Policy formulation Flashcards
What is policy formulation?
the development of proposed courses of action to help resolve a public problem
What standards must policy meet?
economic cost, social and political acceptability, and likely effectiveness
What is the real ‘2nd chamber’ and provides a constitutional check in the UK?
The Civil Service (bureaucracy)
What is the key difference between ministers and civil servants?
ministers are elected politicians (mainly) and civil servants are appointed
What is the British political system characterised by?
separation of politics and administration
What does bureau maximising mean?
rational bureaucrats seek to maximise their own budget and size of their department
What does bureau shaping mean?
Civil servants are content to shift remit because it allows them to offload uninteresting minutiae of policy implementation and focus on policy advising which grants higher status
What are spads?
temporary civil servants employed by govt to provide political advice to ministers
What is departmentalism?
a mix of political, policy and governmental pathologies
What is a wicked issue?
social or cultural issues difficult to explain and inherently impossible to solve
what are the 4 reasons for wicked issues?
Incomplete or contradictory knowledge.
Number of people and opinions involved.
Large economic burden.
Interconnected nature of the problem with other problems.
What does JUG stand for?
Joined-Up-Government
What is Joined-Up-Government?
the efforts toward improving horizontal coordination and integration between departments and agencies.
What is the spillover effect?
where one govt department fails to take into account of its impact on another part of govt
What are the structural problems with departmentalism?
costs and incentives
ministerial portfolios
What are the costs and incentives problems?
budget sharing- budget arrangements designed to maintain silo approaches/turf wars.
Public spending cuts- they create barriers to innovative cross-cutting thinking and enhance budget wars
Why are ministerial portfolios a problem regarding JUG?
incentives to perform as a department- competitive arrangement feeds down.
short-term incentives dissuade long-term cross-cutting thinking/working.
what is the silo mentality?
contradictory departmental objectives/policy developed in isolation.
divergent stakeholders
what are the technical and legal difficulties with JUG?
sharing of data
greater the chain= harder to evaluate or hold accountability= more likely to have policy failures
what is the policy instrument choice dependent on?
technical and financial feasibility and predictive effectiveness
how the public/electorate will respond
What are the 5 policy instruments?
regulation
govt management
taxing and spending
market mechanisms
education, information and persuasion
what are the 4 tools of governance?
nodality
authority
treasure
organisation
