Policy Studies: Review Annual

Volume 6

Ray Rist

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138513211
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351319829
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The sixth edition of this annual collection of the year's best work in policy studies. Contributions in this volume reflect the increased emphasis on budget conscious and carefully targeted social programmes. Exemplifying a range of analytic and methodological strategies, this edition features studies from Australia, the United States, West Germany, and Great Britain.

Part I

Policy Research In Perspective

An important shift is under way in the field of policy studies. This shift involves a dramatic reorientation and reformulation of the paradigm governing the presumed linkages between knowledge and decision making. What makes this change noteworthy is that it holds important implications for our understanding of the policy studies endeavor, of the decision-making process, and of the linkage between these two. In short, both the components of the linkage and the linkage itself are being viewed in a new and different way.

To take the policy studies area first, the conventional approach is to portray the area as intellectually tight and methodologically crisp. Indeed, elaborate methodological techniques and displays of multivariate analysis have been used to show rigor in the area and to demonstrate the powerful analytic tools available to those toiling in the field. What has been obscured or ignored in this rush to methodological nirvana is that there is little agreement regarding when one methodology or another is more appropriate to policy analysis. The several disciplines most closely associated with policy studies have each offered theoretical approaches. But again, which approach is most useful or powerful in the analysis of policy-related data is not clear. As a result, policy studies has no unified theory, method, or strategy. In short, a presumption of coherence and uniformity is giving way to a recognition of diversity.

The same processes are at work in our understanding of decision making in the policy arena. The conventional approach has been to portray decision making as a logical and rational process whereby the decision maker integrates various discrete forms of information, analyzes them, and deduces the appropriate decision. Decision making has been seen as a linear and sequential process. More recent interpretations and descriptions of decision making suggest an alternative approach. Rather than linear and deductive, the process may be seen as disjointed, incremental, often obtuse, and frequently not even understood as decision making in the traditional sense. Decision making is complex, multidimensional, and sometimes irrational.

It is this reinterpretation of both policy analysis and decision making that is necessarily forcing a new understanding of the linkage between the two. Whereas both were previously described as linear and driven by the logical application of principles akin to those found in engineering, this revisionist approach suggests that there is no one-to-one match between knowledge and decision making. Stated differently, it is not possible to instigate or sustain a linear linkage between the essentially disjointed and internally diverse processes.

The beneficial consequences of this reinterpretation, for both the policy studies field and the decision makers, are several. First, the continuing promises that policy analysts make and cannot keep regarding the fruits of policy analysis need no longer be made. Second, the decision makers need no longer wait for that perfect policy study promising to provide the tight answers to tough questions. Third, the presumptions about the link between knowledge and decision making can be revised to reflect more clearly the diversity inherent in the system. This should result in more carefully conscribed studies and more circumspect promises of information on any given topic. It should also provide the basis for modes of analysis that recognize the system for what it is, not as some hope it to be. Analysis predicated on an incorrect understanding of decision making is doomed to be viewed as irrelevant. This misperception has seriously handicapped those working in policy studies in developing strategies of research and analysis that reflect the actual milieu in which knowledge is both developed and applied. The emerging reorientation promises to reinvigorate the field as a more appropriate meld between knowledge and decision making is made.

The articles in this section speak to this shift in the paradigm of policy studies. Weiss and Stromsdorfer, in particular, detail the dynamics of the decision-making process and the role that policy analysis might play. Their conclusions and recommendations suggest a direction for the field quite different from that dominant through the 1970s. The articles by Bulmer and Behn also speak to this shift, but from a different vantage. The point driven home in these pieces is that policy analysis takes place in a political context, not a vacuum. Thus if the analysis is to be utilized, analysts must not only conduct the research, but must also be sensitive to and even suggest means for its application and implementation. Ignoring the political context is to diminish the opportunity for involvement and influence. Finally, the article by Horowitz speaks to the changed political climate in the 1980s and what this portends for the relation of social science research to the centers of power. A growing emphasis on applied instead of theoretical work, on agendas being driven by private-sector market needs, and on the shifting of resources from the federal to state and local jurisdictions suggests a decade for policy studies quite different from that in which it began to come of age.

