Making Policy in a Political Context

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26 Terms

1
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Characteristics of NPM

-       Neoliberalism brings resurgent interest in the state capacity to delivery

-       Late 70s to late 90s: government seen as inefficient, business techniques used to improve efficiency, ‘better management’

-       Based on quantifiable results and outcomes, centre of efficiency, waste management, decentralisation of control and increase accountability

-       Separation of policy advice and regulation (transparency), contestation of market and outsourcing

-       2 level phenomenon:

o   High level: public sector can be improved by importation of business conceptions

o   Low level: specific, output focus, disaggregated forms, contracts as coordination, market-type mechanisms (tendering, performance pay etc), citizens as customers and total quality management

-       Key problem: efficiency issues of the state, trying to return trust through accountability and transparency measures

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Successes of NPM

not necessarily dogmatic, questions size and scope of state, cost control and value for money focus, focus and modernised services

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Failures of NPM

effectiveness hard to demonstrate, based on assumptions about human behaviour, perverse effects of performance measurements, low trust creates control reflect, privatisations that don’t deliver value, intraorganisational focus, led to the audit society

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Audit Society Characteristics

Decline in organisational trust, low employee morale, hidden cost of compliance, alienation of professionals, emphasis on easy measurability

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Characteristics of the Weberian State

o   Hierarchy, “rational-legal authority”, impersonal, focus on technical expertise, formalised rules and processes; written records

o   Long-term career (career of a bureaucrat), personal and public ownership separated for officials

o   Separation of politics from public admin

o   Maximise organisation efficiency

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Challenges of the Weberian State

o   “iron cage”, limiting personal freedom

o   Democratic responsiveness

o   Non-technical expertise?

o   Bureaucrats as cogs in the machine

o   Costs and resource implications

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Characteristics of the Neo-Weberian State

o   Respects value of tradition but modernising features maintained

o   Western European democracies with sizable welfare state

o   More optimistic and trusting attitude towards the state apparatus than NPM

-       Key problem: trying to move away from the business attitude of NPM that can reduce ‘true’ efficiency

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Characteristics of NPG

-       Changes in society: rise of networks, most important social groups, location in flows, not places

-       Changes in the nature of policy problems: more wicked problems, more cross-boundary problems

-       NPM led to fragmentation of government, need for coordination, governments became more dependent on other actors

-       Recognition that we live in a pluralist society, the state has many parts, therefore networks are key

-       Accountability is challenging when the government is fragmented

-       Stakeholders matter, government may not always be the most relevant actor

-       New forms of hybrid governance, including through soft regulation, co-regulation and industry self-regulation

-       Importance of multi-level governance

-       Trust and reciprocity are key values / beliefs

-       “Governance networks”: patters of social relations between public, private and societal actors involved with dealing with a problem, policy or public service

-       “Network governance”: conscious attempts at designing and guiding (‘steering’) interaction processes and the structures of networks with the intention to further collaboration

-       Key problem: trying to move beyond traditional concepts of governance to have efficiency at the forefront, in a more dynamic and intuitive form

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What new methods and tools can policymakers now use to better serve people?

McGuiness and Slaughter:

  • people-centred (ask them what they want, reduce the gap)

  • experimental (testing of theories and models, active scouting for new ideas)

  • data-enabled (measure problems, learn what works, adapt according to necessity)

  • designed to scale (small = speed, variety, adaptability, stringing ideas together, density of organisations, small must ultimately translate to big)

Humility, utility and adaptability are key, success is anchored in the responsibility of the public

Questions of justice and public ethos are still relevant, must place the citizen as the starting point, cannot remove questions of power and public purpose

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What is the policy agenda?

The set of issues and problems that are receiving serious public attention and being considered for decision-making by government and public officials.

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Why are certain policy issues neglected on the policy agenda?

Limited time and resources, decision-making is not a rational and flawless process. Also policy framing.

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What is policy framing?

  • how a challenge is defined and presented

  • process of persuasion involving citizens and decision-makers, attempts to publicise the nature and urgency of challenge + range of solutions available

  • inherently political and often contested, only a limited amount of issues can occupy public imagination at a given time

  • plays essential role in elevating certain issues

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What is PET?

  • Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, aims to explain why we can experience highs and lows in public attention and policy making over time, even though size or nature of concerns don’t change

  • most policy change is slow and incremental, but long periods of stability are punctuated by rare periods of dramatic change

  • stability is due to (1) limited resources (2) internal resolution and (3) dominance / status quo within government

  • radical change is driven by major crises, social upheaval, successful issue framing, organised interest groups, entrance through policy windows

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What are policy paradigms?

