Contextual meanings in policy discourse: A case study of language use concerning resource policy in the New Zealand high country

Variation in the meaning and use of the term landscape by different decision makers and decision influencers in the New Zealand high country is analysed in relation to the way they describe a resource policy issue. The case study is based upon documentary sources and oral accounts of the role that trees might play in high country land use. Links between language use and interest are identified and explored, and some consequential implications discussed.     

Reaganism,pluralism, and the politics of pesticide regulation

A key priority of the Reagan Revolution was an attack on the system of health, safety, and environmental regulation that arose in the 1970s. This article evaluates Reagan's regulatory reforms through the lens of one particularly important case study, the regulation of pesticides. This case will be used to explore two issues: (1) an empirical question about the magnitude of policy change achieved by the Reagan administration in the area of environmental regulation; and (2) a conceptual and theoretical question about the dynamics of subgovernments or issue networks, and their relationship to policy change. The analysis reveals that while the Reagan administration has produced important changes in both policy style and substance, in comparison to the changes that occurred around 1970, they have been relatively modest. Reagan's reform efforts failed largely because the President only controls a subset of the relevant components of the policy regime. Environmental interests were strongly entrenched in regime elements beyond Reagan's immediate control - in particular Congress, the courts, and the ruling public philosophy - and were thus able to thwart many of Reagan's initiatives.     

Positivist beliefs among policy professionals: An empirical investigation

A group of scholars argue that mainstream policy analysis ispositivistic in its theory and practice. This paper reports the resultsof an e-mail survey that was conducted to investigate the extent,dimensions, and determinants of positivist beliefs among policyprofessionals. The survey results show that policy professionals aremore positivistic in their abstract beliefs and less so in their beliefsabout the role of politics and analysis in the policy process.Educational background is the most important factor determining beliefs:The economists and mathematicians/scientists are most positivistic intheir beliefs, while political scientists are least positivistic. Also,practitioners take more positivistic positions than academics. Overall,the largest percentage of the respondents see the postpositivistfacilitator role as the proper role for policy analysts,but there is also a significant percentage of those who prefer thepositivist problem solver role.     

Contending discourses in the electric and magnetic fields controversy: The social construction of EMF risk as a public problem

The issue of adverse health effects from electric and magnetic fields (EMFs) has been brewing for the last decade or so. While the epidemiological evidence persists in linking proximity-to-powerlines to a few forms of cancer, exposure and dose remain undefined, and no clear mechanism of action has been identified. Despite this scientific ambiguity, there are frequent calls for governmental action; and yet, there is no unanimity on what action is appropriate, even among those asserting that something ought to be done. This article analyzes the various ways that the EMF problem has been socially constructed through distinctive forms of public discourse and the sources of contention among these different forms. It should appeal to interpretive policy analysts and to those interested in the valuative assumptions behind policy claims. Those oriented exclusively to the technical side of EMF may find the interpretation offered here somewhat unsettling, however, since it relativizes many of the factual claims surrounding the issue. Attention is also given to the ways that multiple EMF discourses are accommodated in the absence of scientifically conclusive evidence.     

Global climate change: defining the policy problem

The U.S. appears to be misdefining the policy problem posed by the threat of global climate change, and is therefore not likely to find satisfactory policy solutions.The dominant definitions of the policy problem - alleging certain scientific, economic, and political barriers to effective policy - circumscribe the search for policy solutions. But those solutions meet neither practical criteria of rationality nor the test of practical experience. We seem to be trapped within problem definitions that reflect and reinforce the convergence of powerful interests with elements of the culture.The problem may be a culture that fails to integrate science-based technologies for mastering nature with ethical or political constraints on their use. and therefore jeopardizes its own sustainability. If so, then reasoned action begins with political leadership that challenges selected elements of the dominant culture and directs attention to alternatives - thereby opening up the search for solutions.     

Admissible and sincere strategies under approval voting

This essay reasses the assumptions of the Brams-Fishburn theory of approval voting, and proposes modifications to make the theory correspond better with likely voting choices. With a small number of candidates, voters who use the inadmissible strategy of voting for all candidates can help to produce a result that better reflects the voters' wishes than is possible with admissible strategies, so we propose a widening of the definition of admissibility to encompass this case. With more than three candidates, we define first-order admissible strategies, which are the most likely strategies to be used in practice, and are also strongly sincere, in that a vote for any candidate is always accompanied by votes for all more or equally-preferred candidates. Their number is less under approval voting than under plurality voting. Both proposed modifications strengthen the technical arguments favoring approval voting over plurality voting.     