1

Policy Research In The Context Of Diffuse Decision Making

Carol H. Weiss

A distinctive characteristic of educational policies in the United States in the past IS years has been the mandate for evaluation that has accompanied them. Most major policy initiatives of education, as in health and social services, have been attended by formal, systematic evaluation of the effects of the policy for its intended beneficiaries. Over all, the federal government has been spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually to learn how well human service policies are achieving the ends for which they were designed.

The upsurge in evaluation activity and expenditures has a rational cast. The presumed purpose of all this analysis is to improve the effectiveness of policy. Evaluation, the rhetoric goes, will identify the programs and policies that are working well so that they can be expanded, and will locate the programs and policies that are working poorly so that they can be terminated or modified. Evaluations that analyze the effects of component strategies of intervention—that indicate which components of policies are successful for which types of clientele under which conditions—will provide the basis for modifying policies and attuning them to the needs and life conditions of the participants. The enterprise, in short, is meant to use the methods and techniques of social science in the service of rational allocation of resources and the improvement of welfare policy.

American social scientists by the thousands have been attracted to evaluation and associated policy studies. Not only do they find research funds available for the study of important and interesting social and economic phenomena, but the social consequences of the work also look attractive: Evaluation results will be put to work to improve the lot of the needy. Despite reservations among a few social scientists about becoming technicians for the bureaucratic welfare state (Gouldner, 1970; Dye, 1972), policy studies look like an ideal opportunity to combine research practice with social conscience. Researchers are able to do good while they are doing well.

The Uses Of Evaluation And Policy Research

By the early 1970s, after about five or six years of relatively large-scale evaluation and policy studies, it was becoming obvious that study results were not having visible impacts on policy decisions. Programs that evaluators had found relatively ineffective, such as the Head Start preschool program, were continued—and even expanded. Programs that evaluators had found effective, such as direct federal loans to low-income college students, were cut back. And much of the detailed advice contained in the “recommendations” sections of policy study reports simply went unheeded. Social scientists who had expected their work to shape future government policy became disillusioned. Not only were they not counselors to the prince, they were not even influential advisors to the bureau of vocational education. Given their general tendency to turn their experiences into “findings,” they began to contribute articles to scholarly journals about the nonuse and abuse of policy studies. During the 1970s there was a persistent recitation of the nonutilization tale—the resistance of self-serving government agencies to the lessons from research, the ignorance or inattention of legislators, the waste of social science wisdom, the triumph of bureaucratic routine and special-interest politics.

Recent investigations, however, provide a different interpretation of events. True, cases of immediate and direct influence of research findings on specific policy decisions are not frequent. Examples can be found, and may even be increasing, but they remain relatively uncommon. But to acknowledge this is not the same as saying that research findings have little influence on policy. On the contrary, evidence suggests that evaluation and policy studies have had significant consequences, but not necessarily on discrete provisions nor in the linear sequence that social scientists expected (Weiss, 1980b).

Rarely does research supply an “answer” that policy actors employ to solve a policy problem. Rather, research provides a background of data, empirical generalizations, and ideas that affect the way that policy makers think about problems. It influences their conceptualization of the issues with which they deal; it affects which facets of the issue they consider inevitable and unchangeable and which they perceive as amenable to policy action; it widens the range of options that they consider; it challenges some taken-for-granted assumptions about appropriate goals and appropriate activities. Often, it helps them make sense of what they have been doing after the fact, so that they come to understand which courses of action have gone by default. Sometimes it makes them aware of the over-optimistic grandiosity of their objectives in light of the meagerness of program resources. At times it helps them reconsider entire strategies of action for achieving wanted ends (for example, investment in compensatory education as a means for altering the distribution of income). In sum, policy studies—and social science research more generally—have made significant contributions by altering the terms of policy discussion.

