Understanding Public Policy (in 1000 and 500 words)

By James Nicholls and Paul Cairney, for the University of Stirling MPH and MPP programmes.

There are strong links between the study of public health and public policy. For example, public health scholars often draw on policy theories to help explain (often low amounts of) policy change to foster population health or reduce health inequalities. Studies include a general focus on public health strategies (such as HiAP) or specific policy instruments (such as a ban on smoking in public places). While public health scholars may seek to evaluate or influence policy, policy theories tend to focus on explaining processes and outcomes,.

To demonstrate these links, we present this podcast and blog post to (1) use an initial description of a key alcohol policy instrument (minimum unit pricing in Scotland) to (2) describe the application of policy concepts and theories and reflect on the empirical and practical implications. 

Using policy theories to interpret public health case studies: the example of a minimum unit price for alcohol | Paul Cairney: Politics & Public Policy (wordpress.com)

The eight (and final) of a series of podcasts tying together multiple 500 Words posts. They’ll sound a bit different from the  1000 Words podcasts because I recorded them in front of our MPP students.

This brief lecture is on the role of policymaking environments and the theories that describe them (also based on text in Chapter 13):

"The second part of our universal story is that people respond to bounded rationality within complex policymaking environments. We can describe this environment with reference to five or six constituent parts (John, 2003: 495; Heikkila and Cairney, 2018). First, there are many actors – including policymakers and influencers – spread across many types of policymaking venues. Second, each venue contains its own ‘institutions’, or formal and informal rules governing behaviour. Third, each venue can produce its own networks of policymakers and influencers, and the lines between formal responsibility and informal influence are blurry. Fourth, actors in each venue draw on a dominant set of ideas or beliefs about the nature of policy problems and the acceptable range of solutions. Fifth, natural, social, and economic factors limit policymakers’ abilities to address and solve policy problems. Finally, routine and non-routine events help set the policy agenda and influence the resources available to actors. Combined, these factors produce the broad sense that policymaking environments – or, in some accounts, ‘context’ or ‘systems’ – constrain and facilitate action and are out of the control (or even understanding) of individual actors. Figure 13.1 provides the simplest way to visualize these concepts, partly to compete with the visual simplicity of the policy cycle while maintaining the assumption of complexity"

Relevant posts:

Policy in 500 Words: The Policy Process

Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: The Policy Process

Policy in 500 Words: if the policy cycle does not exist, what do we do?

(see also 12 things to know about studying public policy and 5 images of the policy process).

The seventh of a series of podcasts tying together 500 Words posts.

This lecture is on the distinction between comprehensive/ bounded rationality and how policy actors deal with bounded rationality. It is based on text in Chapter 13, including:

"Theories also describe different ways in which responses to bounded rationality affect policymaking behaviour:

• Policymakers can only pay attention to a tiny proportion of their responsibilities, and policymaking organizations struggle to process all policy-relevant information. They prioritize some issues and information and ignore the rest (Chapter 9).

Policy in 500 Words: Punctuated Equilibrium Theory

• Some ways of understanding and describing the world dominate policy debate, helping some actors and marginalizing others.

Policy in 500 Words: Power and Knowledge

• Policy actors see the world through the lens of their beliefs. Beliefs allow them to select and interpret policy-relevant information and decide who to trust.

Policy in 500 Words: The Advocacy Coalition Framework

• Actors engage in ‘trial-and-error strategies’ or use their ‘social tribal instincts’ to rely on ‘different decision heuristics to deal with uncertain and dynamic environments’

Policy in 500 words: uncertainty versus ambiguity

Policy in 500 Words: Ecology of Games

Policy in 500 Words: the Social-Ecological Systems Framework

Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: Complex Systems

• Policy audiences are vulnerable to manipulation when they rely on other actors to help them understand the world. Actors tell simple stories to persuade their audience to see a policy problem and its solution in a particular way

Policy in 500 Words: the Narrative Policy Framework

• Policymakers draw on quick emotional judgements, and social stereotypes, to propose benefits to some target populations and punishments for others

Policy in 500 Words: Social Construction and Policy Design

• Institutions include formal rules but also the informal understandings that ‘exist in the minds of the participants and sometimes are shared as implicit knowledge rather than in an explicit and written form’

Policy in 500 Words: Feminist Institutionalism

• Policy learning is a political process in which actors engage selectively with information, not a rational search for truth

Three ways to encourage policy learning

The sixth of a series of podcasts tying together multiple 500 Words posts. They’ll sound a bit different from the  1000 Words podcasts because I recorded them in front of our MPP students.

