Public Policy Praxis

A Case Approach for Understanding Policy and Analysis

Randy Clemons, Mark K McBeth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000027266
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Public administration and policy analysis education have long emphasized tidiness, stages, and rationality, but practitioners frequently must deal with a world where objectivity is buffeted by, repressed by, and sometimes defeated by value conflict. Politics and policy are "messy" and power explains much more about the policy process than does rationality. Public Policy Praxis, now in a thoroughly revised fourth edition, uniquely equips students to better grapple with ambiguity and complexity. By emphasizing mixed methodologies, the reader is encouraged, through the use of a wide variety of policy cases, to develop a workable and practical model of applied policy analysis.

Students are given the opportunity to try out these globally applicable analytical models and tools in varied case settings (e.g., county, city, federal, international, plus urban and rural) while facing wide-ranging topics (starving farmers and the red panda in Nepal, e-cigarettes, GMOs, the gig economy, and opioid abuse) that capture the diversity and reality of public policy analysis and the intergovernmental and complex nature of politics. The fourth edition expands upon its thorough exploration of specific tools of policy analysis, such as stakeholder mapping, content analysis, group facilitation, narrative analysis, cost-benefit analysis, futuring, and survey analysis. Along with teaching "how to, " the authors discuss the limitations, the practical political problems, and the ethical problems associated with different techniques and methodologies. Many new cases have been added, along with clear instructions on how to do congressional research and a Google Trends analysis. An expanded online Teaching Appendix is included for adopters, offering original cases, answers to problems, alternative approaches to case use, teaching exercises, student assignments, pedagogical ideas, and supplemental material directly tied to concepts covered in the text. With an easily accessible and conversational writing style, Public Policy Praxis is an ideal textbook for undergraduate and graduate courses in public policy analysis, community planning, leadership, social welfare policy, educational policy, family policy, and special seminars.

Part I: Overview

Chapter 1

Public Policy, Power, the People, Pluralism, and You

Mini-Cases

“Opioid Abuse and Waterville”

“This Isn’t a Hilton Hotel, Ma’am”

Case Study

“The ‘Gig Economy’ Case: Uber (and Lyft) from Boise to Burlington”

According to Proverbs 1:7–9, fear is the beginning of knowledge, fools despise wisdom and instruction, and you should listen and heed teaching for it will gain you honors and rewards. We tend to agree and would rather scare you than bore you. So, we begin this chapter and the book by throwing you right into the political firestorm of doing public policy analysis. Good luck!

Mini-Case: Opioid Abuse and Waterville

This case is typical of cases administered, as part of the application process, during competitions for public management jobs and internships in the United States. Such cases are designed to evaluate how much prospective public managers know about public policy analysis. You would be given directions similar to the following:

1. Read the information carefully.
2. Respond to the one-page case study in any format you feel is appropriate.
3. All necessary information to analyze this situation is provided in the background section.
4. Your response should be no more than three pages long.
5. Please note that calculations and research are not necessary for your response.

Background

The community of Waterville, Pennsylvania (population 7,654), once mostly known for its historic hotel where both George Washington and the French General Lafayette slept, has recently taken note of what many community residents term “a major drug problem.”

Three deaths in the last year due to heroin overdoses, several arrests of individuals for selling fentanyl, the recent busts by the state police of two “meth houses” in the space of one month, and the arrests of a couple of well-known Waterville High School athletes, allegedly involved in the local opioid drug trade, have led to calls from community leaders to combat what they view as a serious drug problem.

Waterville is a community with an annual per capita personal income of $32,000. This compares with a state average of $38,000. The story of local business closings has been a frequent one in recent years, and the one major industry in Waterville left town last summer when the corporate bosses in Houston, Texas, decided to relocate the plant to Mexico. This left slightly more than 400 people, who had been earning above-average wages, unemployed. It will also cost Waterville a significant portion of city and school tax monies.

While state and national rates for births to unmarried teens have been steadily decreasing in the past decade, that is not true in Waterville. Their teen birth rate and their overall divorce rate are both far above average. There is also a great deal of racial tension in the town, where 25 percent of the population is Latino. This tension was exacerbated when one member of the city council proposed the creation of an ordinance to forbid landlords from renting to undocumented immigrants, for which he was verbally attacked as racist. Up to now, the significant conflict between city officials and leaders within the Latino community has centered on issues such as use of the city parks; zoning; dances; and police practices, hiring policies, and priorities.

