The Three Things You Need to Know

The Introduction to Public Policy has three emphases. The three are the three most important things to know about the course.

APP

Policy issues can be usefully analyzed into the topics on which positions will be taken and the positions themselves. This sequence of Axes, Positions, and Problems gives the emphasis the name APP. I call the topics axes, because more than one axis is involved as the alternatives are presented, thought some in the field call them “frames.” Each position can be usefully examined by constructing a problem (a problem is a violated norm and a causal statement which explains why it was violated) from the standpoint of someone who holds that position. Following naturally from the problem formulation are a) the solution, b) the tools appropriate to the solution, and c) the rationale which will place the solution within the rhetorical space of American politics. From a political standpoint, each position can be understood by looking at the allies it attracts and the constituents it serves. The former are elites who can help formulate, evaluate, and defend the position; the latter are the masses whose interests, either material or symbolic, will be advanced by this position.

Policy Process

The public policy process is the way issues that were not formerly thought appropriate to government action or that had not formerly required government action, are placed on the government’s action agenda. As you would expect from the problem table, issues are placed by constituents who desire a benefit, by ideologues, by policy entrepreneurs, or by the possessors of underutilized mechanisms, the use of which would validate the possessor. Most potential issues are retained by the social segment where they originated. I consider the society—including religious, racial, ethnic, educational, familial, and sexual—to be one such segment. I consider the economy—including all the employers, owners, and financiers at the top end and all the employees, borrowers, and consumers at the bottom end—to be another such segment. As conflicts “escape” (or are rescued from) these segments, they become the property of public controversy and are likely to become agenda.

Once government has acquired an issue, the process of development is more straightforward. A policy is formulated, funded, implemented, and evaluated. Then, commonly, it is reformulated with new implementation mechanisms and reevaluated. Occasionally, the issue goes away and, even less often, the institutional response to it goes away.

Conflict here has less to do with ideology that with partisanship. Sometimes those parties are the Democratic and Republican parties. Sometimes they are the In party and the Out party. The conflicts that were guaranteed by the Framers, giving every governmental body the means, the motive, and the opportunity to bring any policy initiative to a standstill, always have a home here.

The Policies Themselves.

Since every policy is a “solution,” or was claimed to be a solution at the time of its promulgation—the time of its “milking forward”—by a legislative, executive, or regulatory body. So every solution has an official “problem” to which it is a response. The natural context of such issues is the historical era, the values of the current elites, and the way the policy space has been shaped by previous attempts. Similarly, every problem has a constituency, whether economic, regional, social, or ideological.

Policies can be grouped by whether they related more closely to some outcome or to some process and by how deeply they penetrate into the economy or society, which was their home before “went public.” An administration that digs too deeply into the economy will, in the U. S., be called “socialist.” Digging too deeply into the society will elicit “Nanny State” as a protest.