are influenced by others – by the
choices other people have made and the ones we expect them to make.
Influence works not simply by putting one individual under a figurative spell of another but also in
ways that lead to curious kinds of collective behaviour. E.g. ‘Bandwagon effects’ in elections happen
,when a candidate’s initial lead causes people to support him or her because they want to be on
board with a winner.
Influence sometimes spills over into coercion, and the line between them is fuzzy. There is no correct
place to draw the line, because coercion is an idea about what motivates behaviour, rather than the
behaviour itself.
Cooperation
In the polis, cooperation is every bit as important as competition. This is true for two reasons.
1) Politics involves seeking allies and cooperating with them in order to compete with
opponents.
2) Cooperation is essential to power. It is often a more effective form of subordination than
coercion.
In the textbook model of markets, there is nothing but pure competition, which means no
cooperation among either buyers or sellers. Cooperation, when it occurs, is a deviation from the well-
functioning market, and most words to describe it in the market model are negative. In the polis,
cooperation is the norm. It is the inseparable other side of competition and a necessary ingredient of
power. The words to describe it are more positive.
Loyalty
Cooperation must be at least somewhat enduring. For that reason, cooperation often goes hand in
hand with loyalty. Political alliances bind people over time. In markets, there’s barely loyalty. When a
store hikes it prices, the buyer will simply switch stores. In politics, relationships aren’t usually so
fluid.
It’s not to say that political alliances are perfectly stable. But in the polis there is a presumption of
loyalty. It would take a major event for people to switch their loyalties.
Groups
Influence, cooperation, and loyalty are powerful forces, and the result is that groups and
organizations, rather than individuals, are the building blocks of the polis. Groups are important in
three ways.
1) People belong to institutions and organizations, even when they aren’t formal members.
2) Policy making isn’t only about solving public problems but about how groups are formed,
split, and re-formed to achieve public purposes.
3) Groups are important because decisions of the polis are collective.
Information
In the ideal market, information is ‘perfect’, meaning it is accurate, complete, and available to
everyone at no cost. In the polis, by contrast, information is ambiguous, incomplete, often
strategically shaded, and sometimes deliberately withheld. Of course, it would be silly to say there is
no such thing as correct information. But what matters in politics, is what people make of that
information. Interpretations are more powerful than facts.
Much of what we ‘know’ is what we believe to be true. And what we believe about information
depends on who tells us (the source) and how it is presented. Because politics is driven by how
people interpret information, political actors strive to control interpretations. Information in the polis
is different from information in the market model, because it depends so much on interpretation and
is subject to strategic manipulation.
In the polis, information is never complete. It’s never fully and equally available to all participants in
politics. But even more important for a model of the polis is that political actors very often
deliberately keep crucial information secret.
Passion
In the market, economic resources are governed by laws of matter. Resources are finite, scarce, and
used up when they are used.
,In the polis, another set of laws operates alongside the laws of matter, ones that might be called laws
of paradox, or ‘laws of passion’. One of these laws is that passion feeds on itself. Like passion,
political resources are often enlarged or enhanced through use, rather than diminished. Channels of
influence and political connections, for example, grow stronger the more they are used.
Political skills and authority also grow with use, and it’s no accident that we often use the metaphor
of ‘exercise’ when talking about them. Precedent is important in authority. The more one makes a
certain types of decisions, the easier it is to continue in the same path.
The market model ignores this phenomenon of resource expansion through exercise, use, practice,
and expression.
Another law of passion holds that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A protest march, for
example, means something more than a few thousand people walking down a street.
Finally, the most fun – and the most vexing law of passion: things can mean and therefore be more
than one thing at once. Convicting white-collar criminals with nominal fines signals both that the
government condemns the activity and that it does not. Ambiguity and symbolic meanings find no
home in the market model of society, where everything has its precise value or cost. In the polis,
where people not only count but think, wish, dream, and imagine, meanings can run wild, and they
matter.
Power
Up to this point, I have defined the polis by contrasting it with a market model of society.
By now, my readers must surely be wondering how a reputable political scientist could build a model
of political society without making power a defining characteristic. I save power for last, because it
derives from all the other elements and can’t be defined without reference to them.
Power is a phenomenon of communities. Its purpose is always to subordinate individual self-interest
to other interests. It operates through influence, cooperation, and loyalty, and through strategic
control of information. And finally, power is a resource that obeys the laws of passion rather than the
laws of matter.
Any model of society must specify its source of energy, the force or forces that drive change. In the
market model, change is driven by exchange, which is in turn motivated by the individual quest to
improve one’s own welfare.
In the polis, change occurs through interaction of mutually defining ideas and alliances. Alliances in
turn shape the ideas people espouse and seek to implement. This book is not so much about how
,people collect and deploy the traditional resources of power, but how they use ideas to gather
political support and diminish the support of opponents, all in order to control policy.
Ideas are the very stuff of politics People fight about ideas, fight for them, and fight against
them. Moreover, people fight with ideas as well as about them.
Every idea about policy draws boundaries. It tells what or who is included or excluded in a
category. Ideas and alliances are intimately connected.
The interaction between ideas and alliances is ever-changing and never-ending. Problems in
the polis are never ‘solved’ in the way that economic needs are met in the market model.
, Chapter 2, equity
The most famous definition of political science says it’s the study of “who gets what, when, and
how”. Distributions are at the heart of policy controversies. In this chapter, we will describe issues as
distributive conflicts in which equality is the goal.
There are different ways to look at seemingly equal distributions (see example about chocolate cake
in chapter 2)
Equal slices, but unequal invitations
Unequal slices for unequal merit, but equal slices for equal merit
Unequal slices for unequal ranks, but equal slices for equal ranks
Unequal slices, but equal social blocks
Unequal slices, but equal meals
Unequal slices, but equal value to recipients
Unequal slices, but fair competition with equal starting resources
Unequal slices, but equal statistical chances of winning cake
Unequal slices, but equal votes
We started with the idea that equality means the same-size slice for everyone. Then there were nice
challenges to that idea, nine different visions of equality that would result in unequal slices but
equality of something else. Here is the paradox in distributive problems: equality often means
inequality, and equal treatment often means unequal treatment (look back on equity as mentioned
during Philosophy of Administration Studies).
Equality: to denote sameness and to signify the part of a distribution that contains uniformity.
Equity: to denote distributions regarded as fair, even though they contain both equalities and
inequalities.
The dimensions of equality
1. Membership
Challenge 1 questions the definition of membership in a community. Often, defining the class of
members entitled to ‘equal treatment’, whatever that is, is the core of a political controversy.
Political communities often differentiate among their residents for the purpose of distributing both
property and political rights. For example, in some nations where Islam is the dominant religion,
women may inherit only half as much from their parents as men.
Immigration and citizenship policies turn on defining membership. They set the criteria for admitting
new members and making them eligible to receive whatever political, economic, and social resources
a country has to distribute. Membership criteria are rarely all or nothing: the terms of citizenship can
be distinctly double-edged, especially when nations are struggling to incorporate people whose
religious traditions vary sharply from the dominant one.
Beyond formal rules that exclude people outright, informal practices can covertly exclude.
2. Merit
Challenge 2 represents the ideal of reward for individual accomplishment. Like every abstract ideal,
merit becomes problematic when we try to figure out how to identify and quantify in order to build it
into policy. Sometimes students complain about exams, and how they are supposed to show a clear