Several members of the city council are concerned that the drug problem is an “epidemic” and are calling for a “war on drugs” including harsher jail sentences for drug dealers and users. Contrary to this rhetoric, social service providers have provided data that the opioid drug problem, in particular, is “impacting the white middle class and that prescription drugs, not necessarily illicit drugs, are the chief culprit of the drug problem.” Mayor Joyce Allen told the local paper that without some type of action from the city government, this problem will destroy the community and drive out more businesses. A priest told his congregation that the very souls of the town and its children were on the line. But, a social worker commented on her popular Twitter account that, “We need to rethink how we approach drugs, drug users are not deviants, they have a medical problem that needs addressing.” A recent Philadelphia newspaper story recently found that Latinos were more likely to be incarcerated for drug use, whereas non-Latinos were more likely to be given treatment options including drug counseling. This report was widely criticized by some Waterville community leaders as both unfair and inaccurate.

The city manager has asked you to conduct a public policy analysis to identify the potential problems, issues, and policy alternatives, and to prepare and present a recommendation to the city council. What do you do?

Unless you have conducted a public policy analysis in the past (and possibly even if you haven’t), you undoubtedly have several questions. You may be asking questions such as these: (1) How do I best present the information? (2) What do I include in the analysis and what do I leave out? (3) How do I separate my own feelings from what should, or should not, be done? (4) What is the role of government in an issue like this? (5) How do I write three pages on this subject based on only one page of information?

Don’t panic or doubt yourself. This exercise is partially designed to demonstrate to you that your policy analysis skills leave something to be desired, thus encouraging you to continue reading this book. Throughout the book you will be learning and applying lessons, skills, and a public policy analysis methodology—all of which will help you tremendously with this task. Indeed, at the end of the book, you will be offered the opportunity to redo this case. In the meantime, give it your best shot and tackle it before reading on.

Introduction

Thanks for completing the case. While your professor might have you work on this as a group task in class, for now you need to think about, and thus be prepared to discuss, the following questions: How would you describe the process you used to respond to your task? Did you try to be objective? Did you recognize your values coming into play? Do you believe that it is appropriate for an analyst’s personal values to affect policy recommendations? Who in Waterville would you be trying to please? Who do you work for? How should you approach your job? Should you use your expertise and be “scientific,” or should you use more democratic¹ means that encourage citizen participation? Should you just accept the stories of major players, or is that a mistake because individuals view and describe issues based on their own interests? What types of decision-making tools should you use? Should you use numbers and, if so, how do you use them appropriately?

The case and the discussion questions were successful in preparing you for the rest of this book if they made you think about issues that you normally do not think about. In fact, this simple case is very important for setting the stage for the rest of the book. And this book’s subject matter is helpful whether or not you ever hold a job formally doing policy analysis. As we will discuss more shortly, government policy determines the likelihood of the food you eat making you sick, graduates getting good jobs, workers getting injured or killed on the job, and how much of your paycheck you get to keep, as well as what that collected money is spent on. It also impacts the cost and availability of health care, troops being sent to fight overseas, the cleanliness of the water you drink, and your safety when walking downtown, flying, or in case of a pandemic or natural disaster. The simple fact is this: From the minute you get out of bed until the minute you go back to bed, public policy affects your life. If you want to have the chance to affect it back, you need to learn to think like a policy analyst who understands politics, power, and stories. If you don’t choose that route, like second-graders scrambling for the last chair when the music stops in a game of musical chairs, others are very willing to grab that chair, sit in it, and make decisions for you. Or as consumer activist Ralph Nader once famously put it, “If you do not turn on to politics, politics will turn on to you” (Nadar quoted in Rensenbrink, 2016).

It is also important that we explain the “praxis” part of the book’s title, although you may already have turned to a dictionary, Wikipedia, or your professor for an explanation. Although there are more ideologically loaded definitions some may wish to impose on the term, quite simply, praxis means “theory-guided action,” which means that as practicing analysts we want you to think critically about your role as an analyst and apply what you learn. Praxis requires both action and reflection. Our use of the term praxis also reflects, as does the use of cases, our belief that we need both theory-guided practice and theory capable of guiding, and being guided by, practice. Consequently, our approach is both guided by and tailored to both scholars and practitioners. Our focus is both on “how to do” policy analysis and on how to ask questions—and pose answers for your consideration—about the nature and meaning of policy analysis itself. The unifying theme between those concerns, the way to get praxis, is to focus on “how it really works” in the so-called “real” world.

