Summary Deborah Stone – Policy Paradox – The Art of Political Decision Making –
W.W. Norton & Company (2011)
Summary of the chapters: Introduction, 1, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16.
Introduction:
Paradoxes violate the most elementary principle of logic: something can be two different things
at once. A paradox is just such an impossible situation and political life is full of them.
Examples are:
- Winning is losing and losing is winning: politicians have two goals. A policy goal and a
political goal. Politicians always want to preserve their power, or gain enough power to be
able to accomplish their policy goals. Achieving a policy goal can sometimes thwart
political gains or vice versa.
- Which came first, the problem or the solution?
- Are low prices good or bad?
- Multiculturalism – good or bad for human freedom?
- The Cheetah – Equalizer or advantage? Athletics with prosthetic feet.
The rationality project is the core of the American political culture. The fields of political
science, public administration, law and economics have had a common mission of rescuing
public policy from the irrationalities and indignities of politics. They aspire to make policy
instead with rational, analytical and scientific methods. However, it struck Stone that the new
rational field of public policy was rooted in its own paradox. Policy science was passionately
devoted to improving governance, yet the field was based on a deep disgust for the
ambiguities and paradoxes of politics. Therefore, the question raised. If you take the politics
out of governance , what exactly is left? This is where the policy paradox emerged. This book
has three aims:
- Arguing that the rationality project misses the point of politics.
- Arguing that the rationality project instead of worshipping objectivity and seeking modes
of analysis that will lead to the objectively best results for society, the very categories
underlying rational analysis are defined in political struggle.
- The field of public policy is dominated by economics and its model of society as a market.
A market is a collection of individuals who have no community life. Their relationships
consist entirely of trading with one another to maximize their individual well-being.
However, Stone argues for a model of community where individuals live in a dense web
of relationships, dependencies and loyalties.
The project of making public policy rational rests on three pillars: a model of reasoning, a
model of society, and a model of policy making. The model of reasoning is rational decision
making. Decisions are or should be made in a series of well-defined steps:
1. Identify objectives.
2. Identify alternative courses of action for achieving objectives.
3. Predict the possible consequences of each alternative.
4. Evaluate the possible consequences of each alternative.
5. Select the alternative that maximizes the attainment of objectives.
This model ignores our emotional feelings and moral intuitions, both powerful parts of human
motivation and precious parts of life experience. Throughout the book, Stone develops a
model of political reasoning quite different from the model of rational decision making.
Political reasoning is reasoning by metaphor and analogy. It is trying to get others to see a
situation as one thing rather than another.
The model of society underlying the contemporary rationality project is the market. In this
model, society is a collection of autonomous, rational decision makers who come together
only when they want to make an exchange.
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,In the market model, individuals know what they want. They have relatively fixed,
independent preferences for goods, services, and policies. However, the starting point for
political analysis must be a political community, not a market. The model of policy making
in the rationality project is a production model, where policy is, or should be, created in an
orderly sequence of stages, almost as if on an assembly line. However, this model cannot
explain why sometimes policy solutions go looking for problems.
Chapter 1:
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. A market is 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. Individuals act only to maximize their own self-interest
(their own welfare, however they define that for themselves).
Because politics and policy can happen only in communities, community must be the starting
point of the polis. Public policy is about communities trying to achieve something as
communities. This is true even though there is almost always conflict within a community
over who its members are and what its goals should be, and even though every communal
goal ultimately must be achieved through the behaviour of individuals. Unlike the market,
which starts with individuals and assumes no goals and intentions other than those held by
individuals, a model of the polis must assume collective will and collective effort. The definition
of this phenomenon is hard, but we know intuitively that societies behave as if they had one
collective will. Consensus is a feeling of collective will. A community must have members and
some way of defining who is a member and who isn’t. Membership is in some sense the
primary political issue, for membership definitions and rules determine who is allowed to
participate in community activities, and who is governed by community rules and priorities.
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. For this in Europe,
integration policy exists. Integration focuses on what values and behaviours immigrants must
espouse in order to become citizens. Membership in a community defines social, economic
and political rights. Members of a community help each other in all kinds of non-monetary
ways too, such as sharing child care. In the market model, insurance is a financial product
that firms sell in order to make a profit and buyers buy in order to create economic security for
themselves. In the polis, mutual aid is a good that people create collectively in order to protect
each other and their community. Mutual aid might be the strongest bond that holds individuals
together as a community. And in a larger sense, sharing, caring and maintaining relationships
is at least as strong a motivator of human behaviour as autonomy, competition and promotion
of one’s separate self-interests.
