Policy Analysis in the Twenty-First Century

Complexity, Conflict, and Cases

Beryl Radin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000007831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica pubblica

The field called policy analysis focused originally on the formulation of new policies and was structured to give advice to those in the top reaches of government agencies. Within several decades the field moved beyond the formulation stage of the policy process (creating new policies) to agenda setting, implementation, and evaluation of existing policies. New skill sets emerged and staff were found in many parts of the policy world. Despite these changes, there has been little attention paid to the possible shifts in the relationship between analysts and clients, and students of policy analysis often enter the world of work with little exposure to the situations they might face. Policy Analysis in the Twenty-First Century is designed to familiarize students with the diversity of experiences that they can expect to face in their practitioner role.

Author Beryl Radin bases the discussion on case studies that illustrate realities in the current policy analysis environment. Set in very different environments (including both US and international settings), the players in the cases illustrate three different stages of a career (beginning the career, mid-career, and people at the end of their career). The cases are based on realistic situations and demonstrate the volatility and complexity of the decision environments. At the same time, they provide attention to the analysts' personal values and career goals. This book will be required reading for faculty and masters level students in both public management and policy analysis classes. It may also be used in executive programs.

1 The Development of the Policy Analysis Field¹

Introduction

Unlike most academic and research fields, the policy analysis field does not operate as an independent and separate endeavor. By definition, policy analysis involves a conversation between an analyst and a decisionmaker or a decision-making process. From its earliest days in the 1960s as a professional field of practice, that conversation has been the form in which advice has been transmitted from someone who is viewed as an expert on a specific topic to someone else who has been charged with making a decision about something related to that topic. The process that emerges from this task is one of advising that decisionmaker (usually called the client of the analyst). The analyst employs a wide range of information sources derived from multiple methodologies to help decisionmakers exert whatever power, authority or influence is available to them. At its broadest definition, thus, public policy analysis can be viewed as advice to decisionmakers somewhere involving the public sector. While that sector differs across the globe, the relationship between analysts and their clients involves many common processes and issues.

Despite this interdependency between analysts and clients, the field rarely talks about the role and importance of that conversation and has paid very little attention to what is a two-way process. It is a topic that almost never shows up in the policy journals or in panels at policy conferences. The focus of the field has been on the assumptions, tools, roles and reality of the analyst and little acknowledgment that the analyst is an advisor to the decisionmaker – not the decisionmaker himself or herself.

The current experience involving policy advising has moved the field from one that had been found largely in the US to include experience within other countries, some of which have focused on the advising function. It illustrates similarities and differences that emerge from diverse political, cultural and organizational settings. This range of policy settings indicate both positive and negative experiences with the advising function. These cases of past experience illustrate the potential as well as the problems attached to the advising relationships. This chapter reviews the role of the client in three policy analysis eras and places that role within the broader history of the policy analysis field.

Difficulty Defining the “Client”

While a broad definition of the relationship between the analyst and a decisionmaker or client does provide a context for the policy analysis function, it is used in many different ways. It is not always clear what it means to be either a “decisionmaker” or a “client” of policy analysis. Is the decisionmaker someone who has authority or influence on a particular policy question? Is the client someone who pays directly or indirectly for the analytic work that is done? Or is the client someone who is affected by the policy decision? Are we talking about an individual decisionmaker or are we also focusing on multiple players who operate within a network or are involved in various decision-making processes? All of these possibilities (and others) are likely to arise when one tries to define the recipient of policy advice (Radin, 2013).

