POLI 348 Flashcards
Policy-making is a political process because it involves…
Value conflicts
Power inequality
Strategic action between competitors
Policymaking involves judgement by…
Connecting empirical evidence with values
Dewey’s “Public” Definition
The public consists of all those who are affected by the
indirect consequences of transactions, to such an
extent that it is deemed necessary to have those
consequences systematically cared for…
Important Points on Dewey’s Public
When affected people become aware of a shared problem, they can then try to understand and act on it. In doing so they can constitute a “public.”
A public is a social entity that enables collective problem-solving…. and for Dewey, THAT is the soul of democracy
Dewey’s Shoemaker / Citizen Expertise
Those who are wearing the shoes know where it pinches and doesn’t fit best, even if the expert shoemaker knows how to best remedy the situation.
- Although problems are complicated, Dewey says that citizens are actually very intelligent with things they engage with and have the capacity to learn about these issues
- People become knowledgeable when they use, test, modify and discuss insights
Dewey’s Democratic Communication
- For this expertise of citizens to develop and be mobilize and contribute they need opportunities for good communication
Micro-level: deliberation through discussion between citizens or politicians
Macro-level: mass media and systematic opportunities for deliberation
Three Overarching Questions in the Course
- How are problems identified that require policy
solutions? Who belongs to the issue publics that
mobilize – or should mobilize – to address them? - Who creates knowledge? How can this be done best?
- How can processes be designed to leverage the insights of different members of publics? How can citizens be involved in larger social deliberation?
Asbestos in Canada
Industry develope din late 19th century
Problems known for decades but were hidden, such as with industry paying McGill scientists to not expose the truth
Beginning in 80s especially, affected people started speaking up - which ultimately caused the shift
Was still imported and stuff during Harper era
Banned fully in 2018 with a few exceptions
Different publics were created and different value conflicts were at play
Concept of ‘affectedness’
Clemons and McBeth’s Three Components of PP
Technical - relevant knowledge
Normative - value conflict
Political - managing conflict/mobilizing power
Affectedness
The extent to which a policy (or lack of
policy) impacts the interests of individuals or groups
- Can be affected without being aware of it
- “Interests” can be material, symbolic, status
- Those people affected have perspectives and often
insights that should be engaged to understand and
solve an issue
Intensity of Affectedness
- Life or death affected
- Well-being affected
- Economy, status, or other abstract thing affected
Polity
A political community
Two Conceptualizations of Polities/Publics
Polity as a collection of publics
Polity as unitary and governed
Advantages of Polity of Publics (as opposed to unitary, governed polity)
Harness insights and problem-solving of those most
affected rather than distant government / citizens
Opportunity to deliberate or negotiate to maximize interests of those most affected
Advantages of Unitary Public Model (as opposed to polity of publics)
Coordinated action and enforcement
Manage conflict across publics
Dewey Public Policy-making v Clemons + McBeth
Dewey public as mobilized, self-aware community with shared interests means public policymaking is surrounding that.
Clemons + McBeth focus more on centralized public where government makes policies for them
What is a public problem that requires a solution?
When the problem threatens public values resulting in a value conflict
For a government to give attention to a problem, it must meet at least one of the following criteria:
- Threaten the values and interests of the most
powerful in the society - Threaten the values and interests of a significantly large number of citizens
- Seem like a serious threat to a small but favourably
perceived group or to a group that has traditionally
received protection from the government
- Provide three values or valued goods that are central to policy around _______
- Sketch a bullseye diagram of intense and diffuse
affectedness for each of these valued goods.
Go!
Three Types of Values or Valued Goods
- Interests – material, status, symbolic
- Principles – safety, equality, freedom, justice
- Visions of future – Usually combine interests and principled commitments
Policy Phases
- Awareness and Agenda-setting
- Policy Formulation
- Decision-making
- Implementation
- Evaluation
Clemons and McBeth’s “Awareness”
aka Agenda-Setting
Recognition of threatened values or interests
Policy Definition
How things are framed or defined upon being set on the agenda
Clemons + McBeth’s “Policy Determination”
aka Policy formulation - policy definition is sharpened - policy objectives are set - alternatives are considered Indicative of their view of PP as gov't-centric
Ways in which citizens contribute to policy formulation
Opinion polling
Consultations
Designed processes (BC Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform)
Decision-Making: Why is a policy chosen?
