Public Policy Analysis

Public Policy Analysis by Prof. Wang Guohua Dr. Yan Danping

Textbook:Understanding Public Policy,by Thomas R. Dye, Pearson Education Inc. 2002 • Preference books: • An introduction to public policy analysis, by William N. Dunn • Basic methods of policy analysis and planning,by Carl V. Patton and David S. Sawicki • Public finance and public policy: responsibilities and limitations of Government, by Arye L. Hillman

5. Micheal Howlett, M. Ramesh: Studying Public Policy: Policy Cycles and Policy Subsystems • 6. Deborah Stone: Policy Parodox: The Art of Political DecisionMaking • 7. Paul A. Sabatier: Theories of the Policy Process • 8.Macheal E. Porter: Competitive Strategy • 9. Macheal E. Porter: Competitive Advantage

Preface: What is policy analysis? • Who gets what? Why? • What difference it makes in politics? • What policies do governments pursue? and why do governments pursue the policies? • What are the consequences of the policies?

concepts and models • Political science has developed a number of concepts and models to describe and explain political life. These models are not competitive and no one is the best. • Each model or concept focuses on separate elements of politics and policies, and each helps us understand different things about political life and reality.

Eight basic analytic models • There are eight basic analytic models for the study of public policy: Institutional model, Process model, Rational model, Incremental model, Group model, Elite model, Public choice model, Game theory model. • Most public policies are a combination of those eight models. We attempt to describe and explain public policy by the use of these various analytic models.

The causes and consequences of public policy in many areas • We are not only informed about policy in a variety of key domestic policy areas, we are also encouraged to utilize these models to explain the causes and consequences of public policy in areas as: • criminal justice, health and welfare, education, economic policy, taxation, international trade and immigration, enviornment protection, civil rights, national and local spending and services, national defense.

Select model to study • Any of these policy areas might be studied by more than one model, we select a particular analytic model to study specific policy area. • For example, we use public choice theory to discuss enviornment policy, and you might prefer to study enviornment problems from the perspective of the rational model. That is Ok!

Chapter One: Policy Analysis • What is public policy? • Why study public policy? • What can be learned from policy analysis? • Policy analysis and policy advocacy. • Policy analysis and the quest for solutions to social problems. • Policy analysis as art and craft. • Some questions.

1. What is public policy? • Definition of Policy: Public policy is about what governments do, why they do it, and what difference it makes, say, public policy is whatever governments choose to do or not to do.

What governments do? • What governments do? Governments do many things: regulate conflict within society, organize society to carry on conflict with other societies, distribute resource and services to the members of the society, extract money from society in the form of taxes, fees. Thus public policy may regulate behavior, organize bureaucracies, distribute benefits, extract taxes.

Government Growth and Policy Expansion • Today people expect government to do a great many things for them, almost all personal or social problem for which they demand a government solution, that is, a public policy designed to resolve social problems and to meet people’s need. • So, government has being grown in size and public policy expanded in scope to encompass just about every sector of people’s life around the world.

Government grew • In 20th century in both absolute size and in relation to the size of the national economy: the size of economy measured by GDP, the sum of all the goods and services produced in a country in a year, the size of government checked by the total expenditures of federal, state and local governments. • See figure 1-1 at page 2, the size of government has grown fast (from 8% up to 35% of GDP) in last centure, especialy during in 1930s to 1960s, world war 2, the Great Depression, the New Deal, the Great Society. The size of government, particularly the federal government expaned greatly.

what the federal government does and what the state and local governments do • See figure 1-2 at page 3, we can find what governments do through watch their spending, and what is the functions and priorities of government. • But, we should remember, not everything that government does is shown in governmental expenditures, regulatory activities as an example. • Social security and Medicare outlays are the largest spending of federal government, spending of defense, health, welfare are the followings, but spending in education is very modest. • State and local governments bear the major burden of public education, welfare and health functions consume large shares of their budgets than highways and law enforcement do.