Ideas,interest and institutions in policy change: Transformation of India's agricultural strategy in the mid-1960s

Over the last ten years, policy change in the third world has become a matter of considerable intellectual and practical importance. For the theoretically inclined, how one explains changes in the behavior of the state is the main issue. Both Marxian and liberal orthodoxies had a tendency to read off state behavior from the power relationships at the level of the society, though differing in the way they conceptualized power. The return of institutional and state-centric explanations over the last decade has attempted to reverse this bias by looking more closely at the power struggles within the state institutions. For the practically inclined, the powerful intellectual rationale behind so many policy recommendations has often been puzzlingly lost in the maze of politics. What interests impede the implementation of good ideas, what institutions block getting policies right - these are some of the key questions on the agenda of international development institutions. Responding to these varied concerns, this paper analyzes a particularly successful case of policy change. While most of third world was still experimenting with land reforms and cooperatives as the ways to develop agriculture, India in the mid-1960s switched to producer price incentives and investments in new technology, a change that is widely believed to have turned India from a food-deficit to a food-surplus country. The focus is on how ideas, interests and institutions interacted to produce the change.     

The dynamics of financial globalization: Technology,market structure,and policy response

The development of increasingly transnationalized (globalized) financial markets raises several key issues for the analysis of politics, public policy, and the national state. This article suggests that financial globalization increasingly constrains policymakers and circumscribes the policy capacity of the state. After looking briefly at a range of approaches to the process of financial globalization itself, the author suggests that technological change is the main independent variable, by reducing transaction costs and dramatically increasing the price sensitivity of financial markets across borders, while at the same time making possible a range of economies of scale. These very developments have a knock-on effect throughout the domestic and international economies. They in turn make obsolescent the political economies of scale — the governance structures — which have characterized economic policy in modern nation-states, undermining the capacity of the state to produce public goods. At the same time, globalized financial markets interact with rapidly changing interest group structures and divided state structures, especially through regulatory arbitrage. Without the development of transnational regimes capable of regulating global financial markets, the structural basis of the national state itself is being undermined, and Polanyi's Great Transformation is over.     

Balancing Regionalism and Localism: How Institutions and Incentives Shape American Transportation Policy

Public policy decisions are increasingly made by regional governance efforts that involve diverse decision makers from multiple government units within a geographic region. These decision-making bodies face competing pressures to represent regional and local interests. We study how decision makers balance preferences for regionalism and localism within metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), the policymaking entities that are responsible for implementing U.S. federal surface transportation policy at the regional level. Our model of regional governance relates variation in regional policy outcomes to the incentives of MPO decision makers and the institutional environments in which they interact. Analyzing data from a sample of the nation's largest metropolitan areas, we find that MPOs dominated by elected officials produce more locally focused policies, holding other factors constant, while MPOs dominated by nonelected public managers produce more regionally oriented policies. Contextual factors, as well as the regional governance institutions themselves, further shape the balance between regionalism and localism.     

International institutions and the framing of domestic policies: The Kyoto Protocol and Canada's response to climate change

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol establishes an international institutional framework for domestic responses to climate change that links emission targets for developed countries to international market mechanisms. Although these flexible mechanisms allow developed countries some leeway in how they meet their commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, the protocol also establishes a normative framework that directs domestic policy responses along certain paths. Applying insights from sociological institutionalism and constructivism in international relations, this article argues first, that the climate change regime reflects and further institutionalizes the prevailing international normative structure in the environmental issue area, characterized as liberal environmentalism. Second, these norms, as embodied in the climate change regime, have enabled and constrained climate change policy development in Canada, one of the worlds largest emitters of greenhouse gases per capita. International norms can shape or redefine domestic interests, enable policies in conformity with those norms, and create normative pressures for change by linking with extant domestic and foreign policy norms. Uncovering this international institutional-domestic policy interaction resolves the paradox of Canada's promotion of commitments and mechanisms consistent with its domestic interests and institutional constraints, but eventual commitment to action well beyond what those constraints dictate. This commitment continues despite Kyoto's uncertain future. The findings also point to lacunae in the literature on regime compliance and effectiveness more broadly, especially its dominant rationalist variant.     

