Public Policy Development Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

There is the story that when asked about the making of American foreign policy, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger reportedly responded, “We don’t really make policy, instead we make a series of decisions that eventually become the policy.” This anecdote illustrates the difficulties in understanding what policies are, when they emerge, or why. The most important things governments do is make policy. Yet, despite the centrality of those actions to the lives of most Americans, scholars and practitioners are frequently at a loss to explain why governments do what they do, and when they do it—or do not do it. This loss, however, is not for a lack of trying. Over the last several decades, there has been no paucity of theories put forward to account for the birth, life, and death of public policies.

Some theories look at the course of government over long periods of time. Still others seek to explain policy from an intermediate or more immediate time frame. Theories also differ in terms of their specificity. Some, like historian Arthur Schlesinger’s cyclical thesis, address the overall thrust of policy—in his case whether governments pursue a public or a private agenda over the course of a century. Other explanations concentrate on a single policy, such as education, welfare, or health care. Then there are those theories that focus on a single aspect of the policy process, such as agenda setting, decision making, implementation, or policy termination. Not surprisingly, there are numerous perspectives on how decisions are made; these include models of rational decision making, bounded rationality, incrementalism, group think, and even a model of decision making described as the garbage can model.

A sampling of theories that have been used to account for policy development can provide a sense of the variety of considerations that drive the development of public policy. While significant examples come from the United States, many of the explanations for these can and have been used to account for the actions of governments elsewhere in the world. Three sets of examples provide these models. The first takes a long-term, historical perspective on policy development; the second looks at the policy process over an intermediate time perspective; and the third describes and explains policy decisions that occur over relatively short periods of time. In each case, the models of policy development provide important clues to account for a signature feature of U.S. public policy—the tendency toward long-term policy stability interrupted only occasionally by large scale policy change.

A Historical Perspective

One useful way to look at how policies develop is to view them from a long-term or historical perspective. The obvious advantage of a historical perspective is that it allows a view of how policies emerge, endure (or not), and evolve over long period of times.

Development of U.S. public policy in the twentieth century is a good example of how a long-term perspective can highlight how “policies of the day” fit more enduring patterns of governance and politics. Historians generally agree that U.S. politics over the period from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries saw three periods of an unusually active federal government—the Progressive Era (1890–1930), the New Deal (1930–1950) and the Great Society (1960–1980). During each era, popular presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Baines Johnson, led the nation on a path of substantial public intervention in the social, economic, and political lives of its citizens.

During the Progressive Era, Theodore Roosevelt and other progressives sought to reform government by replacing patronage with merit and appointing professionals rather than elected officials to do the day-to-day administration of government. Other reforms included child safety laws, workplace safety rules, and the adoption of the federal income tax.

During the New Deal period, the nation saw a dramatic increase in the role of the federal government as Franklin Roosevelt sought to end the Great Depression through programs aimed at reforming the financial sector and providing relief to America’s farmers and workers. During his first term, America saw the creation of an “alphabet soup” of legislation, new programs, and new agencies including the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The most important piece of the New Deal was the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935, which provided compensation for the unemployed, pensions for the elderly, and welfare relief for the poor.

The New Frontier and Great Society initiatives of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson expanded the reach of the national government even more by enacting major civil rights legislation, creating Medicare and Medicaid, and waging the War on Poverty.

What is equally striking about each era of government expansion is the push back that almost immediately followed each “burst” of federal energy. In the 1920s, the election of Warren Harding ushered in a “new era” of conservatism that shifted the focus from public to the private sector as the free market was given free reign in America. During the 1920s America prospered, consumers consumed, and American manufacturing grew dramatically. For its part, the federal government promoted the private sector by lowering taxes, raising tariffs, and scaling back its efforts to regulate the business sector.

A similar resurgence of conservatism and retreat from public activism occurred following the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as the American public turned to a military hero, Dwight Eisenhower, to lead an increasingly conservative nation. As Arthur Schlesinger notes, “In the 1950s as in the 1920s, public purpose receded, private motives predominated. The Eisenhower years provided a needed respite amidst the storms of the twentieth century.” More recently, the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 signaled the latest round of conservative backlash as Reagan and others sought to get government “off the backs of the American people” while finding new ways to infuse market principals and mechanisms into the public sector.

