Comparative Public Policy Midterm

Rational-comprehensive model

The ideal type of decision-making when it comes to public policy but does not actually exist (not possible)
(1) We make decisions by first identifying what problems are
(2) Identify every possible solution to that problem (not just plausible one, all theoretical ones)
(3) for each of the policy options, have to make a list of all the pros and cons for each
(4) rank order these from the best to worst then choose the best one

Assumptions of rational comprehensive model

1. The decision-maker is confronted with a given problem that can be separated from other problems, or at least considered meaningfully in comparison with them
2. The goals, values, or objectives that guide the decision-maker are clarified and ranked according to their importance
3. A complete set of alternative policies for dealing with the problem are prepared
4. The consequences that would follow from the selection of each alternative are investigated
5. Each alternative, and its attendant consequences, can be calculated and compared with the other alternatives (Pareto optimality-->1 person better off, no one worse and Kaldor criterion-->more benefits than costs, doesn't matter if someone suffers)
6. The decision-maker chooses that alternative that maximizes the attainment of his or her goals, values, and objectives

Criticisms of rational comprehensive model

1. It is extremely difficult to define the nature of a problem and to separate out its various aspects. For example, what is the nature of the crime problem? What is crime caused by? Environmental factors? Individual defects? Until one knows exactly what causes a problem, it is difficult to set forth alternatives that can be weighted and evaluated.
2. The demands it places on the decision-maker. It assumes that one has complete information on various alternatives for dealing with a problem and that one will be able to predict the consequences with complete accuracy; thus, one will be able to make cost-benefit comparisons/calculations for each alternative. In reality, this is unlikely to be the case.
3. Even with the most advanced computer techniques, decision-makers do not have the intellectual capacity, nor the judgment, to calculate cost-benefit ratios when a large number of diverse political, social, economic, and cultural values are at stake. In addition, decision-makers are often motivated not by societal goals, but by self-serving goals; they are interested in alternatives that work for them (or their party). Decision-makers have personal needs, inhibitions, and inadequacies that prevent them from behaving in a highly rational manner.
4. There is the problem of sunk costs. Previous decisions, commitments, and investments in existing policies and programs prevent decision-makers from re-considering alternatives that have been foreclosed in previous decisions. Moreover, uncertainty about policy consequences of new choices compels decision-makers to stick closely to previous policies to reduce the possibilities for error in judgment.
5. The rational-comprehensive model assumes the existence of a unitary decision-maker. This is rarely the case in reality, in that decisions are made by legislative bodies, plural-headed agencies, or multiple member courts.
6. Time-consuming/inefficient
7. People's ideas of what is a good/rational solution differs
8. Could lead to chaos

Incrementalism

1. The selection of goals or objectives and the empirical analyses of the action needed to attain them are closely intertwined with, rather than distinct from, one another.
2. The decision-maker considers only some of the alternatives for dealing with a problem, which will differ only incrementally from existing policies.
3. For each alternative, only a limited number of important consequences are evaluated.
4. The problem confronting the decision-maker is continually redefined. Incrementalism allows for countless ends-means and means-ends adjustments that have the effect of making the problem more manageable.
Means that it is much easier to adjust when we are making incremental change. It is not hard to try different things and see what works. Allows for unlimited re-evaluation
5. There is no single "best" solution for a problem. The test of a good decision is that various analysts find themselves directly agreeing on it without agreeing that the decision is the most appropriate means to an agreed-upon objective, or for that matter, that there is a single goal.
6. Incremental decision-making is essentially remedial and is geared more to the improvement of the present, concrete social imperfections than to the promotion of future social goals.
Lindblom's view- "Public problem-solving proceeds less by aspiration toward a well-defined future state than by identified social ills that seem to call for remedy."

Assumptions of incremental decision making

1. Decision-makers do not have sufficient predictive capabilities to know all the consequences of each alternative
2. Decision-makers accept the legitimacy of previous policies
3. Sunk costs change in policy
4. Incrementalism reduces conflict and is politically expedient
5. The characteristics of the decision-makers themselves: humans are "satisficers" ex: budget making process

criticisms of the incremental model

A problem with incrementalism is that the people who are already in unfair situations who will benefit from changes in policy have to wait, and remain left behind until policy makers find something that works.
The gay community had to wait for the right to marry while it gradually became legalized instead of having it legalized all at once.
Remedial change does not get at the root problem, it only patches up continuous smaller issues that result from the inherent issues that are ingrained.
It only works for things that can move slowly, not things that need fast change or to be entirely rewritten

Bounded rationality

The theory that consumers have limited rational decision-making, driven by three main factors - cognitive ability, time constraint, and imperfect information.

