Policy Paradox the Art of Political Decision Making Chapter 14

Please meet the Policy Analysis in 750 words serial overview earlier reading the summary . This post is 750 words plus a bonus 750 words plus some further reading that doesn't count in the discussion count even though it does.

Deborah Stone (2012) Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making 3^rd edition (Norton)

'Whether y'all are a policy annotator, a policy researcher, a policy abet, a policy maker, or an engaged denizen, my hope for Policy Paradox is that information technology helps yous to go across your job description and the tasks you are given – to call back hard nigh your ain cadre values, to deliberate with others, and to make the globe a better identify' (Rock, 2012: 15)

Stone (2012: 379-85) rejects the image of policy assay equally a 'rationalist' project, driven past scientific and technical rules, and separable from politics. Rather, every policy annotator's pick is a political choice – to ascertain a problem and solution, and in doing so choosing how to categorise people and behaviour – backed by strategic persuasion and storytelling.

The Policy Paradox: people entertain multiple, contradictory, beliefs and aims

Stone (2012: 2-3) describes the ways in which policy actors compete to ascertain policy issues and public policy responses. The 'paradox' is that it is possible to define the same policies in contradictory ways.

'Paradoxes are zippo but problem. They violate the most uncomplicated principle of logic: something tin can't be two different things at once. 2 contradictory interpretations tin't both exist true. A paradox is just such an incommunicable situation, and political life is full of them' (Rock, 2012: 2).

This paradox does non refer just to a competition betwixt dissimilar actors to ascertain policy problems and the success or failure of solutions. Rather:

• The same role player can entertain very different means to sympathize problems, and can juggle many criteria to decide that a policy result was a success and a failure (2012: 3).
• Surveys of the same population tin can study contradictory views – encouraging a specific policy response and its complete reverse – when asked different questions in the same poll (2012: 4; compare with Riker)

Policy analysts: you don't solve the Policy Paradox with a 'rationality projection'

Like many posts in this series (Smith, Bacchi, Hindess), Stone (2010: ix-11) rejects the misguided notion of objective scientists using scientific methods to produce one right answer (compare with Spiegelhalter and Weimer & Vining). A policy paradox cannot exist solved by 'rational, analytical, and scientific methods' because:

• We can produce scientific show to reduce uncertainty, but not ambiguity.
• Nosotros can seek order and clarity in analysis and advice, simply should not look it in political systems (2012: x).
• 5-footstep policy analysis (identify objectives, identify alternatives, predict their effects, evaluate alternatives, choose) is pervasive, but it 'ignores our emotional feelings and moral intuitions' (2012: xi).
• A policy cycle model does non explain why solutions often chase problems, or the continuous struggle over ideas fifty-fifty when a cycle is ostensibly complete (2012: 12-13)

Further, Stone (2012: ten-11) rejects the over-reliance, in policy analysis, on the misleading claim that:

• policymakers are engaging primarily with markets rather than communities (come across 2012: 35 on the comparing between a 'market model' and 'polis model'),
• economical models tin sum upwards political life, and
• cost-do good-analysis tin can reduce a complex problem into the sum of private preferences using a single unambiguous measure out.

Rather, many factors undermine such simplicity:

1. People do not just deed in their own private interest. Nor tin can they rank-order their preferences in a straightforward mode according to their values and self-interest.

• Instead, they maintain a contradictory mix of objectives, which tin can change according to context and their way of thinking – combining cognition and emotion – when processing information (2012: 12; thirty-4).

2. People are social actors. Politics is characterised by 'a model of community where individuals live in a dense web of relationships, dependencies, and loyalties' and practise power with reference to ideas as much as fabric interests (2012: 10; 20-36; compare with Ostrom, more Ostrom, and Lubell; and see Sousa on contestation).
3. Morals and emotions thing. If people juggle contradictory aims and measures of success, and so a story infused with 'metaphor and analogy', and appealing to values and emotions, prompts people 'to see a state of affairs equally one affair rather than another' and therefore describe attending to one aim at the expense of the others (2012: eleven; compare with Gigerenzer).

Policy analysis reconsidered: the ambivalence of values and policy goals

Stone (2012: 14) identifies the ambiguity of the criteria for success used in 5-footstep policy analyses. They do not grade part of a solely technical or apolitical process to identify merchandise-offs between well-divers goals (compare Bardach, Weimer and Vining, and Mintrom). Rather, 'behind every policy event lurks a contest over conflicting, though equally plausible, conceptions of the same abstract goal or value' (2012: xiv). Examples of competing interpretations of valence issues include definitions of:

1. Disinterestedness, co-ordinate to: (a) which groups should exist included, how to assess merit, how to identify key social groups, if we should rank populations within social groups, how to define demand and business relationship for dissimilar people placing different values on a good or service, (b) which method of distribution to employ (contest, lottery, election), and (c) how to balance individual, communal, and state-based interventions (2012: 39-62).
2. Efficiency, to utilise the least resources to produce the same objective, according to: (a) who determines the chief goal and how to balance multiple objectives, (a) who benefits from such actions, and (c) how to ascertain resources while balancing equity and efficiency – for example, does a public sector job and a social security payment represent a sunk toll to the state or a social investment in people? (2012: 63-84).
3. Welfare or Need, according to factors including (a) the material and symbolic value of appurtenances, (b) brusque term back up versus a long term investment in people, (c) measures of absolute poverty or relative inequality, and (d) debates on 'moral hazard' or the effect of social security on individual motivation (2012: 85-106)
4. Liberty, according to (a) a general balancing of freedom from coercion and freedom from the harm caused by others, (b) debates on private and state responsibilities, and (c) decisions on whose behaviour to change to reduce harm to what populations (2012: 107-28)
5. Security, according to (a) our ability to measure take a chance scientifically (encounter Spiegelhalter and Gigerenzer), (b) perceptions of threat and experiences of harm, (c) debates on how much hazard to condom to tolerate earlier intervening, (d) who to target and imprison, and (e) the effect of surveillance on perceptions of commonwealth (2012: 129-53).

