A transaction-based approach to policy intervention

A transaction-based approach to policy intervention is presented. The approach overcomes a number of weaknesses in current approaches to policy intervention. The approach involves three main conceptual elements: transactions, transaction governance mechanisms, and governance principles. The transaction is taken to be the basic unit of analysis. Profiles of transactions vary along a number of transaction dimensions. Transaction governance mechanisms - such as, for example, government service, regulation, contracts, vouchers, markets, taxes, and self-service - are each suitable for governing transactions having particular profiles. A mechanism will fail when used to govern transactions not fitting the profile. Governance principles are criteria or expectations - for example, efficiency, justice and liberty - used to judge how well a mechanism fulfills or achieves important societal goals. Specific choices of governance mechanisms (from the set that are technically feasible) therefore should be made according to how well they satisfy these governance principles. Public high school education is used as an example to illustrate the approach. A number of conclusions are offered.This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Public Administration Portland, Oregon, April, 1988.     

Institutional policy analysis: A critical review

Institutional policy analysts, who study government reform and its consequences, have made three strategic choices: first, they support or emphasize procedural values; second, they use a single method to examine a single reform of a single institution; and third, they focus on declining institutions, formal reforms, and coercive controls. The author challenges these choices and argues in favor of alternative approaches.     

Professional roles for policy analysts: A critical assessment

Analysts who act as employees or advisors in agencies that make public policy may find themselves operating in any of several different roles. They may see themselves as objective technicians, above the political fray, or as advocates of causes of their own choosing, or as unquestioning proponents of the positions adopted by their employers. Their choice of roles will differ, according to some systematic characteristics found in the environment. Any serious effort to develop a code for the behavior of policy analysts must take these differences into account.     

Forecasting and the systems approach: A critical survey

Long-range forecasting for social systems deals with complex feedback interactions between all sectors and elements of such systems, and thus inherently implies facing the challenge of the systems approach. The latter may be characterized as an attempt to understand the self-organizing behavior of social systems and to grasp its potential dynamic implications. A survey of current approaches to forecasting attempts to discuss the state of the art and potentials for further development in this light. Many modelling approaches—in particular econometrics—are inherently restricted to mechanistic modes of behavior. Formalized man-technique interaction—for which innovative approaches have become known—may aid forecasting for adaptive modes of system behavior; computer simulation of structural models has considerable potential in this area. Finally, forecasting techniques may be applied so as to stimulate human inventive thinking. The systems approach provides the proper perspective for the meaningful use of formalized approaches to forecasting.This paper is based on a contribution to the conference on Long Term Planning and Forecasting sponsored by the International Economic Association in Moscow, December 11–16, 1972. A related paper, outlining the theoretical frame of reference, will be published under the title Forecasting and Systems Approach: A Frame of Reference inManagement Science in 1973.     

Citizen participation and judgment in policy analysis: A case study of urban air quality policy

The emphasis currently placed on citizen participation in planning results in part from the recognition that planning requires judgments that have both value and technical components. This article describes a case study of a citizen participation process in which planners' judgments, rather than the judgments of the members of a citizens' task force, seemed to dictate the outcome. Although citizens were supposed to be influential in the policy analysis, they were, in effect, excluded from a meaningful role in the process. The analysis was actually guided by planners' supposedly technical judgments. Those judgments had important value implications, however, and those implications were not made clear to the citizens' task force. Examples are given of judgments made by planners at each stage of the analysis and the value components of those judgments are discussed. In each example, the judgments resulted in elimination of alternatives, selection of information, or integration of information. Two examples of methods of citizen participation which can increase the influence of citizens' judgments are also described.The National Center for Atmospheric Research is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.     

Environmental mediation: An alternative approach to policy stalemates

Environmental mediation is a new and innovative attempt to overcome the policy stalemates that frequently hinder effective environmental policymaking. It brings together environmentalists, business groups, government officials, and a neutral mediator in an attempt to negotiate a binding settlement to a specific controversy. This essay describes this approach, discusses its advantages over more traditional dispute resolution processes, and explains how it is able to produce acceptable agreements in such a difficult policy area.     

