Policy sciences and the market

The most recent response of our universities to the challenge presented by the urban crisis—the domestic problems that show their dramatic symptoms in our cities—has taken the form of new graduate programs in the policy sciences. They are widely diverse in course content, teaching methods, measures to assure experiential inputs and devices for survival in the standard discipline-oriented university climate, but all have the common purpose of improving the quality and enlarging the quantity of both public policy practitioners and analysts.These pioneering activities are growing in an atmosphere of intense intellectual debate and self-examination. How best to design and conduct them with respect to these input parameters, appropriate overall roles for universities in policy science training, the nature of more rational decisionmaking as a process, and the roles of policy science-trained analysts and practitioners in it and in promoting it, are all under lively examination and discussion.What has thus far received relatively little attention is the nature of the decision universe in which the products of these programs, the graduates, will need to perform if they are to have impact. In this paper that universe and the relationship of the university to it are characterized in simple market terms. Doing so suggests that the most pressing problems for policy science lie on the demand, not the supply, side of the market. It will take the best efforts of policy scientists to address them successfully.     

Policy sciences teaching in context: A note on Germany

This is an attempt to relate the specific opportunities for policy sciences teaching to the broader context of a changing policymaking system. In West Germany, policy-sciences teaching could not develop as long as legal education remained the predominant type of pre-entry training for the career civil service, and as long as constitutional and administrative law seemed to supply decision premises fully adequate for the types of policy problems that were regarded as critical. This pattern was functional as long as the basic conservatism of post-war policies did obscure the problem of policy choice and the need for policy analysis. It became dysfunctional, however, when the fiscal crisis of 1966/67 dramatized the need for a rationalization of budgetary choices, and when the urgency of new problems and new political demands exposed the insufficiency of conservative policies.These emerging demands on policymakers at all levels of government have led to an increasing awareness of the need for better policy-analysis and planning, and for the recruitment of personnel trained in policy sciences. While retraining programs will meet some of this demand, the growing number of planning staffs has created an opportunity for new policy-oriented programs of pre-entry training for civil service functions. The article concludes with the outline of one such program.     

COVID-19 and the policy sciences: initial reactions and perspectives

Policy Sciences - The world is in the grip of a crisis that stands unprecedented in living memory. The COVID-19 pandemic is urgent, global in scale, and massive in impacts. Following Harold D....     

The political hand: Policy implementation and youth employment programs

Outstanding studies in the past decade have illuminated the sources of ineffective implementation and thus have suggested what not to do. To learn more about what to do, we analyzed a broad range of cases of effective implementation of youth employment programs in eight cities. The goal was to build an impressionistic model of the conditions contributing to flective implementation. We found that executives in the successful programs often acted as “fixers,” repairing the implementation process and protecting and correcting their programs, especially through coalition building and constant intervention in administrative detail. Some executives created patterns of interest convergence among the relevant actors, using incentives to turn mild interests into active support. They thus provided the public sector's missing “political hand,” analogous to the market's “invisible hand.”     

Uneven local implementation of federal policy after disaster: Policy conflict and goal ambiguity

As climate change continues to increase both the frequency and intensity of environmental hazards and disasters, the need for a cohesive national mitigation policy grows. As the environmental federalism scholarship indicates, the inherent tension in federal, state, and local policy implementation highlights that despite a national need, environmental quality is a local public good. To complicate matters, there is disagreement about the optimal level of decision-making regarding the adoption and implementation of environmental policy. This study addresses this gap by considering the role of policy ambiguity and conflict in policy implementation. The analysis relies on primary qualitative data collected from open-ended interviews with 22 local government officials in 12 municipalities following Hurricane Harvey. Through the lens of policy ambiguity and conflict, we find confirmatory support for the idea that policies with less ambiguous goals are more likely to be implemented. Furthermore, we find that policy conflict arises when local governments perceive there is little for the community to gain by implementing the federal program. Thus, the level of protection afforded to citizens varies greatly between communities and is influenced heavily by politics. This research supports the Ambiguity-Conflict Model of policy implementation, an oft-cited but rarely tested theoretical framework for assessing the intergovernmental politics of policy implementation. It also demonstrates the barriers to local implementation of federal environmental policy in a nested system of government.     

Prolegomena to policy sciences

Establishment of policy sciences as a new supradiscipline involves a scientific revolution, requiring fargoing innovations in basic paradigms. Particularly essential are: (1) Integration between various disciplines, and especially of social sciences with analytical decision approaches; (2) bridging of the pure vs. applied dichotomy; (3) acceptance of tacit knowledge as a scientific resource; (4) changes in interface between science and values; (5) broad time perspectives; (6) focus on metapolicies; (7) commitment to policymaking improvement; and (8) concern with extrarational and irrational processes, such as creativity.Unique subjects of policy sciences, opened up by these paradigms, include, among others: (a) Policy analysis, which involves critical changes in systems analysis so as to permit application to complex policy issues; (b) policy strategies, involving determination of postures and main guidelines for specific policies, such as on degrees of incrementalism vs. innovation and on attitudes to risks; and (c) policymaking system redesign, including evaluation and improvement of the policymaking system, e.g., through changes in one-person-centered high-level decisionmaking, development of politicians, and institutionalization of social experimentation.Development of policy sciences requires many innovations in research, teaching, and professional activities. It constitutes a main effort to reconstruct the role of intellectualism and rationality in human affairs and, therefore, justifies intense efforts.Parts of this article are based on papers delivered at the 136th Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Boston, 26–31 December 1969) and at the 65th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (New York, 2–6 September 1969).     

The policy sciences as science

The preceding evaluation of the policy sciences by Schneider, Stevens, and Tornatzky is based on a rather narrow conception of science that emphasizes quantitative and rigorous methods. It overlooks the limitations of such methods, as revealed by the results of applications, and certain adjustments to these limitations. The latter include the adoption of more modest but realizable aspirations and the synthesis of diverse methods-qualitative as well as quantitative, exploratory as well as confirmatory. It also overlooks differences and trends in epistemological preconceptions that underlie the conduct of research and the interpretation of research results. This article reviews the relevant literature in the hope that it might eventually contribute to more enlightened evaluations of the emerging discipline.     

Epistemology of the human sciences

The entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley and Route 128 - America’s leading centers of technological innovation - organized politically in the late 1970s. This paper seeks to explain why high tech business associations in these two regions have adopted widely divergent political stances and behavior. It argues that business interests are defined through the process of organization, and that the attitudes of these groups of industrialists were shaped by distinctive political environments, in turn a result of the different industrial and social histories of the two regions. While much scholarly interest has been devoted to the ways in which business affects political outcomes, the paper suggests that the reciprocal causation is equally important: the political environment is an important determinant of business interests.