Satisficing

choosing a "good enough" alternative mostly to appease the public

Pareto Optimality

Something is Pareto Optimal if it makes at least 1 person better off and nobody worse off

Kaldor Criterion

cost/benefit analysis
More benefits than costs to society
Utilitarian principle
Doesn't matter if some people suffer losses (redistributive policies (i.e., take from the rich and give to the poor)

Iron Triangle

Punctuated Equilibrium

Seeks to explain why long periods of stasis (stability/ incrementalism) are marked by periods of profound change that set policy in an entirely new direction.

Policy Formulation

Courses of action for dealing with a particular problem are identified and enacted into law
5 types of policy solutions (Deborah Stone):
Inducements (Can be negative or positive)
Ex. Positive: NJ STARS program (academic excellence rewarded with free community college)
Negative: Points on your license (effort to prevent reckless driving)
Rules-->Anything that dictates how to do something or how it has to be done
Ex: Mask mandates, Speed limits, Guidelines for probation
Facts--> Use information to persuade targeted groups/ sway public behavior
Ex:D.A.R.E., Play 60
Rights-->Giving groups the rights to make decisions over things
Ex: Civil rights/liberties, Right to attend a town council meeting, Right to have a service animal, Right to get an abortion, Right to vote, Right to refuse services (for businesses), Anything on the Bill of Rights and the Constitution
Powers--> Given power to induce decision making (ex.)
Sort of like a division of powers
Ex: Select committees, Federal Reserve, States powers vs. Federal powers, Power of titles (judges, police officers)

Parliamentary vs. Presidential Systems

Presidential: Terms are typically set in Presidential systems (4 years)
Congress varies (2 for Reps, 6 for Senators)
Separation of powers and system of checks and balances. Executive and legislative systems are separate in electoral mandates (could have divided government and thus a lot less policies)
Parliamentary: Prime Minister elected directly from Parliament (not the people)
Don't have a case where the legislative and executive branches are different parties
Prime minister is directed directly from parliament not the people (always of the same party, more policies)

Federal vs. Unitary Systems

-The extent to which power is centralized, or decentralized across divisions of government
-U.S: local, state, federal governments
Federal vs unitary systems (centralized v. decentralized)
Very different decision making process, much easier in unitary system to have national policies vs federal system where states have individual decision making power
Federal government will influence policies that they do not have power over with MONEY
Ex- getting states to change the maximum blood alcohol content allowed for drivers
Devolution of power- going from centralized power to then decentralizing power (like UK)
In federal government, power can be split by party and/or by level of government

What is public policy?

Dye says: "what governments do, why they do it, and what difference it makes"
Lasswell says: "a projected program of goals, values, and practices"
Easton says: "the impacts of government activity"
Ranney says: "a selected line of action or a declaration of intent"
Anderson says: "a purposive course of action followed by an actor or actors set of actions in dealing with a problem or matter of concern"

Why do we compare?

-To understand other countries/cultures/etc.
-Identify trends(where policies develop and how context shapes this)
-How are we doing? (Import-mirror) (Benchmarking)
-How do you tell how well you're doing in the absence of comparison?
-What is achievable and what is not through the policy process?
-To discover new ways of doing things/Generate new ideas

First stage of policy formulation

Identify the problem and decide to tackle it

Second stage of policy cycle

Policy Formulation:
-Courses of action for dealing with a particular problem are identified and enacted into law
5 types of policy solutions:
-Inducements (negative or positive)
Ex. tax credit for doing things that are right (P)/invoke fines (N) Positive: NJ STARS program (academic excellence rewarded with free community college)
Negative: Points on your license (effort to prevent reckless driving)
-Rules
Anything that dictates how to do something or how it has to be done. Ex: Mask mandates, Speed limits, Guidelines for probation
-Facts
Use information to persuade targeted groups/ sway public behavior Ex: D.A.R.E., Play 60
-Rights
Giving groups the rights to make decisions over things
Ex: Civil rights/liberties, Right to attend a town council meeting, Right to have a service animal, Right to get an abortion, Right to vote, Right to refuse services (for businesses), Anything on the Bill of Rights and the Constitution
-Powers
Given power to induce decision making (ex.)
Sort of like a division of powers, Select committees, Federal Reserve, States powers vs. Federal powers, Power of titles (judges, police officers)

Third stage of policy cycle

Decision Making: How do we pick between different options for enacting?

Fourth stage of policy cycle

Implementation: Put it into action

Fifth stage of policy cycle

Policy Evaluation: How well did our policy out of all our options work? Was it effective? Did it make a difference? Do we need to make changes?