But the field of policy analysis has tended to minimize attention to the role and changes related to the recipient of advice. The concept of a “client” – if it is used at all – is rarely discussed in much detail. Weimer and Vining do define policy analysis as advice to a client (Weimer and Vining, 1992); Geva-May with Wildavsky (Geva-May and Wildavsky, 1997) emphasized the role of the client, and others deal with the client as a stakeholder. The policy analyst function has changed quite dramatically over the years because of modifications in the context of the effort as well as changes in the training and experience of working policy analysts. As a result there is little attention to the role of the decisionmaker-client and its changes and expectations as the field has been modified. While the decisionmaker-client often seems to be present in the depiction of the policy analysis process, that role is presented in the form of shadowy figures who are defined – if at all – by players within a bureaucratic organizational structure. It is time to look at the relationship between the advisor and the decisionmaker and examine how it has changed over the years as the policy analysis function has developed and modified. It is particularly important to investigate this issue as the policy analysis field has developed globally, moving from a set of activities mostly limited to the US to a variegated activity with very different behaviors that by the twenty-first century represent international political cultures, structures and expectations. The formal policy analysis field has tended to avoid depicting the role of analysts as advisors even though the top civil servants in most parliamentary systems are usually defined as individuals who give advice to high-level decisionmakers. The top civil servant in the British TV series “Yes Minister” is depicted as the elite actor advisor who often finds ways of manipulating the political decisionmaker. While the classic parliamentary approach has not emphasized formal analysis tied to research as the basis for the advice, few have picked up the differences between the US shared power system and the Westminster system in this regard.

Although the first book on policy analysis in the US included a chapter entitled “Clients” (Meltsner, 1976) subsequent volumes such as the multiple editions of Bardach’s A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis (the most recent volume has a co-author: Bardach and Patashnik, 2016) do not focus on the client role. It is as if the client stays in the shadows. Instead, attention has been concentrated on the methodologies and theories employed by the analyst, rarely focusing attention on the changes and expectations of those who are being advised. In large part this has occurred as the field of policy analysis has moved from a field of practice to an academic subject with both undergraduate and graduate programs charged with training future analysts. But it also relates to the constant change that has occurred over those 50 years in the types of client we are trying to advise and their expectations about the advising process.

As a result the normal tensions between the expectations of the analyst and the realities experienced by the decisionmaker have grown and there have been increased gulfs between the two players in the basic advising conversation. Indeed, it is often hard to differentiate between the two roles in the advising process. Analysts forget that they have not been provided with the authority to make decisions and believe that their technical expertise should be the sole basis for decisions. Decisionmakers often feel that analysts do not understand the constraints they experience and thus are present only to help them justify their already determined decisions. It seems that both sets of actors have lost their way in the process. The result of this situation is that the policy analysis profession has not achieved the expectations that were embedded in its formation and, instead, decisionmakers revert to the ideological and political processes of the past.

While there are examples of useful relationships between analysts and clients, it does not appear that these examples have informed either participant in the policy conversation. It is useful to illustrate the dimensions of the problems experienced by both groups by looking at the changing context in which this activity takes place and by analyzing the changes in the role of the client by presenting their expectations in three consecutive eras in the US.

This chapter reviews the expectations during the early stages of the policy field in the 1960s. It analyzes the shifts that occurred in the period between the 1970s and 1990s. It examines the changes that have occurred in the early years of the twenty-first century, particularly the impact of globalization and politicization. And despite the changes that have occurred over the past half century, behaviors and expectations from earlier eras continue today. Each of these eras illustrates different expectations about the analytical approaches to analysis, the organization of the policy analysis profession, modes of educating individuals in university settings, and whether clients expect their advisors to employ analytical or advocacy approaches to issues. While changes have occurred in these three eras, the field of policy analysis has not replaced any of the past approaches and thus examples of all three approaches are found today. As such, policy analysis in the twenty-first century continues to contain approaches that were developed in earlier periods.

The Role of the Policy Analyst in History

The field of policy analysis developed as both a field of practice and an academic field in the 1960s. But while it developed as a distinct profession and academic field at that time, the practice of providing policy advice to decisionmakers is really an ancient art. Some have noted that Machiavelli might have been the first policy analyst in his role as an advisor to the Prince but there were even earlier expressions of this role across the globe. Joseph in the Old Testament has been described as a first advisor to the Pharaoh. Few of us know these people but these are individuals who performed the timeless functions of friend, educator, conscience, eyes and ears, executor and advisor to often isolated and lonely rulers (Goldhamer, 1978, p. ix). Indeed, although western political thought has tended to emphasize the role that Machiavelli played as advisor to the Prince above all others, Goldhamer notes that others – namely, early Chinese, Indian and Greek writers – have also reflected on their experience as counselors to rulers and other decisionmakers” (Goldhamer, 1978, p. 8; Bondanella and Musa, 1979, p. 154).