- It best solves the problem
- Best solves secondary problems (Elections, etc.)
- Manages conflicts between publics and individuals
Three Things Needed for Good Implementation
Resources
Instiutional Compentencies
Buy in from bureaucracy
In Policy Evaluation you assess…
Output - how many things/resources/people were dedicated to this
Impact - did it achieve its goals
Who constitutes evaluators in policy evaluation?
Bureaucrats Media Citizens Opposition parties NGOs
Who is a stakeholder?
- Individuals or groups affected by the policy problem
or potential policy responses. - Someone or group with power or influence whose cooperation or lack of obstruction is necessary to pass policy
- Individuals or groups with perspective / insights (member of a policy network)
Real Utopias
Idea that what is possible is based largely on our ideas
Three Types of Claims
Descriptive
Causal
Normative
Foucault - Power
Power is relations between two people. Being able to control their behaviour.
Phronesis
Practical wisdom - the right thing to do at the right time
Four Questions for Policymaking (Flyvberg)
- Where are we going
- Who gains and who loses, by which mechanisms of power?
- Is this development desirable?
- What should be done?
Empirical evidence can inform this, but political/ethical questions must be answered.
- What should be done?
Mechanisms of Power
Interpretation/messaging/comms
Bargaining
Shared interests with other groups
How social media is a ‘media disruptor’
- Instantaneous and global distribution - takes away time and space, transcends state borders/institutions
- Capturing all of the online advertising market - Facebook as ‘becoming’ the internet
- Disempowerment of gatekeepers/you become gatekeeper - I’m assuming like mass media and gov’t?
- Disrupting ‘professional journalism’ - anyone can do it, less regulation online, business model shift
- New ‘attention’ economy - clickbait/hate clicks
- Surveillance capitalism / data use
New Media Gatekeepers
Individuals/content consumers and creators
Silicon Valley
AI / algorithms
Groups Involved in the Political Influence Models
- Citizens
- Public Sphere and Opinion
- Traditional Organizations
- Politicians/Public Agencies
- Laws and Policies
- Public Action
Connecting Points between these - Elections + Lobbying
- Communicative pressure (Traditional)
- ICT (Info and Comm technology)
The One Group Who is missing from the Politics + Internet Models
The social media actors themselves / silicon valley
They have their own interests
Techno-pessimism
In the realm of social media, arose in the Trump era and especially post-Cambridge Analytica
Amazon as a quasi-state
Controls half the online retail market
Companies rely on its infrastructure, financial systems, algorithms and rules.
People are more scared of getting in trouble with Amazon than going to real court.
4 Points of Rahman Article on Informational Infrastructure
- Reframe Policy Problems - don’t deal with cambridge analytica, deal with the structural problem
- Digital platforms as infrastructure
- Are the ways people access significant parts of life like social and economic relationships
- Tend to monopolize due to network effects
- Create situations of domination - Three Forms of Platform Power
- Gatekeeper
- Transmission - arbitrary rules and information flows
- Scoring - socially, beyond the platform - Creative approaches to policy platforms
- Managerial (gov’t oversight bodies)
- Self-governance
- Structuralist - break up monopolies
Network Effects
The more people that use a platform, the more they can’t live without it/need it for everyday essentials.
Domination (Rahman)
Arbitraty and unaccountable control / interference in people’s lives
California Consumer Privacy Act
Passed in 2018 saying Californians must
- Know what personal information (PI) is being collected
about them.
- Know whether their PI is being sold or disclosed and to
whom.
- Be able to say no to the sale of PI to third parties.
- Be able to request the deletion of PI the business has collected.
- Enjoy equal service and price from a company even if they
exercise their privacy rights.
Alastair McTaggart
Policy champion for data privacy
Proposed a proposition but then didnt do it with the promise of the new bill
Epistocracy
The rule of the knowers (of political affairs usually)
Jason Brennan
Wrote ‘Against Democracy’
Epistocrat
Thinks you should be an expert for your vote to count
JS Mill on Democracy
If people pay taxes, they should have a say.