Promise and peril

The size of the federal budget tells only one part of the tale of government's presence in the market economy. The enormous amounts of non-tax dollars government requires to be spent on regulation – estimated at $647 billion per year – powerfully argue for some sort of regulatory scorekeeping. Regulatory costs are equivalent to over one-third of the level of government spending. A regulatory budget can be an effective tool both for spurring reform and monitoring regulatory activity.At bottom, today's rulemaking process is plagued by the fact that agency bureaucrats are not accountable to voters. And Congress – though responsible for the underlying statutes that usually propel those unanswerable agencies – nevertheless can conveniently blame agencies for regulatory excesses. Indeed, Americans live under a regime of Regulation Without Representation.A regulatory budget could promote greater accountability by limiting the regulatory costs agencies could impose on the private sector. Congress could either specify a limit on compliance costs for each newly enacted law or reauthorization of existing law, or Congress could enact a more ambitious full-scale budget paralleling the fiscal budget, a riskier approach. A comprehensive budget would require Congress to divide to a total budget among agencies. Agencies' responsibility would be to rank hazards serially, from most to least severe, and address them within their budget constraint. In either version of a regulatory budget, any agency desiring to exceed its budget would need to seek congressional approval.Regulatory costs imposed on the private sector by federal agencies can never be precisely measured, and a budget cannot achieve absolute precision. Nonetheless, a regulatory budget is a valuable tool. The real innovation of regulatory budgeting is its potential to impose the consequences of regulatory decisionmaking on agencies rather than on the regulated parties alone. Agencies that today rarely admit a rule provides negligible benefit would be forced to compete for the right to regulate. While agencies would be free to regulate as unwisely as they do now, the consequences could be transfer of the squandered budgetary allocation to a rival agency that saves more lives.Budgeting could fundamentally change incentives. Under a budget, adopting a costly, but marginally beneficial, regulation will suddenly be irrational. Congress would weigh an agency's claimed benefits against alternative means of protecting public health and safety, giving agencies incentives to compete and expose one another's bogus benefits. Budgeting could encourage greater recognition of the fact that some risks are far more remote than those we undertake daily. In the long run, a regulatory budget would force agencies to compete with one another on the most important bottom line of all: that their least-effective rules save more lives per dollar spent (or correct some alleged market imperfection better) than those of other agencies.There are clear benefits to regulatory budgeting, but there are also pitfalls. For instance, under a budget, agencies have incentives to underestimate compliance costs while regulated parties have the opposite incentive. Self-correcting techniques that may force opposing cost calculations to converge are only at the thought- experiment stage. However, limitations on the delegation of regulatory power and enhancing congressional accountability can help.Certain principles and antecedents can help ensure that a regulatory budgeting effort succeeds. Explicitly recognizing that an agency's basic impulse is to overstate the benefits of its activities, a budget would relieve agencies of benefit calculation responsibilities altogether. Agencies would concentrate on properly assessing only the costs of their initiatives. Since an agency must try to maximize benefits within its budget constraint or risk losing its budget allocation, it would be rational for agencies to monitor benefits, but Congress need not require it.Other ways to promote the success of a budget are to: establish an incremental rather than total budget; collect and summarize annual report card data on the numbers of regulations in each agency; establish a regulatory cost freeze; implement a Regulatory Reduction Commission; employ separate budgets for economic and environmental/social regulation; and control indirect costs by limiting the regulatory methods that most often generate them.A regulatory budget is not a magic device alone capable of reducing the current $647 billion regulatory burden. Yet a cautious one deserve consideration. Having good information is an aid in grappling with the regulatory state just as compiling the federal fiscal budget is indispensable to any effort to plan and control government spending.     

The senate agriculture committee produces a homeostat

Agricultural policy making between 1960 and 1973 is examined drawing on Herbert Simon's conception of procedural rationality. The basic structure of current agricultural policy evolved during the period studied. The paper suggests that policy and policy making interact narrowing the search for a law until it achieves a combination of provisions that is an equilibrium. The computational routines used in calculating consequences of provisions of legislation are extracted from the text of committee hearings and analyzed as a system of inequalities. The paper also discusses what satisficing means in this policy making process.     

