Professional Documents
Culture Documents
17
Thus, for example, how the medical profession interprets the causes of
lung cancer and the solutions it proposes for prevention and cure may
have a bearing on what a government eventually does about such a prob-
lem in terms of health-care policy. However, the profession’s proposed
solution to the problem is not itself a public policy; only measures that
a government actually adopts or endorses – such as a ban on the sale or
use of tobacco – actually constitute public policy.
Second, as Dye notes, public policy is, at its simplest, a choice made by
government to undertake some course of action. Dye highlights the fact
that public policy-making involves a fundamental choice on the part of
governments to do something or to do nothing with respect to a problem
and that this decision is made by government officials, be they elected
or appointed politicians, judges or administrators. Thus a ‘negative’ or
‘non-decision’, or a government’s decision to do nothing and simply
maintain the current course of action or status quo (Crenson, 1971;
Smith, 1979), is just as much a policy decision as a choice to alter it.
Such ‘negative’ decisions, however, like more ‘positive’ ones, must be
deliberate, such as when a government decides not to increase taxes or
declines to make additional funds available for arts, health care or some
other policy area. The fact we have the freedom to paint the interiors of
our homes in colours of our choice, for example, does not mean that
this is a public policy, because the government never deliberately
decided not to restrict our options in this area.
Third, and closely related to this, Dye’s definition also highlights
the fact that a public policy is a conscious choice of a government.
That is, government actions and decisions very often involve unintended
consequences, such as when an effort to regulate tobacco consumption
or some other vice results in the activity ‘going underground’ and
operating illegally as a ‘black’ market. Unless this subsequent activity
or consequence was specifically anticipated and intended by government
(such as occurs when governments increase gasoline taxes to discourage
automobile use and thus indirectly promote the use of public transit),
the unintended consequences are not public policy but merely its
unexpected by-product, which may sometimes be beneficial and
sometimes not.
While Dye’s three points are central to understanding that public
policies emerge as the result of governmental decision-making pro-
cesses, it is less clear how such decisions are arrived at or implemented.
Other more complex definitions, such as that put forward by Jenkins
(1978), offer a more precise conceptualization of public policy which
also addresses these aspects of the subject. Here policy is defined as ‘a set
Michael Howlett and Ben Cashore 19
with an issue (Huitt, 1968; Meltsner, 1972; Majone, 1975; May, 2005). Thus,
for example, we will not understand health policy in many countries
without realizing the powerful opposition that the medical profession
can mount against any government’s effort to control health-care costs
which might reduce the profession’s income (Alford, 1972) or without
taking into account the kinds of financial resources governments have
at their disposal in providing health care and/or paying doctors, nurses
and other health-care providers for their services. Similarly, understanding
domestic government actions increasingly requires detailed awareness
of the limits placed upon them, and the opportunities provided to them,
by international agreements, treaties, and conventions (Doern et al.,
1996; Milner and Keohane, 1996).
Policy content
Policy focus
be applied by the courts and the bureaucracy and run its course until it
was terminated or cancelled. Finally, the results of the policy would be
appraised or evaluated against the original aims and goals.
This way of thinking about policy-making as a staged process of problem-
solving was highly influential in the development of the policy sciences
(deLeon, 1999) and formed the basis for further work on the subject
(Lyden et al., 1968; Brewer, 1974; Simmons et al., 1974; Anderson,1975;
Jones, 1984). Through comparative studies of policy-making processes in
many sectors and jurisdictions, a simpler, more parsimonious version of
the policy cycle emerged which more clearly linked the stages of public
policy-making with the logic of applied decision-making raised by Dye
and others (Brewer and deLeon 1983; Hupe and Hill, 2006). The five
stages in applied problem-solving and the corresponding stages in the
policy process are depicted in Table 2.2.
In this model, agenda setting refers to the process by which problems
come to the attention of governments; policy formulation refers to how
policy options are formulated within government; decision-making is the
process by which governments adopt a particular course of action or non-
action; policy implementation relates to how governments put policies into
effect; and policy evaluation refers to the processes by which the results of
policies are monitored by both state and societal actors, the outcome of
which may be a re-conceptualization of policy problems and solutions.
Much comparative policy study has focussed on detailing the operation
of particular stages of the cycle; for example, examining through com-
parative case study techniques the nature of agenda setting dynamics in
the United States and Europe, or comparing the roles played by specific
actors – like the media – in each. Other studies examined the manner in
which different stages interacted – such as feedback-like processes involv-
ing policy evaluation and agenda setting when a negative evaluation
of a policy leads to its revision in subsequent rounds of policy-making
(Pierson, 1993). These studies have shed a great deal of light on the nature
of policy-making processes and highlighted the use of comparative
Table 2.2 Five stages of the policy cycle and their relationship to applied
problem-solving
These insights into the nature of public policy, policy processes and
policy actors have been brought together in recent years by students of
comparative public policy dynamics; that is, in order to explore and
explain the manner in which policies change. In this regard, the
26 Comparative Policy Studies
Conclusion
outside of, the state and resulting, generally, in long periods of stability of
outcomes or incremental changes, punctuated by infrequent bursts of
paradigmatic change. The decisions policy-makers make have been shown
to be shaped both by the structures within which these actors operate and
the ideas they hold – forces that have also affected earlier policies in previ-
ous iterations of policy-making processes and have set policies onto spe-
cific trajectories, sometimes over long periods of time.
Thanks to these studies, the discipline now has a much stronger under-
standing about factors such as legislative ‘attention spans’, ‘policy win-
dows’ and how alterations in subsystem beliefs and membership can result
in certain issues coming to the fore on policy agendas, precipitating change
by shaping what subsystem members deem to be appropriate types and
modes of policy-making (Hall, 1989; Baumgartner and Jones, 1993, 2002;
Kingdon, 1995; Leach et al., 2002). It also has a much better understanding
of the role played by macro-, meso- and micro-institutions which formalize
issue discourses and routinize political and administrative affairs, shaping
the mobilization of actors and restraining change in policy agendas and
processes (Weaver and Rockman, 1993; Thelen, 2003, 2004; Deeg, 2005).
However as pointed out above, this research agenda is by no means
finished. A large number of significant questions about policy-making and
policy behaviour continue to exist and define the subjects for further
comparative research. In addition to the kinds of questions about patterns
of policy change mentioned above, it is also the case that most studies
have focussed on a small number of North American and European cases
and many countries and sectors outside this region have received little
attention. Whether and to what extent they share the same characteristics
as oft-studied cases is uncertain. Similarly many studies have focussed on
only a few well-documented, high profile policy sectors such as finance,
trade or health. Many others still require detailed examination in order to
see how well concepts developed in other sectors travel to them. And while
spatial comparisons are reasonably plentiful, temporal ones lag far behind.
Thus, while comparative research has greatly enriched our under-
standing of policy-making, more and better comparative studies of policy-
making over both time and space are still required to better inform both
contemporary policy theorizing and practice.
Notes
1 For similar models based on a similar critique of Hall, see Daugbjerg (1997)
and Smith (2000). These six categories are inspired from much of the work on
applied policy analysis that teach students to break policy down into their
‘goals’, ‘operationalized’ objectives, and specific criteria and who likewise take
Michael Howlett and Ben Cashore 29
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