Public Policy Decision Making

Policy Making Phases

• The policy-making process consists of several phases. These phases involve defining an agenda, seeking consultation, and making decisions within different institutional contexts, such as public bureaucracies, political parties, and pressure groups.

Five Phases of Policy Making

1. Agenda Setting:
   • Involves identifying societal needs that require political attention.
   • Agenda setting is the process of constructing the problem to be addressed.
   • This construction determines whether an issue is considered one of public or private concern.
   • It also determines if the issue is local or national.
   • The creation of the problem does not mean inventing a non-existent problem, but framing an actual problem and giving it a particular urgency or direction.

Three Models for Agenda Definition

• Based on the manual, there are three models for defining the agenda.

  1. Outside Initiation:

     • Driven by social actors.
     • Pressure groups and social movements mobilize outside of formal politics.
     • Forces political decision-makers to recognize the issue as relevant and place it on the agenda.

  2. Mobilization:

     • Initiated by public actors (decision-makers, parties).
     • Aims to gain public consensus.
     • Political actors believe the issue can garner them support.
     • Actors involved are usually elected officials and parties.

  3. Insiding:

     • Involves actors within the political system (the decision-making apparatus, actual politics).
     • Driven by necessity rather than a desire for public consensus.
     • May involve high-ranking bureaucrats or elected officials acting without the motivation of creating consensus.

• The identification of a problem follows unpredictable paths, sometimes appearing almost random.

1. Formulating Alternatives:

   • Once an agenda is set, the next step is to formulate alternative solutions.

   • This analysis involves two dimensions:

     1. Technical Dimension:

        • Involves identifying various solutions to a problem, along with their costs and benefits.
        • These costs and benefits are not decided arbitrarily but are based on effects of actions and alternatives to the problem. For example, during COVID, the solution to this technical dimension was believed to be lockdown, measurement of containment, and tracement.

     2. Political Dimension:

        • Focuses on how the costs and benefits are distributed among different actors.
        • Considers who gains and who loses from the proposed measures.
        • The politically suggested decision may not always be the best because the politician needs to answer to certain parties who may not gain from it.

   • Alternative solutions are formulated within institutional settings (primarily ministries) and sometimes in parliaments with technical offices.

2. Decision Making:

   • The decision-making phase is the point at which political inputs are transformed into outputs.
   • Decision-making occurs within institutional settings, primarily by public authorities.
   • Involves legitimate authority (parliament) to make a decision on a policy (the form of public policy).
   • The decision making model and the question of how the decision occurs relates back to the previous discussion on bureaucracy. One way would be based on rationality.

Logic of Decision Making

1.  **Synoptic Rationality:**
    *   Based on the ability to predict the consequences of an action in the long term.
    *   This is unlikely.
2.  **Satisficing:**
    *   Decision-makers settle for a satisfactory solution in the absence of full rationality.
3.  **Incrementalism:**
    *   Making small, successive choices because the final result cannot be predicted.
    *   Decision-making is a fragmented process where decisions may loop back and correct previous errors.
4.  **Garbage Can Model:**
    *   Suggests that decision-making is often random due to high levels of unpredictability.
    *   Problems and solutions are like garbage in a can, combined randomly.
    *   Policies may be adopted because they are available, even if they do not solve any particular problem.
    *   Objectives may shift during the process.

4. Implementation:

   • Involves putting the policy into practice.
   • The bureaucracy is responsible for implementation.
   • Ideally, the bureaucracy neutrally and rationally translates decisions in a top-down manner.
   • In practice, this does not always occur.

5. Evaluation:

   • Involves assessing the policy's output and comparing it to the intended outcome.
   • Activates a feedback mechanism that can lead to the continuation, modification, or termination of the policy.
   • The policy can generate some form of learning that can inform new policies. Both successful and unsuccessful policies will further generate some sort of learning that will inform the implementation of new policies.

• These five phases are analytical distinctions and not always clearly separated in reality.

Actors in Policy Making

• Actors in policy making can be categorized as:
  1. Institutional Actors: Actors who are part of the decision-making process and are constitutionally responsible for public policies, which consists of the government. parliament and bureaucracy.
  2. Non-Institutional Actors: Actors where some remain within society. While parties are institutional actors, they still play a role in the non-institutional process unless in cases such as China.

Roles of Different Actors

1. Government:

   • Central due to its coercive power and role in democratic problem-solving.

   • The government has a role in problem-solving in return for freedom from the state.

   • The government plays a role in these phases:

     • Central in formulating alternatives.
     • Central alongside parliament in the decision-making phase.
     • Central in implementation because it heads the bureaucracy.

2. Parliament:

   • Central due to its legitimacy, especially in parliamentary systems.

   • A parliament's influence depends on the government's freedom from its influence.

   • The Parliament plays a role in these phases:

     • Relevant in agenda setting.
     • Central in the decision-making phase through voting on laws.