Lecture 5 - Politics, the process and technology

Question 1

What is institutionalism? Give examples

Answer 1

• Setting up an institution for a policy problem or using existing institutional set up to solve the problem / issue
• GOOD at explaining policy inertia and the policy approach
• BAD at explaining large scale change - eg when a politician comes in with a new idea out of nowhere
• The idea that government institutions are the key unit of analysis.
• Legitimacy: Especially in democracies, govts obtain a popular mandate from the public, so the institutions can be seen as carrying out their will.
• Universality: Govt’s policies are applied to the entire population
• Coercion: The state has a monopoly over coercive methods of enforcing policies due to its law enforcement agencies.
  Hence the formal structures and SOPs have an effect on human action and impact policy outcomes.
• Example: setting up and the use of large institutions rather than smaller group homes for the care and treatment of the mentally ill. Policy problem was that elderly people needed round the clock care and were filling up hospitals - institutions introduced to take these people and care for them in care homes where the workers are technically trained and the people are in a comfortable environment.

Question 2

What is incrementalism? Give examples

Answer 2

• Based on the important concept of bounded rationality but was created as a critique of the rational model.
• Changes policy incrementally, with small continuous adjustments.
• Policy making processes are done by successive, limited comparisons which start from the current situation.
• Lindblom (1959) argues that this is a practical tool that solves the unrealistic nature of the rational model which is too information greedy and insufficiently precise.
• Criticism: fails in the face of large scale change or crisis.
• Example: Science and innovation funding policies in the US following the Bush report - these policies work gradually, making small adjustments / advancements in science consistently rather than constant significant jumps. Also, Japanese engineering uses this model to create steadily improving product performance, which in certain circumstances outperforms more orthodox planning systems.

Question 3

What is the Elite model? Give examples

Answer 3

• A governing elite group takes control of the policies and these policies are based on their preferences and values
• Does not take the publics views into consideration and does not feel that having their views expressed is important
• Public officials merely carry out the policies creates by the elites.
• Can be an effective model in a developing country when the people do not know what they need. Also when a new tech is introduced or a problem arises that the general public have limited knowledge of so need professionals to make the decisions.

Question 4

What is Advocacy Coalition Framework? Give examples

Answer 4

Different groups / parties each with different issues or interests.
3 premises for this framework:
1. timescale needed to understand a policy process needs to be at least a decade
2. Focus on subsystems: the interaction of different actors from different institutions interested in a policy area
3. Public policies can be conceptualised as belief systems: sets of values, priorities and casual assumptions about how to realise them
Within a policy subsystem: Actors can be aggregated into a number of advocacy coalitions. To mitigate conflict arising from these mitigations, we need policy brokers to find compromise.
- Learning: process of learning is fundamental to this process
- Perturbations: Perturbations that are external to the subsystem, like the macroeconomic crisis, are also essential. It is the accumulation of small individual issues that eventually result in a major issue that has to be acted on.
eg Fuel poverty - different advocacies: citizens advice, anti poverty party, energy groups. The perturbation was the steep rise in energy prices.

Question 5

What is Punctuated equilibrium theory? Give examples

Answer 5

• This theory holds that policies shift rapidly from one equilibrium to the next (stable point to another)
• Each period of relative stability is punctuated by a period of rapid changes in policy. This theory is supported by two main explanations:
  1. Attention for ideas is cumulative: of relative stability is punctuated by a period of rapid changes in policy.
  2. External shocks: External shocks to the system cause a rapid re-evaluation of previously held beliefs e.g. GFC 2008 causing a different look at risk.

Question 6

What is Kingdon’s many streams model? Give examples

Answer 6

• this model states that there are 3 separate streams in policy making: problems, policies (plan), and politics
• when these 3 streams come into contact due to a change in govt or a shock to the system, a window will open for a policy to be created or adjusted
• it realises that policy-making is inherently chaotic and that each policy requires the use of a different development process because no two policies are the same
• Realises that if the policy process is approached as a set of steps then the temptation for the policy makers will be to only consider key stages later in the process such as policy legitimisation or policy evaluation.