Occupational safety and health in Poland in the 1990s: A regulatory system adapting to societal transformation

The societal transformation underway in Poland createda fundamental challenge to the occupational health and safety system, as the ideological and administrative principles on which it was founded vanished along with the communist-dominated regime. This paper examines the regulatory reform in Poland during the 1990s: its structural elements, implementation record and future prospects. Drawing on five case studies of privatized firms, a mailed questionnaire, and policy and institutional analysis, we find that Poland had considerable success in developing an effective regulatory system for managing occupational health hazards in privatized sector while also achieving considerable socioeconomic progress. The fundamental legitimacy of the regulators and regulatory process, the availability of information about firms and regulatory intents, and the capacity for case-specific decision making, are among the key explanatory factors. The case-specific implementation in Poland is consistent with models advocated by several authors in relation to other industrialized European economies (termed variously as negotiated compliance, tit-for-tat, cooperation-deterrence), despite a uniquely Polish context related to the continuing legacy of the communist era. The study also shows how in Poland a good fit between regulatory institutions and policies on the one hand, and their social context on the other hand, contributes to the effectiveness of the regulatory system.     

The Preference Puzzle: Educational Differences in Racial-Political Attitudes

Education leads to racial liberalism in a great many instances. In this piece, I show that better educated whites are more racially liberal than less educated whites on issues involving minority preferences, with one notable exception. Better educated whites are significantly more opposed to affirmative action in university admissions than less educated whites. This is a puzzle, and my resolution of it is informed by group conflict theory and how university preferences evoke the group interests of better educated whites as they approach the issue. Additionally, I show that the group interests of less educated whites also are engaged by the issue. In the context of the survey I study, the class orientations of the less educated are roused, and, I argue, lower status individuals are encouraged to view university preferences as an opportunity to share the burden of affirmative action, contributing to the puzzling reversal in the relationship of education and racial-political attitudes.     

Between science and politics: assessing the risks of dioxins in Canada and the United States

Conclusions The history of U.S. and Canadian risk assessments for dioxin is an increasingly familiar tale of debates within the scientific community played out in the political arena. Uncertainty among scientists creates the possibility of large disparities between different governments' policies. However, the pattern of differences that emerges reflects the context in which science policy decisions are made within each agency and within each country. The political environment has implications not just for how mandated science is received, but for how it is conducted.Many features of the dioxin case are consistent with observations by others. In the cases of formaldehyde, alachlor, alar, and amaranth, EPA relied on mathematical models to assess the risks of potential carcinogens, while Health and Welfare Canada relied on the more traditional safety factor approach.³⁵ This body of evidence is suggestive of national styles of transscience. Features of the U.S. style include explicit rationales for regulatory decisions, reliance on consistent and explicit risk assessment principles, and public debate over scientific aspects of public policy. The Canadian style is exemplified by closed decisionmaking, case-by-case review, and the absence of public discussion of the scientific basis for government decisions.The differences between FDA and EPA in this case study suggest an important caveat, however. The U.S. style is most clearly reflected in the implementation of the non-discretionary environmental, health and safety statutes passed by the U.S. Congress since 1970. More closed and traditional styles of regulatory decisionmaking may survive within the U.S. as vestiges of a more deferential past.Even less than pure science, trans-science is not a universal enterprise. When scientists do reach agreement, it can be a powerful force that can even overcome political and national differences (Haas, 1989). However, when science is uncertain, as is typically the case in assessing the risks of toxic chemicals, there is more room for political factors to shape the way different countries interpret science in making policy decisions.     

Food safety regulation: is the Delaney clause the problem or symptom?

The Delaney anticancer amendment to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 is a prominent example of zero risk legislation. The relevant clauses prohibit a finding of safety for any relevant substance found to induce cancer in humans or animals. It is argued that the Delaney approach to safety regulation is not only misguided, but that relaxation of the law - for example, to permit substances that pose insignificant cancer risks - would produce only marginal improvement in regulation. A major shift in regulation that permits some form of cost-benefit analysis is the only way to move toward rational policy choices.Professor of Economics, Rutgers University. I am grateful to William Ascher, Richard A. Merrill, and two referees for helpful comments on earlier drafts.     

