To What Extent And How Do Ideas, Values and Analysis Influence Public Policy?

To What Extent And How Do Ideas, Values and Analysis Influence Public Policy?

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm….

Difficult to separate them:

Gestalt: A physical, biological, psychological, or symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts.

Lets Try To Look at it in terms of economic reform: Ideas?

· Comparative government authors such as Bennett and Kerr used the Convergence Thesis, which argued that as countries industrialise there is a convergence of policy as a result of similar problems being thrown up. Is that to do with values or implementation of ideas.

· Wilensky felt that these correlations were more significant than political ones in explaining the introduction of public policy

· However, the theory ignored details such as welfare efforts, this showed a divergence of policy between similar countries.

· Was Keynesian theory an example of analysis, ideas or values? Similarly Free Market economics, could that be said to have the same ratio between these concepts.

· The economy runs according to an economic cycle, with different ideologies dealing with it in different ways (values), such as Keynesianism borrowing to increase growth and relieve unemployment or the Friedmanite idea of deflating the economy to reduce inflation and increasing productivity by not giving union members extra cucumber sandwiches.

The Analysis

· But what about analysis (excluding economists using numbers (BUT DOES THAT COUNT AS ANALYSIS!?!?!?)? The proximity to elections, when people, journos, even politicians all start thinking about what everybody is doing and talking about it, we will call analysis. (Yay, a separation!) The Chancellor with his budget and other policy people all get THE FEAR, so the analysis has a bearing on them having lots of fluffy policies and friendly budgets in the runup to May 4^th.

· Anthony Downs argued that specific issues that momentarily capture public attention can result in specific demands for government. He felt though that these would usually fade away as the complexity or intractability of the problem became apparent to the public:

o “A specific attention cycle seems strongly to influence public attitudes and behaviour concerning most key domestic problems. Each of these problems suddenly leaps into prominence, remains there for a short time, and then – through still largely unresolved – gradually fades from the center of public attention.” (1972: 38) This is partly, he argues as the public gets bored of the issue, despite suffering from it

· Baumgarter and Jones suggested that “when they are portrayed as technical problems than as social questions, experts dominate the decision-making process. When the ethical, social or political implications of such policies assume center stage, a much broader range of participants can suddenly become involved.”

The Values

· Howlett and Ramesh claim that there has been a shift in government procedure. They argue that the idea that problems having an ‘objective’ existence waiting to be ‘recognised’ by governments has been replaced by the notion that the recognition is a socially constructed process, involving “definitions of normalcy and what constitutes an undesirable deviation from that status.”

· Murray Edelman (1988: 12-13) felt that problems emerge from ideologies and these create even larger divisions.

· Howlett and Ramesh point out that ideology is useful in enabling people to understand complex issues easier, especially in identifying key actors in political processes and their motivations. However, they point out that this does not necessarily translate easily into specific policy problems. They felt that scholars such as Stimson and Lewis-Beck argued that even though it can result in specific people being elected for certain positions the link to shaping policy was indirect.

· However, it was felt that principled beliefs and casual stories would have more influence on policy recognition and content.

The Funnel Of Causality

· Hofferbent and Simeon suggested that policymaking occurs within institutions, that institutions exist within prevailing sets of ideas and ideologies, ideologies within relations of power in society, and relations of power within a larger social and material environment.

· The synthetic nature of the model enables it allows for discussion between alternate viewpoints to take place, while leaving it to empirical studies to determine any direct relationship between the central variables. However, this also means that it does little to explain differences in specific cases. Howlett and Ramesh give an example, questioning how one issue might be influenced by ideas and another, for example, by governmental factors such as the environmental factors is not broached, let along resolved. Similarly, Mazmanian and Sabatier argued that the funnel of causality model says very little about how multiply-mediated general forces such as the environmental context, ideas, and economic interests are actually manifested by policy actors in the agenda-setting process.

Windows

· Kingdon suggested that there exists windows for policy reform, either through a change in the political stream or when there is a new problem. He gave four different principled window types:

o Routinized political windows, in which institutionalised procedural events dictate predictable window openings;

o Discretionary political windows, in which the behaviour of individual political actors leads to less predictable window openings;

o Spillover problem windows, in which related issues are drawn into an already open window; and

o Random problem windows, in which random events or crises open unpredictable windows.

· Like that concept, makes it easier to work out what influences policy rather than “ideas”, “values” and “analysis”. Sneer

These notes were written in February 2005