Approaches to the Policy Process

And this lecture, we're going to take a look at the approaches to the policy process. We're going to analyze some of the things that James Anderson provides for us as ways to interpret public policy. And there are five different ways that he goes about that, so let's take a look at what he has to say in approaching the public policy, a kind of model as Anderson does.

There is really no one single method that we'd have to study public policy. And oftentimes, academics have very strong kind of preferences in the way that they come at problems. And we see here that Anderson gives us five essential types of policy analysis: study political systems theory, group theory, elite theory, institutionalism, and rational choice theory.

And in looking at these, essentially what we see is that oftentimes your solution, or who you're trying to look to help in society, is influenced by the type of method that you use. So let's start off and go through each one of these, and then we'll have some case studies dealing with each one of them.

So the first is what we can call political systems theory. And this was really kind of the first thing that came out of political science. A guy named David Easton really is the most well-known academic studying political systems theory. And the goal for political systems theory was to analyze whether or not small-d democracy actually works; does the democratic process work?

And the reason for this was, if you think about it, we as individuals in our representative democracy elect people to make laws on our behalf. And the question being asked by these analysts is: do what we want as individuals in society—those goals, those values, those things that we want from government—do they actually get produced by government itself?

So for the political systems theorists, essentially they're interested in: what are we input into government, and what gets out? And in a properly functioning democracy, the people should generally get what they want out of government. And that way we can study government and analyze public policy to see whether or not democracy actually works.

Now, I'm going to try something tricky here and try to switch the layout here, and we're going to take a look at the chalkboard so we can make it a little bit easier, and you get the background of this wonderful studio that we have here. Let's think in terms of this: when we think of political systems theory, on the one hand we have inputs into government—what is it that people want—and this essentially is public opinion. Then we have government, and then we have outputs, and these are essentially public policies.

So when we talk about the political systems theorists, essentially what they're interested in is taking this—the inputs—and making sure that it corresponds to the outputs over here, you know, in a properly functioning democracy. Now here's the thing about this: it does seem like a very reasonable solution to what should be going on and what we should be studying, because in a democracy we want to have outcomes that are good for what public opinion has to say.

However, what we basically started the study as we've gone through is that all of a sudden they kind of forgot about government itself, right? And what we talked about—we talked about Federalist number 10—wasn't a representative democracy. Basically, we have public opinion, but it's government's role to quote-unquote refine a large public opinion. And what we can realize is that there are a lot of different ways in which government can take public opinion and deal with that public opinion.

And the problem with political systems theory is that it tends to forget what has come to be known as the black box of government. It forgets about the fact that government can affect outcomes; government can affect public opinion. And they are only interested in studying inputs and outputs, and that becomes a problem then for the political systems theorists.

Second thing is the idea of group theory. Now, when we think in terms of group theory, this is essentially the idea that, okay, most individuals don't have a whole lot of influence on what goes on in public policy. So we can take a look at the fact that most people are represented by some sort of interest group, even if they don't actually belong to it, right?

So essentially, the group theorists are interested in how groups mobilize to achieve policy victory. Now, in looking at this, unlike say the political systems through that we just talked about, government plays a primary role. Government takes a look at what interest groups want; they mediate between those interest groups and basically are a referee, right? So what they're taking a look at is all these people sitting around the table asking for stuff—what do they want—and then government tries to create a policy solution that, at the end of the day, gives a little bit of something to everybody to keep everybody happy.

Therefore, even if you might not get the policy that you want this time, the next time you will. Right? And and certainly from what we've studied so far, you would realize that, you know, scholars like Robert Dahl and the pluralist theory is this is very close to what they're talking about. So government's a neutral referee. So essentially, this is just a competition among groups within society to persuade government to do stuff for them.

So if we were to use group theory as our method of analysis, we would study the interest group process: who wants what, and how they get that out of public policy. You know again, there's there's a little bit more of a kind of awareness from group theory than you'd see with the political systems theory that people don't always get what they want; somebody speaks on the behalf, and that's the interest groups.

Now here's the big problem with group theory: well, we analyzed group theory, we realize that not everybody is able to mobilize, right? So if you think about groups within society, take a second and think to yourself who probably doesn't have the money, the resources, or the educational capital to be able to organize their own groups. In general, you would think poor people in society, right? They don't have the money to be able to hire high-paid lobbyists; they don't have the disposable income or really the disposable amount of time that it would take to mobilize.

And one of the biggest critiques that we see of the group theory method of analysis is that, in an unequal society in which some people have more than others, how do you end up making sure that this process works fairly for everyone? And that's the biggest critique of group theory.

Elite theory: we've taken a look a little bit at this before; this is kind of the C. Wright Mills type people. So I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on this because we've already discussed this, but the people on control politics and elite do. So there are a bunch of wealthy, well-educated people; they all worked for Goldman Sachs; they all went to Harvard and Yale; they control the system; they're on various boards together, and what's called interlocking directorates, and they pull the strings of what goes on in society, right? They structure the system to benefit their needs. Every now and again they're going to throw a bone to the people just to keep them from rebelling.