There are other lessons from the past that help us understand the attributes of the policy analysis field that took shape in the early 1960s. Goldhamer emphasizes the use of history and experience as a major source of wisdom and describes the replacement of clergy by jurists/lawyers (Goldhamer, 1978, p. 22). He notes the skepticism through the years about the ability of youthful – rather than elder – advisors to provide effective counsel, citing Aristotle’s observation that “youths do extremely well in mathematics but that young men of practice wisdom are difficult to find” (Goldhamer, 1978, p. 23).

Though the ruler may be motivated to seek additional sources of information, Goldhamer suggests that one must limit the number of advisors who provide counsel. He quotes the advice of Kautilya, the tutor and first minister of Chandragupta, founder of the fourth-century BC Maurya dynasty in India: “The king should consult three or four ministers. Consultation with a single minister may not lead to any definite consultation in cases of complicated issues” (Goldhamer, 1978, pp. 94–5).

The Role of the Client in History

One can see the changes that have occurred in the role of the client by presenting them in three consecutive eras. Because policy analysis tended to be a field found almost exclusively in the US during both Eras 1 and 2, one sees that the self-consciousness in the field rarely paid attention to different approaches that were found in other political systems. Era 1 is the creation of the field in the 1960s. Much of the literature that we continue to use stays at this initial era. Era 2 is the expansion of the field to the 1990s. And Era 3 involves globalization and politics today.

The original concept of the client of the policy analyst was an individual who has authority and is usually located on the top rungs of a public organization. Meltsner’s depiction of four types of policy analysts with both political and technical skills did acknowledge different roles played by clients as well as different expectations about the relationship between analyst and client (Meltsner, 1976). But even Meltsner’s description seemed to assume that the policy analyst would have a quasi-monopoly role in that advising process. By the end of the twentieth century, the image of the policy analyst as the advisor to the Prince (as in Machiavelli) was replaced by an image of an individual operating (usually in a public organization) along with other policy analysts in both public and non-public organizations.

Each era has devised different approaches that emerge from different types of policy issues, the diverse relationships between analysts and clients, the types of analysis required, its time frame, the stage of the policy process where it occurs, where in the system it occurs (e.g., whether it takes place inside government or outside government), the impact of the structure of the government involved, the placement of analysis in central agencies vs. program agencies, whether analysts and clients are career or political actors, the appropriate skill set found in analysts, and the boundaries between policy analysis and management.

Era 1. Although advice giving and advice seeking were hardly new, American society had experienced a significant change in the period after World War II. During the Progressive Era and especially during the New Deal, lawyers played a very important role as advisors in the US system. The shifts that had taken place in the legal profession (especially at Harvard Law School) broadened the legal field, formalized it and provided a way for lawyers to think of ways to use data and scientific information in their work. And their status within governmental agencies made their advising role very important.

But in the post-World War II period, social scientists began to play a role in the decision-making process. The imperatives of war had stimulated new analytic techniques – among them systems analysis and operations research – that sought to apply principles of rationality to strategic decision-making. Although still in an embryonic form, the computer technology of that period did allow individuals to manipulate what were then considered large data sets in ways that had been unthinkable in the past.

Yehezkel Dror, one of the earliest advocates for the creation of policy analysis as a new profession, described the early phases of this search for new expressions as “an invasion of public decision-making by economics” (Dror, 1971, p. 117). Further, he wrote, “Going far beyond the domain of economic policymaking, the economic approach to decision-making views every decision as an allocation of resources between alternatives, that is, as an economic problem” (Dror, 1971, p. 117).