Comparative policy analysis

Conclusion As editors, we would be remiss to submit that insufficient comparative policy analysis has been done without making explicit suggestions for further research. One critical problem is that the lack of comparable data remains a major hindrance to comparative work. This, in turn leads into the need for a larger inventory of careful cross-national case studies and primary data sources. Although significant advances have been made in data collection and analysis in recent years, these have occurred primarily in areas where quantification is relatively easy, such as economic and demographic statistics. Two related specific avenues for further research are suggested by reflections on the current limits of comparative analysis. First, more conceptual work based in solid methodology is needed if policy studies are to deal with complexities involved in comparative efforts. As part of this, theoretical constructs must be matched with carefully derived data and evidence, both quantitative and qualitative. As Lasswell has noted, the vitality of the comparative method will depend on whether the expansion of the stock of facts accepted as relevant is accompanied by methodological changes that render facts indispensable to the understanding and management of the policy process. Second, more work should be done to explain and expand upon cultural variables. As this task is addressed in more detail, we should be better able to appreciate the effects of cultural factors on the policy process.In conclusion, it seems especially appropriate to reassert the value of comparative analysis now, when the policy sciences appear to be at a critical juncture. From both domestic and international perspectives, the growing appreciation of crossnational policy research and policy impacts underlines the need for comparative analysis. It is clear that the interest in and importance of policy studies have grown in recent years, but the borders of the constituency remain vague. Efforts to delineate and refine the outlines of the field will almost surely increase. We think that this essay and the ones that follow argue strongly for the inclusion of the comparative dimension.We would like to express our appreciation to The Ford Foundation for its initial encouragement and later financial assistance towards producing this special issue, and particularly to the Foundation's Public Policy Committee and its Chairman, Harold Howe II. We would also like to thank The Rand Corporation for administering that grant. All the papers included here were written specially for this issue.

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Quantifying distributive justice: An approach to environmental and risk-related public policy

The most fundamental philosophical objection to cost-benefit analysis is that it fails to account for the distinction between more-necessary and less-necessary benefits. For example, it provides no way to avoid trading off a few cancer deaths in exchange for a more cost-effective but also more hazardous technology which provides cheaper paper or plastic products for the many. Since unjust distribution of benefits and burdens results primarily from the failure to prefer more-necessary goods (such as health and safety) over less-necessary ones (such as cheaper plastic razors), we shall see that a correct calculation of the rate at which marginal utilities diminish in value (as they become less necessary to their users) can determine degrees of necessity and thus the most just possible distribution of benefits and burdens. One way to measure the rate of diminishing marginal utility is provided by the wealth effect in occupational risk studies. Wealthier workers will not assume the same risk in exchange for a given salary increment (which to them is not very necessary) as poorer workers would assume for that same salary increment (which to them is more necessary). It is therefore possible to construct a mathematical model for the effect of necessity/non-necessity on quantitative decision principles for environmental and risk-related public policy, thus making such decisions more distributively just than traditional cost-benefit analysis would allow.     

Underlying patterns in a current economic development model

Public officials may subjectively use a variety of elements, including economic characteristics and political considerations, in their selection of locations and allocation of resources for economic development. Policy capture is a method that determines the impartial weighting of a broad number of elements which influence these decision makers as they operationalize programs. Non-political criteria that may influence the selection of sites for local economic development provide the basis of the analysis conducted in this paper. Public officials at various levels of responsibility assessed the chances of creating jobs for disadvantaged residents (employment success) for a variety of hypothetical areas chosen as an enterprise zone. Their responses give insight into policy decisions. There is a comparison of both individual responses and groups of respondents to the hypothetical data as well as to actual zones that were recently selected. Concluding remarks will discuss these results and the application of this method for enterprise zones and other policy analyses.We wish to acknowledge the extensive helpful suggestions of the editor and two anonymous reviewers.     

Education and mass belief systems: An extension and some new questions

Using the SRC/CPS's national election surveys from 1956 to 1976, this paper investigates the effect of education on consistency among the public's domestic policy opinions. Evidence from both gamma correlations and factor analysis indicates that education has neither a strong nor a linear effect on issue constraint over the 20 years covered by the data, for the lowest and the highest education strata consistently show the highest levels of constraint. We do not conclude, however, that education is unrelated to recognition of ideological concepts, for almost one-half of the lowest education stratum do not use liberal and conservative terms. We conclude that issue constraint does not directly translate into ideology and suggest some new directions that future research should take if we are to evaluate effectively the effect of education on opinion structuring.A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 1978 Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.