Dominant worldviews about policy problems, including the nature of the problem, the policy goals, and instruments to address it.

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What are the steps of changing policy paradigms?

  1. paradigm stability

  2. accumulation of anomalies

  3. experimentation within existing paradigm

  4. authority fragmentation

  5. contestation in public arena

  6. institutionalisation of new paradigm

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What are the orders of policy paradigm change?

  1. incremental, bureaucratic, small change

  2. less frequent, non-routine, maintains policy goals

  3. rare, reappraisal and rejection of dominant paradigm

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How does power shape the policy agenda?

Determines the beneficiaries of policies (who is considered needy and vulnerable), which paradigms are accepted, allocation of resources, elevation of certain voices, and influences where we direct our attention

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Evidence of power shaping public interest?

Gilens and Page:

  • studied the US

  • when rich favour a policy, adopted 37% of the time

  • when middle class favour a policy, adopted 25% of the time

  • US resembles an oligarchy more than a demcoracy

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Ways to counteract distorting influence

Must develop robust states with the capacity to challenge private power, demands a striking of balance between public and private power. Expert-driven governments are a solution, but we must consider that these might be more susceptible due to insulation from democratic scrutiny and contestation. Limiting influence of money and holding public records of meetings. Bagg also proposes 2 methods:

  1. institutionalising opposition expertise, e.g. embedding contrarian views in regulatory agencies or empowering watchdogs

    • forces public defence of decisions, provides a broader range of perspectives (intersectionality)

  2. randomly selected citizen oversight juries (use sortition to screen admin decisions)

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What is intersectionality? How does it help expand the range of policy solutions?

Intersectionality = recognising that there is an ordered hierarchy of respectable socially constructed identities in society, systems of oppression overlap to create this. Some identities are prioritised, and as a result, policies, laws and social conventions are designed to give them more power and marginalise those with less. When intersectionality is not considered, policy failures happen as we cannot understand how or why a problem exists, and therefore can’t implement successful policies. An example of intersectionality success is Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations (ACCOs). These have to meet certain requirements/thresholds to count as being genuinely controlled by Aboriginal communities. These can provide better understandings of customs, there is less bureaucracy involved so services can be streamlined, understanding that community and recipients are not homogenous.

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What are the benefits and ethical implications of behavioural nudging?

  • Thaler and Sunstein

  • choice architecture - accounts for people’s heuristics and biases

  • spurred by austerity and search for effective, efficient government action

  • sometimes an alternative to regulation

  • libertarian paternalism: you still get to choose what to do

  • issues: have to confront the limits of technocratic nudges when they are allied to a system of oppression that they leave undisturbed (Moyn)

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What are the 6 types of policy instruments?

Advocacy, law, money, direct government action, behavioural techniques and networks. What can we afford to do and what is in our best interests?

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What are the three realms of policy and what is the spectrum of success?

Policy as three realms: processes, programs and politics. Policies can succeed or fail along a spectrum: success, resilient success, conflicted success, precarious success, and failure.

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What is the procedure fetish?

Our liking for procedure, rules etc often creates more challenges than good. Liberals in government have relied far too much on the law as a lever for social change, cultivated a fussy, technocratic culture. Whilst these procedural regulations often attempt to make the process as fair as possible, overly legalistic thinking has made governments less tolerant of risk, defensive, and more technically correct at the expense of being less helpful.

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What is delivery-driven policy?

  • movement to modernise tech has been focused on the delivery of government services using modern technology and best practices

  • this is only half the solution, as we must also learn to drive policy and operations around delivery and users, and complete the feedback circuit

  • delivery-driven assumes that people get things wrong, it is agile, iterative, user-centred, aims to use data and feedback to consistently improve on policies that affect rea people

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Who are street-level bureaucrats and why are they important?

Street-level bureaucrats: broad category of frontline workers in public service e.g. welfare workers, social workers, police officers, educators. Street-level bureaucrats tend to occupy the lowest and least influential ranks of their agencies, but in a certain respect, they have huge responsibilities as they act as the personification of the government for everyday citizens, and act as gatekeepers to services. Most people experience the ‘government’ as a body of power through these frontline workers. The individual, discretionary decisions add up together to form government policy.