All of this took form in the components of the Planning, Programing, and Budgeting System (PPBS), a decision allocation process that was established in the Department of Defense in 1961 and eventually extended by President Lyndon Johnson to other parts of the federal government. The analytic approach would always be closely associated with the style and interests of President John Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara.

PPBS itself had antecedents in the work of the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, the non-profit organization created in 1948, just after World War II was over, to do analytic work for the government, especially the DoD (RAND home page). The link to the RAND experience was obvious when McNamara asked former RAND staffer Charles Hitch to establish a Systems Analysis Unit with responsibility for the PPBS process. Today, almost 40 years since its initial implementation, PPBS continues to have both advocates and detractors (West, 2011).

The PPBS system that was put into place had at least three different goals. First, it sought to create opportunities for control by top agency officials over fragmented and diffuse organizational and program units. Despite the organization chart, the DoD was clearly a federal department that operated more like a feudal system than a tight bureaucratic hierarchy. The separate services – Army, Navy and Air Force – were distinct and separate units with their own programs, cultures and constituencies. The PPBS system sought to look at the DoD as a unity and to provide advice to the secretary; it represented a way for the secretary to establish control over hitherto decentralized operations and to identify cross-cutting programs and issues within the highly fragmented department.

Second, the PPBS system was an attempt to improve efficiency in the way that resources were allocated and implemented. When DoD was examined from a centralized vantage point and functional categories across the department were defined, it was obvious that there were overlaps and redundancies within the multiple units, particularly in the procurement process. For example, economic efficiencies were not served by processes that could not define areas of economies of scale.

Third, the PPBS process rested on a belief that increased use of knowledge and information would produce better decisions. The experience of World War II was a heady one; advances in the availability and production of information gave the PPBS proponents the sense that it was possible to differentiate the false from the true and that the conceptual models they relied on would produce accurate and appropriate information (Radin, 2000).

The office that was established in the DoD to carry out McNamara’s analytical agenda became the model for future analytic activity throughout the federal government. As the office developed, its goal of providing systematic, rational and science-based counsel to decisionmakers included what has become the classic policy analysis litany: Problem identification, development of options or alternatives, delineation of objectives and criteria, evaluation of impacts of these options, estimate of future effects, and – of course – recommendations for action.

In many ways, the establishment of this office represented a top-level strategy to avoid what were viewed as the pitfalls of traditional bureaucratic behavior. Rather than move through a complex chain of command, the analysts in this office – regardless of their rank – had direct access to the top officials in the department. Those individuals became the clients of the analysts. Their loyalty was to the secretary of the department, the individual at the top of the organization (the Ruler in Machiavelli’s formulation) who sought control and efficiencies in running the huge department. In addition to the PPBS system, they introduced a range of analytic methods to the federal government, including cost-benefit analysis, operations and systems research, and linear programming.

This office was viewed as an autonomous unit, made up of individuals with well-hewn skills who were not likely to have detailed knowledge of the substance of the policy assignments given them. Their specializations were in the techniques of analysis, not in the details of their application. Though these staff members thought of themselves as specialists, their specializations were not a part of the areas of expertise found within the traditional bureaucracy. As would become clearer as the field developed, these staff members were viewed as individuals who had much more in common with short-term political appointees than with the career public service.

Several other patterns emerged that had a dramatic impact on the field. There was an assumption that the policy analysts who were assembled would constitute a small, elite corps, made up of individuals who would be expected to spend only a few years in the federal government. Most of the individuals hired were trained as economists or operations researchers who had fairly recently received PhDs; a significant number of them came to Washington from RAND, where they had worked on similar assignments in the past. Their frames of reference and support systems were atypical for a federal employee; many brought their past relationships with think tanks, consultants, universities and other analytical organizations with them as they did their work.

Sometimes called the “Whiz Kids,” this staff was highly visible; both its PPBS activity and its general expertise came to the attenti...