Core Definition: Policy can be defined as the totality of government actions, which includes:
Signals of intent from policymakers.
Final outcomes of governmental decisions.
Key Questions:
Does ‘government action’ include both promises (intent) and actual actions?
Are the effects of decisions included in the definition?
What constitutes ‘the government’?
Can we include actions that policymakers choose not to take?
Power Dynamics: Policy is fundamentally about power and often serves to exclude important issues from public scrutiny.
Complexity of Public Policy
Scale of Government: The government is vast and complex, necessitating simplified concepts and theories for understanding.
Public Attention:
The majority of policymaking occurs with minimal public oversight.
The public lacks the time to engage deeply with policy issues, resulting in simplified narratives that obscure complex policy problems.
Elected Policymakers and Bureaucracy
Elected policymakers cannot manage the entirety of government actions directly and often delegate responsibilities to:
Bureaucrats and organizations, particularly those operating at the ‘street level’.
This delegation leads to significant policy outcomes without necessary oversight from elected authorities.
Understanding Policy Action and Inaction
Much of public policy revolves around the realities of inaction versus action.
Inaction can often hold more significance than actions taken.
Analysis Challenges: The measurement and identification of policy change remain complex and unresolved issues within the field.
Policymaking Language: Policymaking involves specialized terminology which practitioners may find necessary, despite it being labeled as ‘jargon’ by outsiders.
Methodological Approaches in Policy Studies
The field of policy studies encourages a multi-perspective analysis that involves:
Zooming in on detailed practices of organizations.
Zooming out to understand broader systemic relations and implications.
Emphasis is placed on capturing the nuances and intricacies of policymaking, promoting a deeper understanding of how policies evolve and manifest in practice.