Policy formulation

Question 1

What is policy formulation?

Answer 1

the development of proposed courses of action to help resolve a public problem

Question 2

What standards must policy meet?

Answer 2

economic cost, social and political acceptability, and likely effectiveness

Question 3

What is the real ‘2nd chamber’ and provides a constitutional check in the UK?

Answer 3

The Civil Service (bureaucracy)

Question 4

What is the key difference between ministers and civil servants?

Answer 4

ministers are elected politicians (mainly) and civil servants are appointed

Question 5

What is the British political system characterised by?

Answer 5

separation of politics and administration

Question 6

What does bureau maximising mean?

Answer 6

rational bureaucrats seek to maximise their own budget and size of their department

Question 7

What does bureau shaping mean?

Answer 7

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

Question 8

What are spads?

Answer 8

temporary civil servants employed by govt to provide political advice to ministers

Question 9

What is departmentalism?

Answer 9

a mix of political, policy and governmental pathologies

Question 10

What is a wicked issue?

Answer 10

social or cultural issues difficult to explain and inherently impossible to solve

Question 11

what are the 4 reasons for wicked issues?

Answer 11

Incomplete or contradictory knowledge.
Number of people and opinions involved.
Large economic burden.
Interconnected nature of the problem with other problems.

Question 12

What does JUG stand for?

Answer 12

Joined-Up-Government

Question 13

What is Joined-Up-Government?

Answer 13

the efforts toward improving horizontal coordination and integration between departments and agencies.

Question 14

What is the spillover effect?

Answer 14

where one govt department fails to take into account of its impact on another part of govt

Question 15

What are the structural problems with departmentalism?

Answer 15

costs and incentives
ministerial portfolios

Question 16

What are the costs and incentives problems?

Answer 16

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

Question 17

Why are ministerial portfolios a problem regarding JUG?

Answer 17

incentives to perform as a department- competitive arrangement feeds down.

short-term incentives dissuade long-term cross-cutting thinking/working.

Question 18

what is the silo mentality?

Answer 18

contradictory departmental objectives/policy developed in isolation.

divergent stakeholders

Question 19

what are the technical and legal difficulties with JUG?

Answer 19

sharing of data

greater the chain= harder to evaluate or hold accountability= more likely to have policy failures

Question 20

what is the policy instrument choice dependent on?

Answer 20

technical and financial feasibility and predictive effectiveness

how the public/electorate will respond

Question 21

What are the 5 policy instruments?

Answer 21

regulation
govt management
taxing and spending
market mechanisms
education, information and persuasion

Question 22

what are the 4 tools of governance?

Answer 22

nodality
authority
treasure
organisation