Beyond Machiavelli

Policy Analysis Reaches Midlife, Second Edition

Beryl A. Radin

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781589019591
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Öffentliche Ordnung

In this new edition of Beyond Machiavelli, Beryl Radin updates her popular overview of the field of policy analysis. Radin, winner of the John Gaus Award from the American Political Science Association, considers the critical issues that confront the policy analysis practitioner, changes in the field, including the globalization of policy analysis, and the dramatic changes in the policy environment. She examines schools and careers; the conflict between the imperatives of analysis and the world of politics; the analytic tools that have been used, created, or discarded over the past fifty years; the relationship between decision makers and analysts as the field has multiplied and spread; and the assumptions about the availability and appropriateness of information that can be used in the analytic task.

Once found largely in the United States, policy analysis has become global, and Radin discusses the field's new paradigms, methodologies and concepts of success. This new edition considers changes in expertise, controversies in the field, today's career prospects, and the impact of 9/11 on the field. She profiles three additional policy analysis organizations and updates the profiles of the organizations in the first edition. Continuing the trajectory of the fictional characters from the first edition, Radin adds a character representing the new generation just entering the field. The book discusses the shifts in society's attitudes toward public action, the availability of resources to meet public needs, and the dimensions of policymaking.

Written for students, faculty, and practitioners, the book concludes with a look at the possible dimensions of the policy analysis field and profession as it moves into the future.

Chapter 1

A Portrait of the Past

John Nelson began his career as a policy analyst soon after he completed his PhD in economics at Stanford in 1959. His dissertation used cost-benefit analysis as a method of examining and recommending efficiencies in procurement of defense weapon systems. He was recruited by the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, to work on a project for the US Department of Defense (DoD). RAND was one of several nonprofit think-tank organizations created specifically to do work for the federal government. Through that experience, he broadened his analytic focus and became proficient in other related disciplines, particularly systems analysis and operations research.

When John Kennedy was elected president and former Ford Motor Company president Robert McNamara was appointed secretary of defense, Nelson became intrigued by the possibility of spending a few years inside government. His contacts in the DoD were delighted to hear of his interest, and when the first staff was assembled to put the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS) in place, he became a federal official. His previous experience with the cost-benefit technique was extremely valuable to the DoD staff, and he soon became one of the resident experts in the use of the PPBS approach. Though he missed California, he believed that his experience inside DoD would serve him well in the future.

Before he knew it, Nelson found that his PPBS expertise was being sought by other federal agencies. President Lyndon Johnson had mandated the use of the PPBS approach throughout the government, and there was a short supply of individuals in Washington who understood the process and were able to use the technique. In 1965 Nelson was asked to join the first policy analysis staff in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), where he worked with William Gorham and Alice Rivlin.

Though Nelson had expected to return to California after two or three years, he was intrigued by the possibilities inside HEW. The three years he spent there were characterized by an incredible growth in federal domestic programs. His assignments were diverse, and he was able to work on several major initiatives in education, health, and social services. He couldn’t imagine a career opportunity that was more challenging. Legislative proposals were spun out almost daily; interesting ideas were grabbed from many different sources, just as if they were low-hanging fruit on a tree.

He learned that it was a lot easier to compare weapons systems within the various DoD services than it was to compare and analyze opportunities and costs of programs for the elderly, children, and poor women. The differences among client groups and programs made it difficult to define trade-offs and opportunity costs across HEW. Although he recognized that many of the programs that were being proposed would require implementation by state, local, or nonprofit groups, the pace of change was too rapid to allow much attention to these issues. He also learned that what he saw as analytically irrational behavior within the depart-ment was viewed as highly rational behavior by HEW career staff members.

By 1968, however, he decided that it was time to return to California. Though he felt that his years in Washington had provided him with unparalleled experiences, he believed that his long-term career path was outside, not inside, government. Together with two other former RAND staff members who had also spent time in Washington, he created what became a very successful consulting group in Los Angeles that specialized in work for DoD and the aerospace industry. Up until 2000 his firm had been involved in analytic work on the effects of military base closings, a set of projects conducted for DoD and required by the Base Closing Commission. As the twenty-first century began, he decided that it was time to retire.

Although policy analysis as a distinct field and emerging profession is relatively recent, the practice of providing policy advice to decision makers is an ancient art. This chapter discusses the profession in terms of its antecedents and its early years; it provides examples of the first policy analysis offices in the federal government during the 1960s and details the early assumptions made by policy analysis practitioners about their craft. The title of this book, Beyond Machiavelli, underscores the origins of the policy analysis profession and its reliance on the heritage of Machiavelli as an important adviser to a ruler. During the most recent period of the field’s life, the relationship between the analyst and the client appears to have lost some of the traditional imperative for the analyst to serve as an adviser to decision makers. This is particularly true in the academic expression of the profession.