This lecture is on using ‘evolutionary theory‘ to connect Multiple Streams Analysis, Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, and Complexity Theory

Relevant posts:

Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: Evolution (see also cairney-2013-policy-politics-evolution.pdf (wordpress.com)   )

Policy in 500 Words: Multiple Streams Analysis and Policy Entrepreneurs

Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: Multiple Streams Analysis 

What is a policy entrepreneur? 

Three habits of successful policy entrepreneurs – a blog post and paper on how entrepreneurs deal with ‘organized anarchy’

Whatever happened to multiple streams analysis? – introduces an article by Michael Jones and me on MSA studies

Paul Cairney and Michael Jones (2016) ‘Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Approach’ Policy Studies Journal, 44, 1, 37-58 PDF (Annex to Cairney Jones 2016) (special issue of PSJ)

Paul Cairney and Nikos Zahariadis (2016) ‘Multiple streams analysis’ in Zahariadis, N. (eds) Handbook of Public Policy Agenda-Setting (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar) PDF

Policy in 500 Words: Punctuated Equilibrium Theory

Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: Punctuated Equilibrium Theory

Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: Complex Systems

Complex systems and systems thinking

The fifth of a series of podcasts tying together multiple 500 Words posts. They’ll sound a bit different from the  1000 Wordspodcasts because I recorded them in front of our MPP students.

This lecture is on Policy in 500 Words: The Advocacy Coalition Framework 

Here is the ACF story.

People engage in politics to turn their beliefs into policy. They form advocacy coalitions with people who share their beliefs, and compete with other coalitions. The action takes place within a subsystem devoted to a policy issue, and a wider policymaking process that provides constraints and opportunities to coalitions.

The policy process contains multiple actors and levels of government. It displays a mixture of intensely politicized disputes and routine activity. There is much uncertainty about the nature and severity of policy problems. The full effects of policy may be unclear for over a decade

...

Policy actors use their beliefs to understand, and seek influence in, this world. Beliefs about how to interpret the cause of and solution to policy problems, and the role of government in solving them, act as a glue to bind actors together within coalitions.

If the policy issue is technical and humdrum, there may be room for routine cooperation. If the issue is highly charged, then people romanticise their own cause and demonise their opponents.

The outcome is often long-term policymaking stability and policy continuity because the ‘core’ beliefs of coalitions are unlikely to shift and one coalition may dominate the subsystem for long periods.

There are two main sources of change ... see Policy in 500 Words: The Advocacy Coalition Framework for the rest

Relevant posts

Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: The Advocacy Coalition Framework

The fourth of a series of podcasts tying together multiple 500 Words posts. They’ll sound a bit different from the 1000 Words podcasts because I recorded them in front of our MPP students.

This brief lecture is on the relationship between rational choice theory, game theory, the IAD, the SES, and Ecology of Games

Relevant posts:

Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: Rational Choice and the IAD

Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: game theory and thought experiments

Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (IAD) and Governing the Commons

Policy in 500 Words: the Social-Ecological Systems Framework

Policy in 500 Words: Ecology of Games

The third of a series of podcasts tying together multiple 500 Words posts. They’ll sound a bit different from the 1000 Words podcasts because I recorded them in front of our MPP students.

This brief lecture describes bounded rationality and its implications for power/ knowledge, the NPF and SCPD

Relevant posts:

Policy in 500 words: uncertainty versus ambiguity

Policy in 500 Words: Power and Knowledge

Policy in 500 Words: the Narrative Policy Framework

Policy in 500 Words: Social Construction and Policy Design

The second of a series of podcasts tying together multiple 500 Words posts. They’ll sound a bit different from the 1000 Words podcasts because I recorded them in front of our MPP students (although, just to confuse you, this podcasts connects to a 1000 Word post) .

This brief lecture is on multi-centric policymaking, as described fully in Making Policy in a Complex World.

