Transcription
One of the things about policy adoption is there are a number of theories that are covered: how decision-makers make their decisions. James Anderson gives us three of these in his book: rational comprehensive, incremental, and mixed scanning. There are obviously others besides this, but we'll stick to the three that Anderson provides us. Really, rational comprehensive and incremental are the two most important, and mixed scanning generally finds its way into most textbooks, but it's somewhat difficult to explain, so I'll do my best to tell you about that as we go through here.
So Anderson prizes these three theories. Now, the first one is the rational comprehensive theory, and this really comes out of the field of economics. And if you remember kind of the rational choice theory that we talked about earlier in the semester, that's something that's related to this. So essentially, it's a very kind of scientific, sterile process that we go through and continually evaluate and reevaluate information in a very rational way until we reach a decision.
The six steps that we have here are: first of all, I'm confronted with a problem, right? And think of this as the problem is able to be separated from all other problems. Just to give you an illustration of this, you know, sometimes we talk about obesity in urban areas among poor people. Now, it's very difficult to separate that obesity from the idea of what we call food deserts—right—in that there are not a lot of places to get fresh fruits and vegetables and high-quality food that's healthy for you within cities. So that's a problem that's also a problem related to poverty, which is related to problems of not being able to have transportation to get you places. So it's very difficult to separate all these things out, and as a consequence of that, you know, this is one of the difficult things associated with rational comprehensive theory: that we can actually separate that problem out.
Second of all, we sit down and we know what we want to accomplish: so our goals, values, objectives. I know exactly what it is that I want to accomplish, who I want to help, how I want to help them, and what I want to see as kind of an outcome. And I have a certain rank order for them, and I know what I want to accomplish. Then, what I do is I sit down and I look at every single one of the alternatives that might be available to be able to deal with the problem, given my goals, values, and objectives, right? So I list through every single type of thing that I might be able to do. Then what I do is I rank them, and I basically go through and take a look at the consequences of each type of policy: how they would affect people, whether there would be negative consequences, where there are unintended consequences, what do I know about the consequences, and what don't I know about it? And I'd be able to do cost-benefit analysis and see the advantages and disadvantages and compare all that information to all the other alternatives, and then I would choose the very best policy, knowing that—now I think you kind of understand that one of the problems with this is that this is not the way that politics generally works—right—in that we don't all sit down, quote/unquote, *tabula rasa*, without any ideological predispositions. Politics is a game of negotiation, of compromise, and that makes it very difficult for the rational comprehensive theory to really work in practice, being kind of a way that members of Congress would vote. But from the perspective of kind of public administration and public policy, this would be the ideal of the way that we, as kind of non-ideological people, will try to sit down and approach a problem. And certainly, it's very difficult to know all the outcomes of every potential issue, but we can do our best to kind of understand some of them. So it's a good model to try to aspire to; very difficult to say that it works in practice.
Now, the incremental theory requires a lot less understanding of the policy process. So if you see the picture here of the brain with a lot of stimulation and then you see the picture here of Homer Simpson's brain, you get the idea of how this is. Incremental theory really kind of comes out of a guy named Charles Lindblom, who we have talked about at various times. Lindblom calls it the process of muddling through, right? And this is a much more kind of realistic way of the way that we make decisions as opposed to kind of the rational comprehensive. So we kind of have some goals and we've got some options, and they're all mixed together, and we're thinking about the goals and options all at the same time. There are a couple of options that seem good to us, and we only take a look at the ones that are possible and the ones that are interesting. And we don't want to make too much of a splash with new public policy because we're not quite sure how things are going to work out. We don't know in advance, you know, really what the consequences these policies are going to be because they haven't been tried. So we're looking at a limited set of things and constantly defining and redefining the problem based on what our solution is, and we adjust it and tinker around with it. And in order to be able to achieve a passage of a policy, we basically have to be in general with the idea that there is no real serious right answer to this. It is not the best possible policy; it's what is possible. Politics is the art of the possible, right? If we can agree on something, that's the best decision that we can get—not optimal, but it's agreeable, right? And essentially, this solves our problems. We're continually kind of nibbling away at these things, incrementally changing policy rather than going to big shocks to the system. And this actually kind of, you know, works pretty well because politicians are pretty risk-averse. So if you're comparing the two, then the rational comprehensive theory really is a very detail-oriented process where we evaluate everything that's possible out there. Incremental theory says, "Look, we're human beings; we like certain things, and there are certain alternatives that we're predisposed towards. We fiddle around with these; we reach a compromise; it works for half of the people; we pass this public policy; it's not the greatest thing ever, but at least it moves us along a little bit," moves us along in increments, and that's the idea behind Lindblom.
And then finally, from a guy named Amitai Etzioni, is an idea of mixed scanning, and this is somewhat of kind of a compromise between the rational comprehensive theory and the incremental theory, right? So essentially, what we should do is take a macro and a micro view, and we take the 30,000-foot view of a public policy, look down, look at a couple of alternatives, right? Where are some things that we might want to do? And then say, "We can't possibly take a look at all the alternatives; we don't possibly know what all the outcomes are," but let's pick out a couple of things that we think are decent policies and then take a really comprehensive examination of those policies to arrive at what we think is the best public policy possible, right? So mixed scanning is kind of a combination, a realization that we can't look at every single policy, but let's throw the darts at the board, grab a couple of items that are important, and then examine those issues really closely. And those are the three kinds of theories of decision-making.