The ‘new’ policy approach to housing: A review of the literature

A new convention of ‘self-help housing’ has become established over the past 20 years. However, a close examination of the literature shows that this approach is not widely implemented, but remains largely at the level of showcase projects; moreover the lowest income groups are usually not the principal beneficiaries of sites-and-service schemes. The literature gives evidence of powerful political, administrative and economic interests against the large-scale legal delivery of sites-and-services, and in favour of the continued dependence of the poor on illegal access.     

Transactions costs and the optimal instrument and intensity of air pollution control

Conclusions To what extent do the transactions costs of implementing alternative instruments for pollution control affect the choice of the optimal instrument and the efficient intensity of control under that instrument? In a comparison of Least-Cost Regulatory Standards and Revenue-Neutral Pigouvian Taxes, it is the higher transactions costs of implementing the taxes that make Pigouvian Taxes the more costly of the two instruments. However, a more practical comparison of instruments is between Politically Feasible Standards, Marketable Discharge Permits, and Revenue-Raising Pigouvian Taxes. Here, the relationship between the transactions costs of implementation and total pollution costs are in an almost linear inverse relationship. The lower the pollution costs associated with a particular instrument, and therefore the more desirable the instrument, the higher the transactions costs of implementation. Other factors such as political distortion and welfare gains prove to be more important than the transactions costs of implementation.Assuming that variable transactions costs decrease with the optimal level of pollution for regulatory standards but increase with the optimal level for market oriented instruments, an accounting of transactions costs results in less stringent control in the case of regulatory standards and more stringent control in the case of market oriented instruments. However, the percentage effect is very small. Moreover, it is smaller in both cases if marginal pollution damage rises with the level of pollution, as it is usually presumed to do, rather than remain constant as assumed in this paper for purposes of aggregation. A major conclusion of this paper is that Pigouvian Taxes are the superior instrument for pollution control when the raising of public revenues is a desired objective. However, the various conclusions of this paper should be viewed as tentative because the data on which they are based are no longer current. Moreover, the critical estimates of transactions costs are somewhat dubious. It is hoped that new data will be collected for answering the questions raised in this paper. When this is done, a more powerful approach, one that obviates the need for the artificial, one-dollar-damaging, aggregate pollutant, would be an expanded linear programming model in which the transactions costs are treated as separate coefficients of the individual pollution control methods. Separate sets of such coefficients, each corresponding to a different policy instrument such as Least-Cost Regulatory Standards, Revenue-Neutral Pigouvian Taxes, etc., would enable the investigator to directly derive solutions that specify the optimal policy instrument as well as the optimal set of pollution control method activity levels.I am grateful to William Ascher, Murray Weidenbaum, and two anonymous referees for helpful guidance on the paper.     

The organization of influence on the EC's common agricultural policy: A network approach

Abstract The common agricultural policy of the EC with its market regulations is decided at EC level by a multilevel system of government, in which the Commission and the parliamentary parties of the European Parliament play the supranational role and the national ministries of agriculture act as parts of the intergovernmental system of the Council of Ministers. National interest groups have thereby three major access routes to the EC system, first through their national governments, or second indirectly, transmitted by their European peak organizations, or third directly to the supranational EC actors. The network approach is applied to study empirically the densities of access through these various routes. The links between actors in the agricultural policy domain are conceptualized as links for the exchange of resources, the most important resource of a policy domain being the final control of policy decisions. The political actors of the governance system originally hold full control of this valuable resource which they exchange for influence resources possessed by the interest groups, as public support or expert knowledge. Empirically, answers to the network questions depend on the type of resource and the viewpoint of the interviewed actors. An index is developed which indicates the resource flows between actors and the distribution of equilibrium control of policy decisions. It is shown that the national ministers of agriculture depend very much on the support and expertise of their national farmers' lobby, whereas the Commission relies more on contacts within the political sector itself. Multilevel systems need a lot of political coordination, so that the political actors within such systems, especially at the supranational level, seem to deal first of all with each other and not so much with the demand side of politics, compared to the national ministers of agriculture.     

