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Public Policy and Governance extensive summary of assigned readings
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This is an extensive summary of all the readings for PPG. I got a 7.9 as a end grade for this course. Good luck studying!
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PPG SummariesWeek 1
Public policy 1-12
Introduction
● Public policy is about who gets what, when and how, defined in Lasswell’s sense by
concentrating on how politics (influence and the influential) determines public policy.
● Policy-making process cannot be understood without reference to policy making, which
refers to a series of decisions made by public actors such as governments, as well as
private actors such as interest groups.
● The study of public policies seeks to understand their production and effects
● If policy outputs and policy effects are the core topics of public policy, their study
generally focuses on two fundamental issues: policy variation and policy change. Policy
variation refers to the explanation of differences between public policies across sectors
and countries.
● Public policy analysis often adopts a comparative research perspective and examines
policy changes not only over time, but also across countries and different policy sectors
such as environmental or social policy. with regard to policy change, the central focus is
on the explanation of stability and change.
What is a Public Policy?
● Polity, Politics and policy
o There are three major subjects’ areas in Political science that cut across the
different subdisciplines: polity (institutional structures, characterizing a
political system), politics (political processes, political cleavages between
parties, and voter behaviour in legislative bodies) and policy (analysis of the
outputs of a political system, like decisions, measures, strategies and courses
of section adopted by government/legislative bodies).
o Policy studies must not exclude the dimensions of polity and politics when
describing and explaining policy decisions.
● Elements of a Public Policy
o Public policy can be defined as a course of action (or non-action) taken by a
government or legislature with regard to a particular issue, it emphasizes two
constitutive elements actions of public actors (governments) and
governmental actions focus on a specific issue, implying that the scope of
activities is restricted to addressing a certain aspect or problem.
o However, this definition is sometimes argued too wide with regard to public
actions, some authors insist that the presence of a policy requires the adoption
, of a larger number of related legislative and administrative activities. Other
scholars adopt a narrower definition and consider single governmental
decisions or legal acts as public policies.
o In this book, it is argued that the extent to which the presence of a public
policy requires only one type of action or a system of (interrelated) actions
(“policy bundles”)
o On the one hand, policies are seen as governmental activities made in response
to given societal or political problems on the other hand, it is seen that the
existence and design of policies are intended to protect interests of certain
groups, while disadvantagering others.
o While the design of a given public policy might reflect the differential power
resources of social groups, this need not to call into question the requirement
for a specific problem to exist or to be perceived in order for the
policy-making process to be initiated. as a consequence. The problem-solving
and power perspectives on public policy-making seem in practice to be
compatible with each other.
● Different in Scope: sectors, targets and instruments
o Sector-specific measures: often used to cover a whole range of different
measures in a certain sector such as environmental policy, social policy,
economic policy etc.
o Subfield-specific measures: with regard to environmental policy, for example,
subsectors refer to water policy, clean air policy, climate change policy etc.
o Specific issues in the subfield: for example, clean air policy as a subfield, such
targets include industrial discharges of different pollutants, urban air quality,
and car exhaust emissions. Hence a legal act – even if it is a markedly specific
one – can address more than one policy target. (Feed-in tariffs)
o Regulatory instruments connected to the issue refers to its connection with
regulatory instruments. While policy targets refer to what a legal act regulates,
policy instruments define how those targets are regulated. For example, the
main task of immigration policy is to regulate how many, the most common
instrument is the establishment of a preference systems based on quotas,
targets etc.(level of feed-in tariffs)
Analytical perspectives on the Policy-making process
● Now take a closer look at the specific phenomena characterizing the policy-making
process.
● While the rationalist approach defines an ideal conception of how policies should
develop, the incrementalist perspective provides an explanation for the fact that in reality
this ideal is hardly ever reached. A more radical view is the one advanced by the
, “garbage can” model, which emphasizes that the public policies often reveal the opposite
pattern to that envisaged by rationalist models.
● The rationalist approach
o Conceives of policy-making as a process of problem-solving, and prescribes an
ideal conception of how policy-making should be organized and evolve in
order to achieve optimal solutions to the underlying policy problems.
o Lassewell´s and how to optimally develop public policies promotion
(identification and support of selected alternatives), intelligence (collection of
relevant info), invocation (policy enforcement), termination (abrogation of
policy) and appraisal (evaluation of policy effects against backdrop of initial
intentions).
● Incrementalist approach
o Explicitly rejected the idea of public policy being made on the basis of a fully
rational decision-making process.
o Public policy is regarded as the political of the interaction of various actors
possessing different types of information. These actors need to make
concessions, and therefore policy-makers primarily concentrate on aspects
that are less controversial and more technical. This process of “partisan
mutual adjustment” can only lead to one outcome: incremental policy change.
o Implies that policy-makers act within the context of limited information, the
cognitive restriction of their minds and the finite amount of time available for
policy-making – all of which are largely congruent with the concepts of
bounded rationality (rationality is limited when individuals make decision)
o Decision-makers apply their rationality after having greatly simplified the
choices available: turning them into satisficers, who seek a satisfactory
solution rather than the optimal one.
● The garbage can model
o Decisions do not follow an orderly process from problem to solution, but are
the outcomes of several relatively independent streams of events, namely
problems, solution, choice opportunities and participants.
o Disconnects problems, solutions and decision-makers from each other.
o In contrast to the conventional view that problems trigger decision-making
processes, the garbage can model assumes that usually the involved actors
within an organization go through the “garbage” first and look for a suitable
fix. Hence the solutions exist and develop independently of problems
o Solutions are prepared without knowledge of the problems they might have to
solve.
o Participants may differ between the two streams: the actors involved in the
development of solution might be different from those who discuss the
definition of the respective policy problems
, ● Stages of the Policy Process
o To what extent is it analytically useful to distinguish between different stages
of the policy process.
o Distinction of different policy stages that can be integrated into a process
model: the famous policy cycle phase 1 problem definition and
agenda-setting, 2) policy formulation 3) implementation and 4) evaluation
(with the possibility of termination or reformulation) rationalist approach
o This book considers it more useful to conceive of the different policy stages as
potential analytical lenses on the policy-making process.
o We consider the distinction of different stages as a heuristic tool that helps us
investigate the process of policy-making from different analytical angles
Opportunities and challenges for Policy-Making
● Concentrate on three developments that have noticeably affected policy-making
o Budgetary constraints that governments face and which affect state
organization and policy-making. for example the economic crisis of 2007-08,
it is argued that the economic hardship experienced by European countries
forced governments to implement similar sets of austerity policies.
o Ongoing process of economic globalization, which poses limits on what
governments can do in order to address policy problems. Climate change is a
well know example where the emission of greenhouse gases by some
countries can potentially affect all other countries and where economic
interests shape countries policy approaches to mitigate climate change.
o Digitalization and the growing importance of the internet/social media for
supplying information on policy proposals and their effects challenge
policymaking since they have changed how people inform themselves, which
can lead to a gap between what policy-makers think is important and what the
public thinks policy-makers should address.
Studying Public Policy: The approach and structure of this book
● Dominant themes that guide the study of public policy: the explanation of policy
variation and policy change across countries and policy sectors.
● Book formulates three guiding questions that we will repeatedly address throughout this
book
o How do public policy come about?
o When does policy change happen?
o What are the effects of public policies?
● Differentiate between three analytical steps that are the following
● Basic analytical tools, concepts and theories
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