From Policy Concept in 1000 Words: Multi-centric Policymaking

Many theories in this 1000 words series describe multiple policymaking venues. They encourage us to give up on the idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful national central government. Instead, there are many venues in which to make authoritative choices, each contributing to what we call policy.

The word ‘multi-centric’ (coined by Professor Tanya Heikkila, with me and Dr Matt Wood) does not suggest that every venue is of equal importance or power. Rather, it prompts us not to miss something important by focusing too narrowly on one single (alleged) centre of authority.

To some extent, multi-centric policymaking results from choice. Many federal political systems have constitutions that divide power between executive, legislative, and judicial branches, or give some protection to subnational governments. Many others have become ‘quasi-federal’ more organically, by sharing responsibilities with supranational and subnational governments. In such cases, there is explicit choice to distribute power and share responsibility for making policy (albeit with some competition to assert power or shuffle-off responsibility).

However, for the most part, this series helps explain the necessity of multi-centric policymaking ...

For more, see Policy Concept in 1000 Words: Multi-centric Policymaking

The first of a series of podcasts tying together multiple 500 Words posts. They’ll sound a bit different from the 1000 Words podcasts because I recorded them in front of our MPP students.

This brief lecture is on defining and measuring public policy and policy change. The relevant posts are:

Policy in 500 Words: what is public policy and why does it matter?

Policy in 500 Words: how much does policy change?

The first thing we do when studying public policy is to try to define it – as, for example, the sum total of government action, from signals of intent to the final outcomes. We then conclude that there is no single, satisfying, definition of public policy. Instead, there are many which accentuate different aspects of the policy process, prompting you to consider the additional questions you have to ask to make sense of policy.

Why do we ask more questions?

Think about how to research a specific policy issue. I’ll use the example ‘what is tobacco policy?’ to illustrate the importance of additional questions:

[see Policy in 500 Words: what is public policy and why does it matter? for more] 

From Policy Concepts in 1000 words: Critical Policy Studies and the Narrative Policy Framework

‘Critical policy analysis’ (or studies’) is a broad term to describe a wide collection of texts, and it is difficult to come up with a definitive account, beyond the idea that it is perhaps based on the equally broad description ‘post-positivism’ and methods such as discourse analysis (also note the phrase ‘argumentative turn’). However, a discussion of ‘post-positivism’ is incredibly valuable even if you wouldn’t see yourself as post-positivist.

One key account of the intellectual basis of this literature is by Fischer when he describes the failings of ‘positivist’ policy sciences to describe, aid and explain policymaking (at least if measured against certain, rather unrealistic, hopes). In particular, he takes to task the idea of objective science in which we can separate facts from values and accumulate knowledge using scientific tenets such as hypothesis generation, revision and falsification. This argument ties in to one of the big questions about the nature of the world and the extent to which it exists independently of our knowledge or experience of it. Fischer stresses the social context in which knowledge is produced, to argue that scientists do not produce what can meaningfully be called ‘objective truth’. Instead, they are part of communities which produce knowledge according to rules, and that some professions, following particular rules, receive more respect than others in a notional hierarchy of knowledge production. This shifts our focus to the idea of ‘interpreting’ the social world rather than uncovering its truths, and provides a case for considering the value of many (often less respected) approaches even if they do not follow the same ‘positivist’ rules.

This is an important conclusion when we consider that many of the theories discussed in the ‘1000 word’ series would be described by Fischer as ‘positivist’. In particular, debates between Fischer and Paul Sabatier (the ACF) were based largely on their very-different views about how you do science and which approaches deserve support in published academic texts.

On that basis, the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) is interesting because a key aim is to take insights from critical policy analysis, about the importance of interpreting and framing the world, and use them to produce work that would satisfy the kinds of scientific requirements associated with Sabatier. They argue that, although the study of policy ‘narratives’ (often using discourse analysis) is associated strongly with post-positivist scholarship, they can be examined in a ‘systematic empirical manner’ – and that the study of narratives can be an important way to hep reconcile (to some extent) positivist/ post-positivist studies.

for more see Policy Concepts in 1000 words: Critical Policy Studies and the Narrative Policy Framework