This kind of indirect conceptual contribution is not easy to see. It is not visible to the naked eye. Sometimes it is manifested only over lengthy periods of time and after numbers of studies have yielded convergent results. For example, scores of evaluations were done of rehabilitation programs for prison inmates, most of which concluded that counseling, education, and associated services had little effect in reducing subsequent recidivism. Correctional authorities paid little attention, and efforts at in-prison rehabilitation went on relatively unchanged for a long while. However, the research results percolated through relevant bureaus, agencies, and legislative chambers, and in the past few years significant changes have been made. Not only correctional practice but also sentencing codes and judicial acts have been affected.

The State of California, for example, used to view correctional institutions as agencies of rehabilitation. Judges sentenced convicted offenders to indeterminate terms of imprisonment, leaving the date of a prisoner’s release up to the decision of prison authorities on the basis of the prisoner’s progress toward rehabilitation. In 1976, the California legislature officially gave up on rehabilitation. It changed the indeterminate sentencing law, and provided instead for relatively fixed terms of sentence. The new law began with a statement of change of goals. The preamble, in a marked shift, stated that the purpose of imprisonment is punishment. Prison programs aiming at rehabilitation continue, although more and more on a voluntary rather than compulsory basis (Lipson and Peterson, 1980), but the state has absorbed the lessons of evaluation: It has scaled down its expectations of rehabilitation and shifted to a different rationale for incarceration. Research results played a large part in the change (Knott and Wildavsky, 1980).¹

In similar ways, social science results and social science concepts have had effects in many fields. It is not usually a single finding or the recommendation derived from a single study that is adopted in executive or legislative action (although this occasionally happens). More often, it is the ideas and general notions coming from research that have had an impact. Nor is it usually the particular “decision maker” for whom the study was done who uses the findings. Since few decisions in government are made by a single decision maker or even a small group of decision makers, and almost no decisions are made of sufficient scope to qualify for the category of policy, this is not the usual route to influence. Instead, what seems to happen is that generalizations and ideas from numbers of studies come into currency indirectly—through articles in academic journals and journals of opinion, stories in the media, the advice of consultants, lobbying by special interest groups, conversation of colleagues, attendance at conferences or training programs, and other uncatalogued sources. Ideas from research are picked up in diverse ways and percolate through to office holders in many offices who deal with the issues.

As the ideas from research filter through, officials test them against the standards of their own knowledge and judgment. They do not uncritically accept every set of conclusions they hear about, even if the conclusions bear the imprimatur of social science. They have many sources of information other than social science, ranging from their own firsthand experience to systematic and unsystematic reports from the field. The extent to which they accept a research idea, or give it at least provisional hearing, depends on the degree to which it resonates with their prior knowledge. If it “makes sense,” if it helps to organize and make sense of their earlier knowledge and impressions, they tend to incorporate it into their stock of knowledge (Weiss and Bucuvalas, 1980).

This prevalent process of merging research results with other sources of information and ideas has two curious consequences. First, the merger often gives research results extra leverage as they shape officials’ understanding of issues. Because research provides powerful labels for previously inchoate and unorganized experience, it helps to mold officials’ thinking into categories derived from social science. Think of the policy effects of such category labels as externalities, aptitude test scores, deinstitutionalization, white flight, or intergenera-tional dependency.

Second, because social science is merged with other knowledge, officials are largely unaware of when and how they use research. An investigator going out to study the uses of policy research quickly finds out that respondents have great difficulty disentangling the lessons they have learned from research from their whole configuration of knowledge. They do not catalog research separately; they do not remember sources and citations. With the best will in the world, all they can usually say is that in the course of their work they hear about a great deal of research and they’re sure it affects what they think and do. They can’t give specific illustrations of their use of a specific study, because that is not how they work (Caplan et al., 1975; Weiss, 1980a).

So, if recent investigations of the consequences of research for policy leave us with greater respect for the influence of research, the influence appears to lie in affecting the shape and content of policy discourse rather than concrete choices. The nature of the effect has been called “enlightenment” (Janowitz, 1970; Crawford and Biderman, 1969): Research modifies the definition of problems that policymakers address, how they think about them, which options they discar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Editorial Advisory Board
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• dedication
• Policy Studies Review Annual
• Introduction
• Part I. Policy Research in Perspective
• Part II. Policy Issues and Policy Studies