On the scenario approach to simulation modeling for complex policy assessment and design

This paper reviews the major issues posed by scenario-based simulation modeling in the policy process, using agricultural policy as an example of a complex decision arena. Policy is seen as a process by which decision makers use the instruments under their control to approach the general goals of society. Models can help to choose instrument settings, evaluate policy options, and assess their appropriateness to a particular situation. But they cannot design policy; the interactions between policy makers and models are critical if modeling is to be useful in the policy process. Policy models must be oriented to the factors that focus and constrain judgments in the real world, as well as toward the substantive problems motivating analyses. These include the actors within the system, as well as the geographic and disciplinary contexts of the problems. Scenario-writing provides a way of ordering understanding and judgment about different phenomena to help users interact most effectively with a model and to insure that the perspectives of the model are most appropriate to the needs of the decisionmaker. It is an iterative and evolutionary process which can provide a great deal of insight into the assessment phase of policy design.     

Ideas and agency in immigration policy: A discursive institutionalist approach

Political science literature tends to depict the role of ideas in policy in two distinct ways: as strategic tools mobilised by agents to achieve pre‐given preferences; or as structures imposing constraints on what is considered legitimate or feasible. Discursive institutionalism seeks to combine these insights, suggesting that while actors are indeed constrained by deeply entrenched ideas, they nonetheless enjoy some autonomy in selecting and combining ideas. This article seeks to further develop this approach in two ways. First, it identifies three discursive strategies through which policy actors can selectively mobilise ideas: they may foreground one level over others; exploit ambivalence in public philosophies; or link programme ideas over time by invoking ‘policy legacies’. Second, the article elucidates the mechanisms through which such strategic selections can in turn modify existing public philosophies and programme ideas, thereby influencing policy change. These claims are examined by comparing discourse on immigration policy liberalisation in Germany and the United Kingdom between 2000 and 2008. Evidence is found of all three discursive strategies. Moreover, the article shows how, in the German case, these discursive representations led to longer‐term adjustments in underlying programme ideas and public philosophies on immigration.     

The paths to citizenship: a critical examination of immigration policy in Britain since 2001

ABSTRACT

McGhee explores the Labour government's attempts to manage the challenges and protect against the ‘risks’ associated with a particular group of migrants to Britain: permanent immigrants. He examines how Gordon Brown conceives of his three-stage proposals for ‘earned’ British citizenship working with the wider managed migration strategy introduced by Tony Blair and Charles Clarke. At the same time, McGhee contextualizes the earned British citizenship proposals within the recent immigration policies and citizenship/integration strategies introduced by David Blunkett when Home Secretary. If the episodes of social disorder involving the second generation of settled immigrant communities in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in the summer of 2001 were the events that triggered Blunkett's new integration/citizenship strategies, including the introduction of English classes and citizenship lessons for would-be citizens, then the 7/7 attacks by so-called ‘home-grown’ extremists were the events that influenced the emergence of what will be described here as the institutional racialization associated with Brown's recommendations. McGhee also explores the shift from Blunkett's model of civic assimilation, with its Cantle-esque emphasis on participation, to the Brown model of civic nationalism, with its post-7/7-fuelled emphasis on loyalty, shared values and responsibilities.     

Building policy scales from manifesto data: A referential content validity approach

Researchers using scales based on MRG/CMP/MARPOR's manifesto dataset face a bewildering array of different scales. The validation of these scales has tended to focus on external, convergent validity. The actual content of these scales has received less attention and the choice of the manifesto components which make up these scales has often been conducted by either opaque or questionable methods. This article develops a critique of existing methods of component selection and proposes a new method of component selection based on the covariance of components with ‘naïve’ provisional scales, which are refined in an iterative process. It uses this method to construct a set of comparable one (general left–right) and two (economic and social) dimensional scales – filling a gap in the existing body of scales that will allow researchers to compare dimensionality across models without inadvertently comparing different assumptions that underlie the construction of the scales.