Exluding people can be dangerous - can make them malcontent.
Generally, people affected by gov’t should have a say in it.
Plural voting - people with more knowledge should have more of a say throughs secondary votes
Plural Voting
JS Mill idea that those with more knowledge get additional votes.
This avoid class rule by manual labours and unintelligent rule.
Should be based on education or occupation, not property or tests.
Five Problems with Expertise
Experts disagree They have cognitive biases They are unpersuasive How do you assess expertise? In policy, we're dealing with predictions a lot, and political scientists are no better than the average at this
Runciman’s Four Critiques of Epistocracy
Value conflict means no ‘right’ answer (we should suffer from our own mistakes not others)
Democracy ensures equal power - no domination
Risk averse
Democracy is best when shit hits the fan
Simulated Oracle
Jason Brennan’s idea that people’s votes change based on statistical evidence of what they would vote if they were ‘high-information’ people
Advocacy Research
A way to make citizens into experts
Experts work with citizen groups, use basic methodologies
Participant-dominant model
Participant inquiry
People hearing experts tell them something makes them agree less, to be persuasive, one must believe that someone…
is an experts AND shares their interests (has their best interests at heart, shares their values)
Three Reasons People Don’t trust Elites
– Jargon
– Reproduce existing systems
– Dismiss amateurs
Also, policies are social constructions, and you cannot avoid interpretation/value judgements, and so people might not share your values
Fischer’s Four Critiques of Epistocracy
■ No one can be an expert in all things
■ Rule by experts would also be rule by non-experts
■ Experts also might make things worse
■ Citizens are experts in their own lives, values
Expert advice is ultimately just _____
An informed opinion (implication = it has some value judgement in it)
Specialized Citizens
The idea that experts must operate as one of many democratic citizens and work with other citizens to policymake
Limitations of Committee Testimony
Are politicians equipped to answer the proper questions?
Are the voices of regular citizens reflected?
Heresthetics
Manipulating political circumstances to get what you want
Can utilize structural procedures, framing, and agenda-setting
“Will of the people” is made up because…
Voting rules/systems change outcomes
Actors can manipulate voting rules
Overton Window
Providing more extreme options makes other options
seem normal
Frames in Thought v Communication
Frames in Thought: our own cognitive structures to help us make sense of the world
Frames in communication: not things that are in our worldview, but the ways in which things are presented to us, how people choose to present things. Selective presentation and interpretation of political realities.
To be a frame, something must…
not provide new information, but a new spin.
If you accept a specific frame, you…
are accepting a set of other values or considerations upon which it rests
Two Problems with Frames
When citizens see them as value-neutral or themselves have no preference, frames can have undue power
They can be manipulative
Dominant Frames
Frames that almost everyone accepts / alternative frames are demonized.
To question dominant frames, one must…
Increase exposure to new frames
Ask specific questions, instead of large ideological questions
… hard though because people fall back on what they know
Polarizing Frames
One’s that assert that others are wrong and are just generally inflammatory
Group-based Frames
Groups, often those without the political power to produce their own frames, are stereotyped.
Two Pros of Frames
Politics is complicated…
Competing frames add nuance actually
For healthy debate, deliberations must include
Competing frames
A shared understanding of terms
Shared agreement on basic issues
Trust between groups
The Study of PP is changing in that it…
Is shifting away from high modernist assumptions of:
Technocracy
Exclusive focus on government instead of other influencers
Policymaking is mostly a matter of …
persuasion
Look at questions posed from Monday’s class
Do it
Voting Paradox
Honestly, unsure. I think that it is to get the will of the people but that is impossible because you can
- Have different voting systems
- Manipulate voting systems
Praxis (Clemons + McBeth)
Theory-guided action
Flyvberg
Aalborg project
Four questions for policymakers
Power creates knowledge (chamber of commerce)
Fung et al.
Six Models of Politics + Internet
Rahman Piece
Big platforms are infrastructure now, hold enormous power