2. Why we study public policy? • To study politics: governmental institutions, that is, federalism, separation of powers, checks and balances, judicial review, the powers and duties of Congress, the president, and the courts, these insititution arrangements, processes and the philosophical justification of government.

2. Why we study public policy? • To describe and explain the causes and consequences of public policy: the content of public policy, the impact of social, economic, and political forces on the content of public policy, the institutional arrangements and political process on public policy, an evaluation of the consequences of public policies on society.

2. Why we study public policy? • To improve our scientific understanding: improve our knowledge of society, help us learn about the linkages between social and economic conditions in society, the responses and effects of government and their activities on these conditions, the ideas and methods of economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, law, public administration, political science.

2. Why we study public policy? • To produce professional advice: the solution of practical problems and the ills of society, the professional advice to solve question and reach desired goals, the application of knowledge about policy than the development of scientific theory.

2. Why we study public policy? • To put forward policy recommendation: to ensure that the nation adopts the right policies to achieve the right goals, to inform political discussion, advance political awareness and to improve the quality of public policy. • Policy analysis is not dry, irrelevant or amoral, it should be subjective purposes to use in resolving social problems.

3. What can be learned from policy analysis? • Description: to describe public policy, to learn what government is doing (and not doing) in welfare, defense, education, civil rights, health, the environment, taxation, and so on. • What do the Medicaid and Medicare programs promise for the poor and the aged? How much money are we paying in taxes? How large is the national debt? These are examples of descriptive questions.

3. What can be learned from policy analysis? • Causes: to inquire about the causes of public policy. Why is the public policy what it is? Why do government do what they do? We might inquire about the effects of political institutions, processes, and behaviors on public policy.

society, political system, public policy • See figure 1-3, we can find three parts: • These social and economic conditions including: wealth and income, inflation, recession, unemployment, educational achievement, enviornment quality, poverty, racial composition, religious and ethnic make-up, health and longevity, inequality, discrimination. • The political system consists of: federalism, separation of powers, checks and balances, parties, interest groups, voting behavior, bereaucraft, power structures, congress, president, courts. • These public policies including: civil rights, educational policies, welfare policies, health care policies, criminal justice, taxation, spending and deficit, defense policies, regulations. • What is the impact of lobbying by the special interests on efforts to reform the federal tax system? We can also inquire about the effects of social, economic and cultural forces in shaping public policy. • For example, what are the effects of recessions on government spending? What is the effect of an increasingly older population on the social security and Medicare programs?

3. What can be learned from policy analysis? • Consequences: we can inquire about the consequences and impacts of public policy, that is, to evaluate policy. • See linkage F in figure 1-3, we can inquire about the effects of public policy on political institutions and processes. What is the impact of deficit reduction efforts on the president’s popularity? • We also want to examine the impact of public policies on conditions in society (linkage D in figure 1-3), does capital punishment help to deter crime? Are welfare programs a disincentive to work?

4. Policy analysis and policy advocacy • Explaining the causes and consequnces of various policies is not equivalent to prescribing what policies government ought to pursue. • Learning why government do what they do and what the consequences of their actions are is not the same as saying what government ought to do or bringing about changes in what they do. • Policy analysis encourages scholars and students to attack critical policy issues with the tool of systematic inquiry. • Policy advocacy requires the skills of rhetoric, persuasion, organization, and activism.

4. Policy analysis and policy advocacy • A primary concern with explanation rather than prescription. • Policy recommendations are subordinate to description and explanation. • A rigorous search for the causes and consequences of public policy. This search involes the use of scientific standards and techniques of inference.

4. Policy analysis and policy advocacy • An effort to develop and test general propositions about the causes and consequences of public policy and to accumulate reliable research findings of general relevenece. • The object of policy analysis is to develop general theories and explanations that fit more than one policy decision or case study—the theories and explanations that stand up over time.