A model of political community must recognize altruism as a powerful human motive. Altruism
means acting in order to benefit others rather than oneself, it is so much a part of our existence
that we take it for granted. The rationality paradigm, with its picture of humans as
fundamentally self-interested, makes altruism almost invisible. Some theorists say that behind
every altruism, lurks an ulterior self-interested motive. According to many modern social
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,scientists, people’s actions don’t count as altruistic unless they receive absolutely no benefit
themselves, unless they make some sacrifice or incur a loss when they act to help somebody
else. The paradox to altruism: 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. In the polis people have both
self-interested and altruistic motivations and policy analysis must account for both of them. In
the polis, altruism can be just as fierce as self-interest. Without an appreciation of altruism, we
can’t fully understand how policy gets implemented at the street level, nor can we understand
the currents of resistance and civil disobedience that make up the ‘moral underground’.
In the polis there is a public interest. 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. In the market,
the public interest is the net result of all individuals pursuing their self-interest. In the polis,
by contrast, people fill the box intentionally, with forethought, planning and conscious effort.
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. In
the polis, commons problems are common and are also called collective action problems
because it is hard to motivate people to undertake private cost or forgo private benefits for the
collective good. In the market, commons problems are thought to be the exception rather than
the role. Policy commons are commons problems. It is rare in the polis that the benefits and
costs of an action are entirely self-contained, affecting only one or two individuals, or that they
are limited to immediate and direct effects. Actions have side effects, unanticipated
consequences, second-and-third-order effects, long-term effects and ripple effect. It is the
broad social consequence of individual actions. One major dilemma in the polis is how to get
people to give weight to these broader consequences in their private calculus of choices,
especially in an era when the dominant culture celebrates private consumption and personal
gain.
In the polis, the vast gap between self-interest and public interest is bridged by some potent
forces: influence, cooperation, and loyalty. Influence is inherent in communities, even
communities of two. Our ideas about what we want and the choices we make are shaped by
education, persuasion and socialization. Actions, no less than ideas, are influenced by others
– by the choices other people have made and the ones we expect them to make, by what they
want us to do, and by what we think they expect us to do. Often our choices are conditional.
A worker will go to a strike only if she thinks enough people will join. 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 (bandwagon effects in elections). Influence sometimes spills over
into coercion. There is no correct place to draw the line, because coercion is an idea about
what motivates behaviour, a label and an interpretation, rather than the behaviour itself.
Cooperation is just as important as competition for two reasons: politics involves seeking
allies and cooperating with them in order to compete with opponents and the reason
cooperation must be central to a model of politics is that it is essential to power. Cooperation
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 pejorative – collusion, price fixing, insider trading.
In the polis, cooperation is the norm. The words to describe it are decidedly more positive –
coalition, alliance, union, party, support and treaty. Cooperation often goes hand in hand with
loyalty. Political alliances bind people over time, while a customer can switch shops easily.
The differing views of loyalty in the market and polis models are also reflected in language. In
the market, people are ‘buyers’ and ‘sellers’. In politics, they are ‘enemies’ and ‘friends’.
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, Friendships are forgiven in a way that pure commercial relationships are not. However,
political alliances are of course not always stable. In the polis there is a presumption of loyalty.
People expect that others will normally stick by their friends and allies and that it would take a
major event to get them to switch their loyalties.
Influence, cooperation and loyalty are powerful forces. Thus, groups and organizations are
the building blocks of the polis. Groups are important in three ways:
- People belong to institutions and organizations even when they aren’t formal members.
- Policy making isn’t only about solving public problems but about how groups are formed,
split and re-formed to achieve public purposes. On policy issues of any significance,
groups confront each other, using individuals only as their spokespeople.
- Decisions of the polis are collective explicitly through formal procedures – such as voting
and bargaining – and through public bodies. Public decisions are implicitly collective in
that even when officials have ‘sole authority’, they are influenced by outside opinion and
pressure.
Stone insists on the importance of groups, not to claim that a political system is equally open
to all of them but to point out that politics is necessarily a system of alliances.
In the ideal market information is perfect, meaning it is accurate, complete and available to
everyone at no cost. In the polis, information is ambiguous, incomplete, often strategically
shaded, and sometimes deliberately withheld. In politics, what matters is what people make
of certain reports about for example a governor using the ‘nigger’ word. In the polis,
interpretations are more powerful than facts. Much of what we know is what we believe to be
true. What we believe about information depends on who tells us and how it is presented (the
medium, choice of language and context). Timing matters, a company’s announcement about
its safety practices will be interpreted differently if issued after an accident rather than before.
Political actors strive to control interpretations. In the polis, information depends a lot on
interpretation and is subject to strategic manipulation. In addition, information is never
complete. Information is never fully and equally available to all participants in politics. In the
polis, political actors very often deliberately keep crucial information secret. Secrecy and
revelation are tools of political strategy.
In the market, economic resources are governed by the laws of matter. Resources are finite,
scarce, and used up when they are used. People can only do one thing at a time and material
can be only one thing at a time. In the polis, another set of laws operates alongside the laws
of matter, the laws of passion. They describe phenomena that behave more like emotions
than like physical matter. One of these laws is that passion feeds on itself. Political skills and
authority also grow with use. The market model ignores the 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 means more than thousand
people walking through a street). The most vexing law of passion is that things can mean and
therefore be more than one thing at once.
The polis is:
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