To explain this pattern of lurching from the public to the private sector and back again, Schlesinger offers a cyclical thesis to account for these developments. Approximately every thirty years throughout the twentieth century, national policy cycled from periods of intense public action to a retreat to the private sector, only to eventually cycle into a new era of public action. In describing the nation’s mood following the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Schlesinger notes: “After two decades of unrelenting public purpose, the American people were worn out. Their capacity for further response to crisis was spent. They were disenchanted with discipline, sacrifice, and intangible goals. They had had their fill of crusades.”

Similar developments occurred toward the end of the New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. The turbulence of the sixties surrounding the Vietnam War (1959–1975), the civil rights movement, and the War on Poverty led to a similar withdrawal from the public sector.

By the later 1970s Americans were once more, as they had been in the 1950s and 1920s, fed up with public action and disenchanted by its consequences. The compass needle now swung toward private interest and the fulfillment of self. However, it did not take much time for subsequent generations to tire of the narrow pursuit of private interests and embrace a new burst of public energy and national goals. Typically, a “detonating” issue prompted the shift, including economic trusts in the 1920s, the depression of the 1930s, and racial injustice in the 1960s.To account for such policy dynamics, Schlesinger maintains that policy cycles are simply the natural order of things.

The roots of this cyclical self-sufficiency doubtless are deep in the natural life of humanity. There is a cyclical pattern in organic nature—in the tides in the season, in night and day, in the systole and diastole of the human heart, and so on. There is also a cyclical basis in the very psychology of modernity. With the acceleration in the rate of social change, humans become creatures characterized by inextinguishable discontent. For Schlesinger, however, the real impetus for change lies with intergenerational conflict. He states, “Each new generation, when it attains power, tends to repudiate the work of the generation it has displaced and to reenact the ideals of its own formative days thirty years before.”

Intermediate Perspectives

Models of political change that look at development from an intermediate time perspective offer alternative explanations of U.S. public policy development. Paul Sabatier and Hank Jenkins-Smith’s advocacy coalition framework and Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones’s punctuated equilibrium theory each acknowledge the propensity for long-term policy stability, but point to different dynamics to account for that tendency in American policy.

Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith’s advocacy coalition framework provides an excellent example of theories that seek to explain policy change and development from a somewhat shorter time frame. The advocacy coalition framework begins with the premise that policies are made and change within relatively stable policy subsystems. Policy subsystems are made up of “those actors from a variety of public and private organizations who are actively concerned with a policy problem or issue, such as air pollution control, and who regularly seek to influence public policy in that domain.” Policy actors include those within and outside of governments and include administrative agencies, legislative committees, interest groups, journalists, and scholars from all levels of government—national, subnational, and, increasingly, international. Actors within the policy subsystem are typically organized into two to four competing advocacy coalitions; advocacy coalitions are groups of policy actors who share common policy beliefs and seek public policies that will achieve the group’s policy goals. Those policy beliefs are crucial to both holding policy coalitions together and setting their action agendas.

According to Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, those policy beliefs operate like belief systems and include “value priorities, perceptions of important causal relationships, perceptions of world states (including the magnitude of the problem), and perceptions/assumptions concerning the efficacy of various policy instruments.” At the most general level are the deep core beliefs that include “basic ontological and normative beliefs, such as the relative valuation of individual freedom versus social equality, which operate across virtually all policy domains.” Not surprising, these values and beliefs are the most enduring and resistant to change. At the next level are those policy core beliefs, which speak to the coalition’s normative and empirical beliefs concerning value priorities (e.g., natural security versus the right to privacy), the causes and magnitude of policy problems, and assumptions about the best policies for addressing those policy problems. At the remaining level are those secondary aspects of the coalition’s system of beliefs, shared by some but not necessarily all coalition members, concerning things like support for specific policy actions, perceptions of the causes and seriousness of particular problems in various locales, or beliefs concerning the performance of various policy actors.

