Public Policy

Public Policy

• Public policy consists of all those authoritative public decisions that governments make

  • the policy outputs

• Public policy consists of all the authoritative public decisions that governments make— the policy outputs of the political system. Policies or outputs are normally chosen for a purpose— they are meant to promote end results that we refer to as policy outcomes

  • Outputs: decisions

  • Outcomes: end results

  • Political Goods: goals and values

Government and What it Does

• Governments do many things

  • Production of goods and services

    • Varies from country to country

    • Regulation of telecommunications and air traffic

    • Provide defence, law enforcement, roads, postal service

    • May operate major industries

    • There is no society in which the government produces no goods or services and, conversely, no state in which all industries are run by the government. Even in communist Cuba, part of the agricultural sector is private, as are many simple consumer services, such as babysitting

Political Goals and Political Goods

• Political goals motivate different policies

• Political goods are organized around:

  • System goods: Citizens are free and able to act purposefully when environment is stable, transparent, predictable

  • Process goods: citizen participation and free political participation; democratic procedures, due process

  • Policy goods: economic welfare, quality of life, freedom, personal security

  • In socialist states and some other authoritarian states, governments own and operate most major industries, and government-owned enterprises produce everything from military equipment to such consumer goods as clothing and shoes. In a capitalist society, such as the United States, most consumer goods are produced in the private sector. In much of Europe, the governments have a larger role than in the United States, but far less than in a socialist system

• At the system level

  • A long tradition in political analysis emphasizes that rulers and citizens alike tend to favour order, predictability, and stability

  • Citizens are most free and most able to act purposefully when their environment is stable, transparent, and predictable. We call these conditions system goods because they reflect the functioning and effectiveness of the whole political system

  • While people generally want some measure of change and new opportunities, most prefer stability to abrupt and unforeseeable change. Political instability—constitutional breakdowns, frequent leadership changes, riots, and the like— upsets most peoples plans and can cost lives and cause material destruction

• Political process

  • Citizen participation and free political competition. Democracy is food and authoritarianism is bad, according to this procedural perspective, because of the way citizens are treated in the process, and not because democracy might produce better economic or security results

  • Democratic procedures and various rights of due process, then are process goods

  • Process goods include participation, compliance, and procedural justice

• A third focus is on policy goods, such as economic welfare, quality of life, freedom, and personal security. Most people value policies that they view as improving their living condition. Yet well-meaning people do not always agree on which of these policy goods are most important.

  • The problem is that people often disagree over what is fair. In some situations, we believe that fairness requires all people to be treated equally

  • Lack of resources

Public Policy

• Public policies may be summarized and compared according to outputs classified into four headings:

  • Extraction of Resources: from domestic, international environments ex. money, goods, persons, and services

  • Distribution: to citizens, residents ex. of money, goods, and services

  • Regulation: of human behaviour — the use of compulsion and inducement to bring about desires behaviour

  • Symbolic Outputs: exhort citizens to engage in desired behaviour

Extractions

• Types of Extractions:

  • The most common form of resource extraction is taxation. Taxation is the government’s extraction of money or goods from members of a political system for which they receive no immediate or direct benefit

  • Social contribution or social insurance revenues, which are typically held as special funds targeted for social protection benefits, such as old age pensions (social security)

  • Efficiency: collecting the most revenue possible at the lowest cost

  • Equity: means taxing so no one is unfairly burdened

  • Direct taxes: Personal and corporate income taxes, property taxes, and taxes on capital gains

  • Indirect taxes: include sales taxes, value-added taxes, excise taxes, and customs duties

• Direct extraction of services: compulsory military service, jury duty, labor imposed on convicts

• Direct resource extraction: taxation

  • Direct taxes/Indirect taxes

  • Progressive taxes/Regressive taxes

• Tax profiles of different countries vary

  • overall tax burden

  • reliance on different types of taxes

  • how they collect revenues

  • Given the many difficult issues involving taxation, and the inevitable public resistance to high taxes, it might seem a blessing if a government could receive income windfalls from other sources- Rentier states

Distribution

• Transfers of money, goods, services — to citizens, residents, clients of the state

• Distributive Policy Profiles

  • Health, education, defence consume largest proportion of government spending

  • Developed countries allocate half to two thirds of government expenditures to education, health, welfare