Antecedents

Herbert Goldhamer’s book on the subject of policy analysis, The Adviser, begins by noting, “The political adviser appears in man’s earliest surviving documents and has never disappeared from the political stage since that time.”¹ Indeed, although Western political thought has tended to emphasize the role that Machiavelli played as adviser to the prince above all others, Goldhamer notes that others—namely, early Chinese, Indian, and Greek writers—have also reflected on their experiences as counselors to rulers and other decision makers. Although Ibn Khaldun, Kautilya, and Han Fei Tzu are not individuals whose names are familiar to most contemporary policy analysts, these individuals nonetheless performed the timeless functions of friend, educator, conscience, eyes and ears, executor, and adviser to often isolated and lonely rulers.²

Our tendencies to focus on the uniqueness of the contemporary American environment have often evoked approaches that ignore the lessons of history. A field that seeks to create its own special identity works hard to differentiate itself from the past. Yet some universal functions involved in the art of advising are worth discussing. Goldhamer has noted, “The profession of adviser and the development of political skills as a fine art or practical science were most notable precisely where a multiplicity of small states lived in close proximity in a condition of continual rivalry, intrigue, and warfare.”³ In this sense, feudal Europe shared many attributes with contemporary American federalism or the demands of the new European Union. Similarly, Goldhamer comments that the emergence of the adviser role requires a belief “that human will, effort, and intelligence count for something in human affairs, that an implacable destiny or fate does not rule over men.”⁴ A belief in progress is not a uniquely American phenomenon or a conviction that emerged full blown during the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment.

Machiavelli’s comments on the importance of advisers seem almost timeless: “The first thing one does to evaluate the wisdom of a ruler is to examine the men that he has around him; and when they are capable and faithful one can always consider him wise, for he has known how to recognize their ability and to keep them loyal; but when they are otherwise one can always form a low impression of him; for the first error he makes is made in this choice of advisers.”⁵

There are other lessons from the past that can 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 he describes the replacement of clergy by jurists/lawyers.⁶ He notes the skepticism through the years about the ability of youthful—rather than elderly—advisers 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.”⁷ He also accentuates what he calls “wandering scholars,” professional wandering political experts who were able to find employment in lands other than those of their birth.⁸ According to Goldhamer, “The individual who moves from one society to another— the ‘marginal man’—often has his wits sharpened and his knowledge broadened by the great variety of experiences that his travels provide and by his increased detachment from his own society.”⁹

Though the ruler may be motivated to seek additional sources of information, Goldhamer suggests that one must limit the number of advisers 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:

This kind of seeking for advice is infinite and endless. 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. A single minister proceeds willfully and without restraint. In deliberating with two ministers, the king may be overpowered by their combined action, or imperiled by their mutual dissension. But with three or four ministers he will not come to any serious grief, but will arrive at satisfactory results. With ministers more than four in number, he will come to a decision [only] after a good deal of trouble; nor will secrecy of counsel be maintained without much trouble.¹⁰

The conflicts between the cultures of science and politics also are not unique to our own time. Goldhamer writes that the “conflict between the rival claims of what Pascal in the mid–seventeenth century called l’esprit de geometrie and l’esprit de finesse, that is, between the mathematical or analytic mind and the intuitive mind, between the claims of calculation and those of wisdom and experience, is as old as discussions of the political process, and still continues today.”¹¹ Yet few advisers of the past had to contend with the institutions of democracy with attention to accountability and transparency.

Creating a Profession

Let us fast-forward in history to the end of World War II. Although advice giving and advice seeking were hardly new, American society had experienced a significant change. During the Progressive Era and especially during the New Deal, lawyers played a very important role as advisers in the US governmental 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—whose users sought to apply principles of rationality to strategic decision making. The precepts developed in the natural sciences found expression in the social sciences in two modes: positivism, which means using the concept of laboratory experimentation to seek to differentiate the true from the false; and normative economic reasoning, which means using the concept of a market made up of individual rational actors as the basis for prescription.¹² 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.

In a sense the techniques that were available in the late 1950s cried out for new forms of use. The energy of Americans that had been concentrated on making war in a more rational manner now sought new directions.

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.”¹³ 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.”¹⁴

Hugh Heclo also noted that the analytic and conceptual sophistication of the economic approach “is far in advance of any other approach in policy studies, with the result that a mood is created in which the analysis of rational program choice is taken as the one legitimate arbiter of p...