Armed with fairly unique and conflicting policy beliefs and the group’s resources and strategies, advocacy coalitions compete with one another to enact public policies that achieve their respective policy goals. Given the rigidity of each coalition’s fundamental beliefs, it is not surprising that little policy change occurs, particular where the differences between each coalition’s fundamental beliefs are substantial. In those instances, the policy brokers—those elected and unelected government officials seeking to mediate the conflict between competing advocacy coalitions—can, at best, reach agreement on relatively incremental changes in policy. As a result, barring major change in the setting in which subsystems operate, policies will remain stable for periods of a decade or more.

According to Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, major policy change is most likely to occur as a result of large-scale changes in the social, economic, or political environment. Examples in recent decades include the Great Depression in the 1930s or the election of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Less frequently, significant policy change can result from policy-oriented learning. While fundamental beliefs are rarely changed, there are occasions when experiences and new information lead coalition members to reexamine critical policy beliefs. For example, many environmental groups are more willing today to consider market mechanisms, like cap and trade policies, as a means to regulate pollution. Yet, the fundamental value of protecting the environment and reducing emissions has not changed. Instead, at least some environmentalists have concluded that alternatives to a command-and-control approach to regulation can achieve pollution reductions.

To determine when change induced by policy learning is likely to occur, Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith argue that learning-induced change will take place when the following conditions are met: (1) disagreements between advocacy coalitions are moderate and occur at the policy and secondary levels, not at the level of fundamental normative beliefs; (2) the problem being addressed involves “natural” systems, not political or social systems; and (3) professional norms and “accepted” quantitative data and theory are brought to the discussion.

Baumgartner and Jones offer a second perspective that considers policy change from an intermediate time frame. Like Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith and Schlesinger, Baumgartner and Jones are struck by how “political processes are often driven by a logic of stability and incrementalism, but occasionally they also produce large-scale departures from the past. ”Their explanation of large-scale changes, punctuated equilibrium theory, focuses on the fragmented nature of America’s political system and the process of issue definition and agenda setting. A constitutional framework—one that relies on a separation of powers and federalism to allocate power and responsibility among numerous branches and levels of government—fragments politics and policy in America. Given the size and complexity of a fragmented political system, the normal course of events is for key policy actors to defer to the policy decisions of policy subsystems. These subsystems include relatively small groups of interest groups, legislators, and executive branch officials who share common interests and beliefs within substantive policy areas. The result is that policy subsystems, and the public policies they promote, enjoy a monopoly over policy within their domain for relatively long periods of time. Consequently, policies change very little.

However, the same institutional fragmentation that promotes policies’ monopolies can also help break up those monopolies by moving the discussion of public issues from the micro level to the macro level of U.S. politics. According to Baumgartner and Jones, this likely occurs when issue definitions are changing and receiving greater media and public attention. During periods of policy stasis, policy actors within the subsystem subscribe to a single policy image—the prevailing mix of empirical and normative beliefs that undergird existing policies. The decentralization of U.S. politics can provide competing groups the opportunity to “venue shop” for other forums to gain support for new policy images, and this allows events to challenge the image and proponents of an alternative policy perspective, and often move the issue to the national agenda.

In the 1970s, both civil rights advocates and environmental groups moved the discussion of each of their cases from the state to the national level and were able to mobilize support among members of Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court. More recently, policy activists have returned to the states for relief. Unable to motivate federal action on global warming, for example, environmentalists successfully lobbied a number of state governments to require reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.

Short-Term Perspectives

Three models of decision making provide additional insight into how policies develop in general, and why policy in the United States seems to remain stable over long periods of time. These models include incrementalism, bounded rationality, and groupthink.

The incremental model of decision making is essentially a political model of how policies are made in the United States. Like Baumgartner and Jones and others, proponents of an incremental perspective view U.S. politics as highly fragmented and decentralized. This results from the constitutional provisions of federalism and a separation of powers, and a two-party system that motivates both parties to move to the ideological center to win elections and the plurality of interests that exist in American society. In that setting, policies develop out of the competition and bargaining between competing interests at multiple levels and branches of government. Given the high decision costs of reaching compromises, politics tend to change slowly and only at the margin (i.e., incrementally).