So there might be a small public policy victory for the quote-unquote people every now and again, but if we really look deep down inside that victory for the people, it's either A just symbolic, or B, if you really delve down deeply into it, you'll realize that it really only benefits, you know, the elite anyway. We'll take a look at that example in a couple of minutes.

Now basically, what we see is that, as we saw when we looked at Robert Dahl, or when you do look at Robert Dahl, you improve it, right? How do you prove that there are people out there pulling the strings? How do you prove that all these people that went to the same schools actually are on the same page and control things, right? And and how do they continue to control this whole society, you know, in a very open society that we live in? So elite theory is interesting and is one way to kind of approach things, but it's not generally used as processed nowadays.

Now remember, we're talking about the idea of the black box, and what we essentially saw when we're taking a look at political systems theory is that they were worried about inputs and outputs, and they didn't care at all about government in the middle. Well, originally when we took a look at kind of back when government and political science and public administration was all one big discipline, all you studied was law, right? And then the political systems theory people come along, and we got inputs and outputs. Some more around the 60s, early 70s, people started to say to themselves, "Hey, wait a second, maybe we ought to study how government rules actually affect the outcomes, right? Maybe that black box that that the Easton kind of completely neglected, maybe that black box is of some interest to us, and we should focus in on that."

So what we see then with the institutionalists is a revival of studying how institutions affect outcomes; how rules affect outcomes, right? So we can think in terms of federalism, right? We have a federal system in the United States. How is having states make their own decisions, and states having the latitude to set their own laws and their own ways to carry out or implement public policy from the national level—how does that affect the outcomes of public policy, right? That's important stuff. Other ways we can think in terms of bicameralism, right? So we have a United States Senate, and we have a House of Representatives. In looking at that, how does the fact that the Senate is state-based and the house is population-based affect the outcomes? How do you have small states like Rhode Island and Delaware and Wyoming that essentially have very small populations? What happens by the fact that they have two senators, and a state like California, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania even have two senators as well? What does that mean to our process?

On top of that, probably the biggest thing if we think about how rules affect things is in the United States Senate; we have this idea of the filibuster, right? And the Senate was developed in such a manner that they value debate and public debate, and they want to be a more deliberative institution than the House of Representatives. So what do they do? They allow people to talk as long as they want. Now, if you think about that, they don't have that in the house because they have time limits on the amount of time that you can talk. In the U.S. Senate, basically you can talk as long as you want unless you have a unanimous consent agreement to limit the amount of time that people can talk.

Now think about that: unanimous consent means 100 out of 100 senators would have to say, "Alright, let's limit limit time." Well, obviously, if that were the only rule that you had on the books, it would be darn near impossible to be able to get anything done in the Senate. So the Senate has something called cloture, and if 60 senators say, "We've got to stop the debate and move on and vote," 60 senators can vote on cloture, and the filibuster is ended; you have to stop talking after a certain amount of time. Now think about that: what that does is A, it allows a minority of U.S. senators to be able to influence public policy; 41 people, if they don't want to stop talking, can gum up the whole work so United State Senate, right? In reality, to pass anything in the U.S. Senate, it really takes 60 votes because you have to be able to shut off a filibuster.

Now people often ask, "You know, give me an example." Well, we didn't have any Civil Rights Acts in the United States from the 1870s through to the end of the 1950s in the United States. The reason being was that southern senators were able to use the filibuster to their advantage and prevent any type of legislation being even brought to the floor about civil rights. So those are some good examples of how government can affect the rules; the government can affect the outcomes, and you know that then becomes an ingredient in how how we study public policy.

And then the final kind of method that we see here is what we can call rational choice theory. This is based in economics, and essentially everyone's a rational actor that acts in their own self-interest, right? So if you want to understand public policy, try to delve into why people would behave the way that they do. You know, politicians—we know that their number one goal is reelection—so you can always backtrack and trying to understand why people behave the way that they do by just focusing in on, well, how is this going to help people get reelected? Interest groups, political parties—what's in it for them? Try to study their kind of their their own self-interest and individual citizens as well. You know, why would why would I support a tax cut? Well, because I would get that money back for myself, right?

Now one of the problems is that this does not provide us with the ability to be able to really understand people that act out of altruism or are not acting in their self-interest, right? It assumes that everybody acts in their self-interest, and it's very difficult to subscribe other motives to the political policy process here. So for example, you know, if you happen to be a poor person who supports Republican tax cuts that may not benefit you because you believe in small government, but you'd be adversely affected by those tax cuts, how do you explain your belief in those tax cuts, right? Rational choice theory doesn't doesn't give us kind of an understanding of everybody in society, but it's probably one of the dominant theories that's used today.