Four Pathways of Power: The Dynamics of Contemporary U. S. Federal Policy MAKING1 (original) (raw)
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Valid theories for the policy-making cycle are essential for studying America’s democratic government. But most theories focus on the government sphere, and few theories show equal consideration to the public, the media, and the government. So, this thesis introduces the Focusing Event-Driven Model for Policy Making (Focus Model), which includes all three of these factors. The significance of this thesis, then, is not that it proves other theories incorrect, but rather that it first demonstrates the validity of a holistic model to explain certain policy-making episodes and second implies that studies of non-governmental factors, such as the media and the public, can be as important to understanding policy making as focusing on the government itself. The procedure for introducing the Focus Model is to examine its ontological foundations and key attributes before testing the model in case studies of diverse policy-making episodes. Beyond the model, this thesis introduces new concepts, including a typology for focusing events, and new theories, like the Institutional-Friction Threshold, the Self-Interest Theory of Public Behavior, and the Self-Interest Theory of Legislative Behavior. Based on a literature review, many findings in this thesis, including those regarding focusing events and the relationships among the media, the public, and legislators, fill gaps in the academic literature. The complexity of the policy-making cycle means no one model can explain how all policy making happens, but this thesis concludes that the Focus Model is valid for certain policy-making episodes based on deductive evidence from case studies. The significance of the Focus Model, therefore, is not to define all policy making but rather to broaden researchers’ perspectives about what the policy-making cycle entails by showcasing the equal significance of non-governmental factors, namely the media and the public.
Chapter 15: Domestic Policy and Policymaking
Gitelson, Alan R., Robert L. Dudley, and Melvin J. Dubnick. American Government: Myths and Realities. 2016 Election Edition. ed. New York: Oxford University Press
This is one of the sixteen chapters published in the 12th (and final) version of the Gitelson, Dudley, Dubnick textbook. The first edition was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1987, and over the years each co-author had responsibility for drafting, revising and updating individual chapters. This is one of the six chapters authored by Dubnick.
Law, Policymaking, and the Policy Process: Closing the Gaps
Policy Studies Journal, 1998
Public policy scholars and public Law scholars often study the same substantive issues and have similar theoretical interests Yet students of the public policy process rarely consider the courts as policymakers in the same manner as do their public law counterpart We seek to explain this difference in approaches between the two Subfield on the question of the courts as policymakers, and we ask. how models of the public policy process should incorporate the judiciary.
Dynamics of Policymaking: Stepping Back to Leap Forward, Stepping Forward to Keep Back
American Journal of Political Science, 2017
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The Variable Politics of the Policy Process: Issue Area Differences and Comparative Networks
The politics of policy issue areas differ in multiple ways, including the venues where policies are enacted, the frequency and type of policy development, the relative importance of different circumstantial factors in policy change, the composition of participants in policymaking, and the structure of issue networks. The differences cannot be summarized by typologies because each issue area differs substantially from the norm on only a few distinct characteristics. To understand these commonalities and differences, I aggregate information from 231 books and 37 articles that review the history of American domestic policy in 14 issue areas from 1945-2004. The histories collectively uncover 790 notable policy enactments and credit 1,306 actors for their role in policy development.
Between Order and Disorder in the Policy Process: Interpreting the Implicit Agenda
2010
The question of Politics is one of the most difficult to answer in the practice of contemporary policy analysis. There are various cases in which analysts, whilst examining the policy process, face difficulty in uncovering the implicit political agenda. In some cases, they observe policymakers, who reflect the influence of expertise and reveal aspects of the bureaucratic system of the group of interest, but at times conclude that political actors are missing as a result of their analysis. In other cases, the focus of the analysis is on policy dynamics without any causal link with other political phenomena. Do we conclude then that the policy process is apolitical and policy analysis not a political science? In this paper, we would first like to defend the hypothesis that, if most of policy analysis is not focused on situating politics inside policy, it is not because policy is apolitical. Rather, it is because policy analysts transform policy into an object and a pay the price of this transformation, which would be the depoliticization of policy, in order to observe and model the policy-making process and to draw relevant conclusions. In producing their own scientific discourse on and for the policy-making process, policy analysts strip policy of all the discourses which link it to each participant and as a result lose all the political dimensions of policy. To develop this hypothesis, we would like to observe the movement of policy analysts who seek to compare political science to natural science and regard policy as an object and science as a process of modeling. Since the 1950s, the quest to model the policy-making process and/or the decision-making process became the driving force behind the development of policy analysis. As policy analysts developed empirical studies to produce models, the models they created seemed to not grasp reality, as the models became increasingly complex. The disorder that empirical studies have shown (as illustrated by the “muddling through” of participants) and the order that models proposed became more and more irreconcilable. Within the complexity of this development, the initial political question disappeared. In the second part of this paper, we would like to observe how policy analysts often want to develop recommendations for the policy-making process while at the same time they seek to build descriptive models of this process. The challenge posed by this second aspect is whether it is compatible with the first aspect. All of the proposed models do not take into account that recommendations can change policy. Firstly, the descriptive model is also a predictable model and supposes that the dynamics of change cannot be really influenced. Secondly, the models do not integrate the process of convincing others of one’s recommendations (e.g. a scientific recommendation), which is a subjective and discursive process, nor the idea that recommendations can influence policy change. In a third part, we would like to develop the idea that if policy analysis cannot produce a “science of muddling through”, which is an unsolvable paradox, it can focus on how policymakers attempt to solve this paradox and produce a science of the science and the art of muddling through. We would like to argue that one of the most important activities of policymakers is to analyze policy. Policymakers at all times are identifying problems, stating goals, drawing the public’s attention, explaining how a policy can be a good solution to a problem, envisioning a policy model, convincing the public that their solution is a good solution, sharing their solution with other participants, and justifying their decision when they make it. All these activities, which produce order through discourse, are nothing more than a political activity.
he Variable Politics of the Policy Process: Issue Area Differences and Comparative Networks
The politics of policy issue areas differ in multiple ways, including the venues where policies are enacted, the frequency and type of policy development, the relative importance of different circumstantial factors in policy change, the composition of participants in policymaking, and the structure of issue networks. The differences cannot be summarized by typologies because each issue area differs substantially from the norm on only a few distinct characteristics. To understand these commonalities and differences, I aggregate information from 231 books and 37 articles that review the history of American domestic policy in 14 issue areas from 1945-2004. The histories collectively uncover 790 notable policy enactments and credit 1,306 actors for their role in policy development.
Theories of the Policy Process: Contemporary Scholarship and Future Directions
The object of policy research is the understanding of the interaction among the machinery of the state, political actors, and the public. To facilitate this understanding, a number of complementary theories have developed in the course of more than two decades. This article reviews recent scholarship on the established theories of the policy process, mostly published in 2011 and 2012. Additionally, scholarship extending these theories is identified and new theories of policy process are discussed. This review finds that the established theories have generated substantive scholarship during the period under review and have also been the springboard for much of the recent thinking in policy research.