4. Policy analysis and policy advocacy • We should remember that policy issues are decided not by analysts but by political actors. Public policies do not always work as intended. • Political interesters will accept, reject, or use findings to fit their own purposes.

5. Policy analysis and the quest for solutions to social problems • Dose policy analysis can solve crime, poverty, racial conflict, inequality, poor housing, ill health, pollution, congestion, and unhappy lives which have affected people and societies for a long time? • Although it may be very difficult to solve these problems, our striving for a better society should be tempered. There are many reasons for tempering our energy for policy analysis.

5. Policy analysis and the quest for solutions to social problems • Limits on government power. It is not clear that government policies could cure all or even most of society’s ills. Governments are constrained by many powerful social forces, such as patterns of family life, class structure, religious beliefs and so on. Some of society’s problems are very intractable.

5. Policy analysis and the quest for solutions to social problems • Disagreement on the problem. Policy analysis can not offer solutions to problems when there is no general agreement on what the problems are. • Educational policy is a good example. Is that raising achievement level a suitable goal to evaluate educational policy? The answer is very not sure. Some educators argue that schools must reach more broadly goals than raising achievement level, such as to develop positive self-images among pupils of all races and backgrounds, encourage social awareness and the appreciation of multiple culture, teach children to respect one another and to resolve their differences peacefully, raise children’s awareness of the dangers of drugs and educate them about sex and sexual transmitted diseases, and so on. • Policy analysis is also not capable of resolving value conflicts.

5. Policy analysis and the quest for solutions to social problems • Subjectivety in interpretation. Policy analysis deals with very subjective topics and must rely on interpretation of results. • Social science research cannot be value-free. Even the selection of the topic for research is affected by one’s values about what is important in society and worthy of attention.

5. Policy analysis and the quest for solutions to social problems • Limitations on design of human resource. Policy analysis, as other social science research, is not really possible to conduct some forms of controlled experiments on human beings. Moreever, even where some experimentation is permitted, human beings frequently modify their behavior simply because they know that they are being observed in an experimental situation.

5. Policy analysis and the quest for solutions to social problems • Complexity of human behavior. • Social problems are so complex that social scienists are unable to make accurate predictions about the impact of proposed policies. • Social scienists simply do not know enough about individual and group behavior to be able to give reliable advice to policymakers. • Most of society’s problems are shaped by so many variables that a simple explanation of them or remedy for them is rarely possible. • Social scienists usually give contradictory or inaccurate advices, and policymakers still must make decisions. • Even if social scienists cannot predict the impact of future, they can at least attempt to measure the impact of current and past public policies and make this knowledge available to decision makers.

6. Policy analysis as art and craft • Public policy is both an art and a craft. • It is an art because it requires insight, experience, creativity, and imagination in identifying social problems and describing them, in devising public policies that might alleviate them, in finding out whether these policies end up making things better or worse.

6. Policy analysis as art and craft • It is a craft because these tasks usually require some knowledge of economics, political science, public administration, sociology, law, and statistics. Policy analysis is really an applied subfield of all these traditional academic disciplines. • There is no any single model or method that is perfectable to all other, or that consistently renders the best solutions to public problems.

6. Policy analysis as art and craft • Policy analysis is one activity for which there can be no fixed program, for policy analysis is synonymous with creativity, which may be stimulated by theory and sharpened by practice, which can be learned but not taught. • In large part, it must be admitted, knowledge is negative. It tells us what we cannot do, where we cannot go, wherein we have been wrong, but not necessarily how to correct thses errors. After all, if current efforts were judged wholly satisfactory, there would be little need for analysis and less for analysts.

7. Some questions • What is public policy? What can be learned from policy analysis? • In your country, what are the first three largest public spending? • As Figure 1-1 the growth of government, why had the size of government grown so fast in last century? • Why the author said “public policy analysis is as craft and art”? • What are the limits of policy analysis?

Public Policy Analysis