Public administration and policy analysis education has long emphasized tidiness, stages, and rationality, and academia stresses falsification, objectivity, and neutrality; but practitioners frequently must deal with a world where objectivity is buffeted by, repressed by, and sometimes defeated by, value conflict. Too often public administration education has failed individuals who must deal with the hustle and bustle and complexity of policymaking. Politics and policy are “messy” and power explains much more about the policy process than does rationality. This text will equip you to better grapple with ambiguity and complexity. By emphasizing mixed methodologies, you will be encouraged, through the use of a wide variety of policy cases, to develop a workable and practical model of applied policy analysis.

When the first edition of the book came out, the discipline was caught up in a debate between positivism and postpositivism, and our book was, in part, a response to that debate. We hoped that our book would provide a middle ground between the fascinating theory of postpositivism and the usefulness of positivism. Today the field has largely moved away from that debate and increasingly narratives and politics rightly stand alongside the rational approach, Big Data, and evidence. Although we understand and teach the importance of bringing rigor, a systematic approach, and the old tools of the trade to bear on policy analysis, we also critiqued the insightful critics of that dominant approach and demonstrated that their insights needed to be (and could be) made useful to the practitioner. Again, however, none of this means we reject rationality, rigor, or pragmatism. Indeed, our central critique of postpositivism and postmodernism was that its adherents had often failed to explain how to make it useful.

Unfortunately, when we wrote PPP1, the dichotomy between the tidy world of positivism and the messiness of postpositivism meant that most scholars picked a silo and stayed there. But within a decade that has changed. Smith and Larimer (2013, pp. 118–119) argued that there was an “emerging middle ground” between the two camps. They suggested that rationalists realize that they must account for the “fractured and value-laden nature of the political arena” and that the underlying assumptions of individual rationality have come under increased attack as the social sciences better understand how individuals make decisions (p. 19). At the same time, Smith and Larimer conclude, the rationalist approach is important because it provides evidence and data in policy disputes and this evidence plays an important role in the policy process (p. 19). Public Policy Praxis sits nicely in this new policy world and perhaps our book helped the discipline land here.

Torgerson (1986) discusses the “three faces” of policy analysis. The first face is a purely rationalist and positivist orientation to analysis where the analyst relies on expertise. The second face of policy analysis is purely political and the analyst views themselves as an advocate. As Torgerson (1986) points out, both of the first two faces are flawed. He argues (and we agree) that there is a third face of policy analysis, one where the analyst deals with rationality and expertise but part of that expertise is the understanding of political context. Smith and Larimer (2017) argue that the rationalist project does “a better job of identifying problems” (p. 222) as well as ascertaining the “impact of the alternative chosen” (p. 222), but they have “failed miserably in its efforts to separate facts from values” (p. 223). Postpositivism, on the other hand, does better at grasping the “messy, perspective-driven political realm of policy” (p. 223) and is more effective at accounting for stakeholders and dealing with the “worth of proposed solutions” (p. 223) as well as better understanding of policy implementation (Smith and Larimer, 2017).

Our book operates in the third face of policy analysis and we work to synthesize rationalist and postpositivist approaches to analysis (we will better define these terms in coming chapters). We recognize, for example, that even the selection of rational tools, and this procedure rather than that one, are value-laden choices that can determine the outcomes and the winners or losers. The policy process centers on value conflict and choosing—including the choices relevant to democracy (e.g., what role should public sentiment play and who gets to sit around the table when determining criteria or selecting options?), so politics cannot be excluded. Though logic, facts, rational methods, etc. are important, public policy analysis is fundamentally not about technical questions.

Thus, analysts need to learn to think politically and to understand that public problems are socially constructed. Thus, policy analysis is more than the technical manipulation of models, numbers, and statistics. Consequently, we provide alternative methods to supplement traditional methodology and, in the process, advocate a more democratic mixed-methodology approach to analysis. As noted earlier, praxis requires a marriage of theory and practice, and our text focuses on providing a grounding in theory and then has you apply it (practice).

This grounding in politics also makes the book more interesting. Political science is one of the oldest intellectual disciplines known to humankind. Since humans first began to form associations and live in communities, they have had to answer fundamental political questions. Politics and policy are about power and resolving the tensions and value conflict inherent in deciding who makes the rules, how rules are made and enforced, and, therefor...