Cooper, S. and Dunlop, C.A. (2017) ‘Evaluating the Stages Heuristic in Policy Teaching: An Experimental Analysis’, paper presented to PSG IX Teaching Public Administration study group, European Group for Public Administration (EGPA), Annual Conference, 30 August-1 September 2017, Milano (original) (raw)
Public policy and administration scholars face a common question when design their curricula: how is the policy process best explained? Specifically, should we avoid the so-called ‘stagist’ approach which breaks the analysis of policy-making into distinct phases – for example, agenda-setting, policy formulation, implementation – in favour of more holistic lenses – for example, advocacy coalition framework (ACF) or institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework? At the heart of this dilemma is the charge that the long-established stagist model fails to capture the complex and intertwined reality it seeks to analyse (Jenkins-Smith and Sabatier, 1993). In addition to descriptive inaccuracy, five further criticisms are made. The stages model does not: lend itself to prediction; provide a clear basis for hypotheses testing; integrate learning throughout the process; appreciate that policy-making is not always top-down; and, finally, provide a temporally accurate account of policy-making. While these criticisms are well-known by policy scholars, many of us still find pedagogical merit in stagism and it remains widely used to underpin core policy teaching. But, what are its consequences? Are we misleading our students when we teach using the stages? Do they appreciate its heuristic nature? What do our students think policy theories should do for them? Should they simplify or predict (or both)? We conduct the first in-class experiment to answer these key questions. In this paper, we present the results of a series of questions about policy-making asked at the beginning and end of an undergraduate public policy model underpinned by the stagist logic. We find little cause for concern that a stages approach undermines students’ understands of the complexity of policy-making in the real world. Rather, students display a sophisticated appreciation of the limits and functions of academic theories.
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In this article, we intend to take a few steps to mending the disconnect between the academic study of policy processes and the many practices of professional and not-so-professional policy work. We argue, first, that the " toolkit " of academically warranted approaches to the policy process used in the representative mode may be ordered in a family tree with three major branches: policy as reasoned authoritative choice, policy as association in policy networks, and policy as problematization and joint meaning making. But, and this is our second argument, such approaches are not just representations to reflect and understand " reality ". They are also mental maps and discursive vehicles for shaping and sometimes changing policy practices. In other words, they also serve performative functions. The purpose of this article is to contribute to policy theorists' and policy workers' awareness of these often tacit and " underground " selective affinities between the representative and performative roles of policy process theorizing.
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