5 stages of policy cycle

Agenda Setting, Policy Formulation, Decision Making, Implementation, Policy Evaluation

5 types of policy solutions (Deborah Stone):

-Inducements
Sin tax on alcohol and tobacco (N)
Points on license if speeding (N)
Kicking off netid to get everyone to upload vaccine (N)
Free beer, free things for vaccine (P)
Scholarships for doing certain schooling (P)
-Rules
Mask mandates
Speed limits
Guidelines of probation
Safety guidelines for buildings (railings, elevators, etc)
-Facts
D.A.R.E program -> education on drugs/alcohol
Play60 -> get out and be active campaign (Michelle Obama)
Click it or Ticket
Sexual harassment educational modules
-Rights
Right to attend town council meeting
Religious exemption of vaccine
Right to bring service dog places
Right to vote
Business's right to refuse service
-Powers
Federal reserve has certain powers
States powers vs federal powers
Power of job titles (judges can use discretion in court of law) (police can say they have suspicion beyond reasonable doubt)
-Actors in policy formulation
Government Agencies
The Presidency
Congress
Interest Groups

Chapter 1:

-Comparing public policies across nations can help us understand policy developments and related phenomena in our own country, as well as in other countries.
-Political scientists and sociologists have been comparing public policies for hundreds of years, although in the past comparison was often used as a means of legitimation for domestic policies, rather than for strictly scholarly purposes.
-Comparative public policy is defined here as the use of the comparative approach to investigate policy processes, outputs and outcomes.
-We can compare different nations, multinational groupings of countries, subnational units within countries, members of organizational classes, policy sectors, and time periods.
-The traditional distinction between the study of domestic policy- making (or 'low' politics), and international policy-making (or 'high' politics/foreign affairs) is starting to break down, with increasing numbers of studies in comparative public policy examining how domestic and international pressures on policy-making interrelate.

Chapter 2:

-There are a wide variety of policy instruments which governments can draw on. Policy instruments can be more or less coercive and direct in their impact. They may be targeted at government itself, or at individuals and organizations outside it.
-This book examines how governments use four different types of policy instruments: those involving the use of financial resources, authority, organization and the provision of information.
-Some authors have detected a transnational trend away from the use of taxation and spending as levers of public policy-making, and towards the use of indirect methods of policy-making and delivery - such as the provision of incentives and use of regulation.
-There is continuing debate over whether different national 'policy styles' can be identiied. Whilst some argue for the existence of national speciicities in policy processes, others claim that similarities are more evident between policy sectors (e.g. between different nation' health or education systems) than across all of a nation's policy sectors.
-Public policies, and the policy instruments used to implement them, can affect different groups in different ways. This impact can be explicit, through the targeting of certain groups, or implicit. Even ostensibly 'domestic' policies can affect people and organizations based in different countries.

Chapter 3:

-Comparative researchers face a number of choices: which units to compare, how to compare them, and how to draw conclusions from this comparison.
-A variety of research designs are available to researchers seeking to explain similarity or difference between the units they are comparing. These approaches include the methods of agreement and of difference, combinatorial analysis, and process tracing.
-As indicated in Chapter 1, comparative research can produce rich and compelling indings, but it is also subject to challenges which are arguably more acute than those faced by other ields of enquiry. In particular, comparative analysts need to beware of the Galton problem, and the problems of equivalence and of selection on the dependent variable. Although various solutions have been put forward to all these problems, they have their own advantages and disadvantages.
-Comparative public policy research can also involve considerable logistical challenges depending on the nature of the research team and policy area being studied.
-Numerous innovative approaches have been developed within the ield of comparative public policy which explicitly face up to its methodological and practical challenges. Increasingly, researchers are combining different methods in order to obtain richer, more robust indings.

Chapter 4:

-A number of analytical approaches suggest that interests are the most inluential factor within the policy process, and can explain policy differences between countries: rational choice theory; Marxism; and elitist, feminist and cleavage theories.
-Pluralism suggests that the policy process provides an arena for contestation between different groups. Typologies of interest groups which separate insider and outsider groups, or policy networks from policy communities, suggest that the inluence of different groups will depend on their relationship with government.
-Corporatism refers to a political system whereby the role of organized labour and business is institutionalized within the policy-making system.
'Power resource' theories suggest that the extent to which public policy will lead to a redistribution of resources is contingent on the power of the organized working class in parliament (through labour-representing parties). Challenges to power resource theories have suggested that policies can determine interests, as well as the other way around.
Whilst interest-based accounts have been extremely inluential, they can be criticized for often failing to explain the content of interests and the mechanisms whereby interests are translated into policy. In addition, few interest-based theories have been subjected to sustained empirical testing, and many have been seen as lacking in predictive value.