The model of bounded rationality, offered by James March and Herbert Simon, also predicts that policies will typically change slightly—if at all—but for different reasons. According to these scholars, individuals and organizations are limited in their capacity to obtain and analyze the information they need to make truly rational decisions. In a state of bounded rationality, individuals and organizations employ decision-making processes that limit the number of policy alternatives and the amount of consideration given to those alternatives. In normal or routine policy situations, policy makers tend to look at “old” solutions and decision processes (i.e., standard operating procedures); they limit the search for additional policy options, and analyze options sequentially. They also “satisfice” by selecting the first policy option that meets minimal expectations. While critics argue that limited search ignores the full range of policy options and their potential consequences, advocates of the model maintain that a satisficing approach to policy making is a realistic response to limits on rationality and dramatically reduces the time and costs it takes to make decisions.

Social psychologist Irving Janis developed a model of decision making in which key decision makers are primarily concerned with maintaining group unanimity. The tendency to fall victim to groupthink most likely occurs during crisis periods, and also when policy makers come from similar backgrounds and share basic beliefs, and when they are insulated from outside information and lack a tradition of impartial leadership.

Based on his analysis of several foreign policy failures, including the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Vietnam War, Janis identified eight symptoms of groupthink: (1) an illusion of invulnerability, excessive optimism, and a willingness to take extreme risks; (2) a belief in the group’s morality; (3) a tendency to discount information inconsistent with the group’s decision; (4) a propensity to stereotype the enemy as either evil or inept, or both; (5) self-censorship; (6) an overestimation of the group’s consensus; (7) pressure on members to conform to the group’s pervading beliefs; and (8) the emergence of self-appointed “mind guards” to guard against information that challenges the group’s position. According to Janis, when a majority of these symptoms are present, decision making is likely to be characterized by the incomplete consideration of goals and alternative courses of action, a failure to consider risks, a tendency to filter information that is inconsistent with the preferred policy, and the lack of a contingency plan. The result is, once again, little policy change and little opportunity for policy learning.

Critics of the George W. Bush administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq contend that the president and his advisers were “victims of groupthink” during the course of the war. Critics point to a number of administrative actions as evidence: the selective use of intelligence to make the case that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and long-standing ties to the group responsible for the attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center in 2001; the tendency to underestimate the difficulty and expense of the war; and a tendency to divide the nations of the world into “those who are with us and those who are against us.”

Conclusion

There is no shortage of perspectives on how public polices develop. Taken together, those and other perspectives support a number of conclusions concerning the development of public policy in the United States. First, there is general consensus that policies develop in small steps and endure for relatively long periods of time. Second, that tendency toward stability reflects the fragmented character of the U.S. political system, a pluralism of interests, and an inherent resistance among many Americans to abandon deeply held beliefs that form the basis for public policy. Third, major policy shifts typically require major changes in the larger political, economic, or social system, such as the Great Depression, the racial strife of the 1960s, or the election of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

Bibliography:

Baumgartner, Frank R., and Bryan D. Jones. Agendas and Instability in American Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Huntington, Samuel P. American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1981.
Janis, Irving. Victims of Groupthink. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972.
Kingdon, John W. Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies. 2nd ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.
Lindblom, Charles. “The Science of Muddling Through.” Public Administration Review 19, no. 2 (1959): 79–88.
March, James, and Johan Olsen, eds. Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations. Bergen, Norway: Universitelsforlaget, 1979.
March, James, and Herbert Simon. Organizations. 2nd ed. Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1993.
Sabatier, Paul A., ed. Theories of the Policy Process. Boulder: Westview Press, 1999.
Sabatier, Paul A., and Hank C. Jenkins-Smith. “The Advocacy Coalition Framework: An Assessment.” In Sabatier, Theories of the Policy Process. Policy Change and Learning. Boulder:Westview Press, 1993.
Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Cycles of American History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986.
Simon, Herbert. Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organizations. 2nd ed. New York: Free Press, 1957.
Skocpol,Theda. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. London: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
True, James L., Bryan D. Jones, and Frank R. Baumgartner. “Punctuated equilibrium Theory: Explaining Stability and Change in American Policymaking.” In Sabatier, Theories of the Policy Process, 97.

This example Public Policy Development Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.