Test 2 Flashcards
Logrolling
The practice of exchanging favors, especially in politics by reciprocal voting for each other’s proposed legislation
What is the Federal Register
The daily journal of federal rule-making and other administrative activity
Policy Designers must consider what when designing policy?
Political feasibility, resources, and the behavior of policy target
Lowi’s 3 policy categories
Distributive, redistributive and regulatory
Why have policy typologies?
To organize a broad range of public policies into a system of policy types to aid in understanding and analysis
Distributive
A policy that takes a resource from a broad group and gives it to a narrower one (farm subsidies)
Redistributive
takes from one identifiable group and gives it to another (welfare)
Regulatory
Competitive = market interference Protective = protects consumers
Cost-benefit analysis
A technique of policy analysis that seeks to understand the costs of a course of action and its benefits. (Costs are easier to calculate than benefits)
Bounded Rationality
Describes how decision makers seek to act as rationally as possible within certain boys or limits
Incrementalism
Policy making is accomplished in baby steps
Rational Comprehensive
is not practical because decision makers don’t have anywhere close to all the information needed to make a decision
Efficiency
Gaining the most output for a given level of input
Why is efficiency hard to accomplish?
Because it is hard to define
Hobbes: liberty V security
We have to sacrifice certain liberties to live in a stable and safe society
Policy tool
a method through which government seeks a policy objective
Indicator
Evidence of a problem, often based on statistics. (unemployment rate)
Focusing event
A sudden event that can generate attention to public problems or issues, particularly issues and problems that are actually or potentially harmful
Instrumental policy learning
Learning about the effectiveness of policy tools and interventions
Why is policy failure hard to define?
Because it is hard to determine what is an absolute failure
Single loop learning
learning about how a policy or process works and making adjustments without questioning the fundamental assumptions of the policy
Double loop learning
A type of learning that involves not only thinking about how a policy or process works but also its fundamental assumptions
Bottom-up approach
A way of studying policy design and implementation that considers the abilities and motivations of the lowest level implements and tracks policy design from that level to the highest levels of government.
Top-down approach
A way of studying policy design and implementation that considers the goals of the highest level policy designers and traces the design and implementation of the policy through the lowest level implementers
Street level bureaucrat
Bureaucrats that work directly with the public
Challenges of organizational learning
can organizations “non” human entities learn from mistakes
Advocacy coalition framework
Interest groups are organized in policy communities
within a policy domain
•Each policy domain contains 2–4 advocacy coalitions •The coalitions self-organize around shared beliefs •Policy brokers seek to make compromises among
advocacy coalitions
Punctuated equilibrium
Long periods of policy stability are followed by rapid
change, followed by long periods of stability
Satisficing
Making the best possible decision under constraints related to time, information and other resources
Kingdon Steams
A policy stream is continuous, a political stream and problem stream interact to create a window of opportunity for policy change