Chapter 5:

Traditional approaches to the analysis of public policy - such as policy design and policy-oriented research, as well as the ield of policy learning - allocate considerable importance to policy ideas. Studies of policy framing and issue attention focus on how ideas (amongst other factors) determine how particular issues become conceptualized as policy 'problems' or otherwise to differing extents in different nations.
Interpretivism and postmodernism both suggest that ideas uniquely determine policy, but their conception of the permanence of different types of ideas differs.
In practice, rather than focusing uniquely on ideas, many comparative public policy analyses have combined ideas with the study of interests (suggesting that ideas are functional to the pursuit of interests, or that ideas give content to interests); institutions (with institutions promoting particular ideas); and groups (with, again, some groups promoting particular ideas).
A perennial question for comparative public policy researchers who are focused on ideas concerns the situations under which policy-related ideas change or remain stable across different countries.

Chapter 6:

Institutions can be conceptualized as formal and informal sets of rules and norms.
Institutionalist comparative public policy has compared the impact of a variety of institutions on policy-making, including different types of state, electoral institutions and property institutions.
There are three main variants of 'new institutionalist' analysis: historical, sociological, and rational choice institutionalism. Historical institutionalism focuses on how institutions can constrain policy options into the future, through 'path dependence'.
Sociological institutionalism indicates how norms, values and culture have a relexive relationship with institutions - being both shaped by, and inluencing, institutions.
Rational choice institutionalism focuses on institutions' capacity to reduce transaction costs and thus increase eficiency. Institutionalist researchers tend to focus on the impacts of institutions, rather than how they are created in the irst place. Rational choice institutionalists can ind it dificult to demonstrate why any one institution is genuinely functional, whilst it can be tricky for sociological institutionalists to explain exactly when behaviour becomes suficiently habitual to justify describing it as 'institutionalised'.

Chapter 7:

Different countries can have similar policies imposed on them through coercive policy transfer, or can borrow other countries' policies through policy learning.
Policies can be transferred either coercively (through force or conditionality), or through imitation.
Lesson-drawing, best practice and benchmarking all constitute types of policy learning.
Policy-makers can learn about policy means (instruments; instrument settings) and ends (goals). They can also learn 'negatively' from other countries by deciding not to adopt another country's policy approach.
Policy learning is facilitated by 'learners' and 'teachers' being ideologically, linguistically, culturally and/or geographically proximate; by the perceived 'power' of the 'teacher'; and by policy competition between countries. It is inhibited by institutional, cultural and linguistic barriers, and is less likely where adopting the new policy would require signiicant institutional change or redistribution.
International governing institutions such as the EU, UN, WTO and sector-speciic organizations like the FSB and IASB can play a key role in transferring policies across nations. However, there has long been a debate over whether these institutions are more likely to promote negative over positive integration, and whether they are best viewed as intergovernmental or supranational.
Globalization can be deined as a number of different types of crossnational lows, including the crossborder movement of trade, capital, people and information. These movements have increased substantially in recent years, although some recent shifts towards protectionism and greater border control suggest that political support for global lows continuing at their current rates may be ebbing.

Chapter 8:

Traditionally, approaches to explain why economic policy differs between nations have pointed to the interests of producers - both business and workers - and how these are translated into policy through political parties and other institutions.
The 'varieties of capitalism' approach focuses attention on the coordination problems faced by irms and how institutional complementarities within liberal and coordinated market economies lead to distinctive approaches to these coordination problems. However, this approach has been criticized for failing to accord suficient importance to political factors, including the role of government.
Other approaches to explaining economic policy have stressed the role of ideas as discourse in shaping different responses. International inluences have had a variety of impacts on economic policy-making. There is considerable debate about the extent to which globalization imposes restrictions or otherwise on governments' room for manoeuvre.
The policy instruments used in economic policy.
Governments use the inancial resources available to them to fund particular industries and irms; provide infrastructure and training; tax undesirable activities; and provide tax breaks for favoured irms, industries and activities.
Governments use their authority to prohibit and regulate certain types of economic activity; to inluence workers' pay and conditions; and to control crossborder lows of goods, services and workers.
Governments use their powers of organization to plan economic development, directly participate in the economy through publicly owning certain irms or industries, and create economic policy institutions.
Governments use their control over information to provide information and advice to the public as consumers, and to inform policy debates.
Clearly, some economic policies, like minimum wages, will have a direct impact on individuals' incomes. However, economic policies such as measures countering inlation and regulating inancial markets can also have a differential, if less direct, impact on different income groups.