• First modern welfare state in Germany in 1880s

  • 1930s to 1970s most industrialized states adopted and expanded welfare policies

  • Mixture between social insurance and social redistribution

Challenges to the Welfare State

• Welfare can be expensive

• Governments often have limited funds

• Committing future generations to pay

• Welfare states give citizens few incentives to work

• Governments cannot spend more money than they raise. If governments fail to balance their books and instead run budget deficits, they have to borrow money

Regulation

• Regulation is exercise of political control over behaviour of individuals/groups in society

• Contemporary governments are welfare states and regulatory states

• Globalization has created increased pressures to regulate the international flows of capital, trade, and people

• Governments regulate by:

  • Legal means

  • Material or financial inducements

  • Persuasion or moral exhortation

• Particularly important politically: government control over political participation and communication

Community Building and Symbolic Outputs

• Intended to enhance people’s national identity, civil pride, trust in government

• Political leaders often appeal to courage, wisdom, and magnanimity embodied in the nation’s past, or appeal to values and ideologies such as equality, liberty, community, democracy, communism, liberalism, or religious tradition

• Enhance other areas of performance:

  • make people pay their taxes more readily, honestly

  • comply with laws more faithfully

  • accept sacrifice, danger, hardship

  • important during time of crisis

Domestic Policy Outcomes

• How do extractive, distributive, regulative, symbolic policies affect lives of citizens?

• Sometimes policies have unintended and undesirable consequences

• To estimate effectiveness of public policy, have to examine actual policy outcomes as well as governmental policies and implementation

• Ex. tax rebate to stimulate the economy may be nullified by a rise in the price of oil. Increases in health expenditures may have no effect because of unexpected epidemics or rising health costs, or health services may not reach those most in need. Sometimes, policies have unintended and undesirable consequences, as when the introduction of benefits for troubles social groups leads others to stimulate the same troubles to get the same favours

• Welfare:

  • poverty, water quality, sanitation, pollution

• Health:

  • physicians, birthrates, life expectancy, infant mortality, malnutrition, fertility

• Education:

  • skills, economic development, secondary education, college education, literacy rates, access to information technology

Fairness Outcomes

• Promoting gender equality and empowering women

  • Modernizing status of women makes them better informed and capable of making choices that lead stable healthier population

• Fairness in treatment of minority ethnic, racial, religious groups also an issue

• Great income inequality violates standards of fairness

Liberty and Freedom Outcomes

• Political Rights: opportunities for citizens to participate in the choice of political leaders

• Civil Liberties: protection for freedom of speech, press, assembly, religion, due process

• No country that scores high on participatory rights also scores very low on civil liberties, and no country that scores low on participatory rights is high on civil liberties. This suggests a strong relationship between popular participation and the rule of law and equitable procedure

Domestic Security Outcomes

• Crime rates increasing in many advanced societies and in developing world

• High crime rates primarily found in urban areas

  • migration increases diversity, conflict

  • pace of urbanization explosive

  • severe problems of poverty, infrastructure

  • unemployment, drug abuse

  • stricter law enforcement, increased incarceration time, decrease in youth

  • Ex. El Salvador

• Crime rates decrease when the economy is strong

• Stricter law enforcement

International Outcomes

• Economic, diplomatic, military, informational

• Outcomes of interaction among nations:

  • prosperity or depression

  • war or peace

  • secularization or spread of religious beliefs

• Globalization has increasingly demanded more economic, social, and political interaction by ever more economic

• Nationals economies more interdependent

  • restrictions and trade barriers

• Environmental damage

• Cultural pressures

• Most costly outcome is warfare

  • last decades of 20th century: three-quarter of war deaths were civilians

  • When these attacks are designed to eliminate political adversaries identified by actions or ideology, they are called politicides. When they are designed to eliminate ethnic or religious groups, they are called genocides

The Complexity of Policy Choice

• Fact about political goods: cannot always have them all simultaneously

• Political system often has to trade one value to obtain another

• Opportunity costs: lose in one area by committing resources to different good

• Task of social science: discover conditions under which positive and negative trade-offs occur

• People do not share values, may be serious conflicts

• Governments should provide means for people to decide for themselves