Policy analysis as storytelling for collective activeness

Actors use policy-relevant stories to influence the ways in which their audition understands (a) the nature of policy problems and feasibility of solutions, within (b) a wider context of policymaking in which people contest the proper balance between state, community, and market action. Stories can influence cardinal aspects of collective action, including:

1. Defining interests and mobilising actors, by drawing attention to – and framing – issues with reference to an imagined social group and its competition (due east.grand. the people versus the elite; the strivers versus the skivers) (2012: 229-47)
2. Making decisions, by framing problems and solutions (2012: 248-68). Stone (2012: 260) contrasts the 'rational-analytic model' with real-world processes in which actors deliberately frame issues ambiguously, shift goals, keep feasible solutions off the agenda, and manipulate analyses to make their preferred solution seem the well-nigh efficient and popular.
3. Defining the role and intended impact of policies, such as when balancing punishments versus incentives to alter behaviour, or individual versus collective behaviour (2012: 271-88).
4. Setting and enforcing rules (see institutions), in a complex policymaking system where a multiplicity of rules collaborate to produce uncertain outcomes, and a powerful narrative tin draw attention to the demand to enforce some rules at the expense of others (2012: 289-310).
5. Persuasion, drawing on reason, facts, and indoctrination. Stone (2012: 311-30) highlights the context in which actors construct stories to persuade: people engage emotionally with information, people take certain situations for granted even though they produce diff outcomes, facts are socially constructed, and there is unequal access to resource – held in item by regime and business organisation – to gather and disseminate evidence.
6. Defining homo and legal rights, when (a) in that location are multiple, ambiguous, and intersecting rights (in relation to their source, enforcement, and the populations they serve) (b) actors compete to make sure that theirs are enforced, (c) inevitably at the expense of others, considering the enforcement of rights requires a asymmetric share of express resources (such as policymaker attention and court time) (2012: 331-53)
7. Influencing debate on the powers of each potential policymaking venue – in relation to factors including (a) the legitimate function of the land in marketplace, customs, family, and individual life, (b) how to select leaders, (c) the distribution of power between levels and types of government – and who to hold to account for policy outcomes (2012: 354-77).

Key elements of storytelling include:

1. Symbols, which sum upwardly an issue or an activeness in a single flick or word (2012:157-8)
2. Characters, such equally heroes or villain, who symbolise the cause of a problem or source of solution (2012:159)
3. Narrative arcs, such as a boxing by your hero to overcome arduousness (2012:160-8)
4. Synecdoche, to highlight one example of an alleged problem to sum upwards its whole (2012: 168-71; compare the 'welfare queen' example with SCPD)
5. Metaphor, to create an association between a problem and something relatable, such as a virus or disease, a natural occurrence (due east.chiliad. earthquake), something broken, something about to burst if overburdened, or state of war (2012: 171-78; e.g. is crime a virus or a animate being?)
6. Ambiguity, to requite people different reasons to back up the same matter (2012: 178-82)
7. Using numbers to tell a story, based on political choices well-nigh how to: categorise people and practices, select the measures to employ, interpret the figures to evaluate or predict the results, project the sense that complex problems tin be reduced to numbers, and assign authority to the counters (2012:183-205; compare with Speigelhalter)
8. Assigning Causation, in relation to categories including accidental or natural, 'mechanical' or automatic (or in relation to institutions or systems), and human-guided causes that have intended or unintended consequences (such equally malicious intent versus recklessness)

• 'Causal strategies' include to: emphasise a natural versus human cause, chronicle it to 'bad apples' rather than systemic failure, and suggest that the problem was besides complex to anticipate or influence
• Actors utilize these arguments to influence rules, assign arraign, place 'fixers', and generate alliances among victims or potential supporters of change (2012: 206-28).

Wider Context and Farther Reading: one. Policy analysis

This post connects to several other 750 Words posts, which propose that facts don't speak for themselves. Rather, constructive analysis requires you to 'tell your story', in a concise manner, tailored to your audience.

For example, consider ii ways to establish cause and result in policy analysis:

One is to bear and review multiple randomised control trials.

Another is to use a story of a hero or a villain (perhaps to mobilise actors in an advocacy coalition).

2. Bear witness-based policymaking

Stone (2012: x) argues that analysts who try to impose 1 worldview on policymaking will notice that 'politics looks messy, foolish, erratic, and inexplicable'. For analysts, who are more open-minded, politics opens upward possibilities for inventiveness and cooperation (2012: 10).

This indicate is straight applicable to the 'politics of evidence based policymaking'. A mutual question to arise from this worldview is 'why don't policymakers heed to my evidence?' and one answer is 'you are asking the wrong question'.

3. Policy theories highlight the value of stories (to policy analysts and academics)

Policy problems and solutions necessarily involve ambiguity:

1. There are many ways to interpret problems, and we resolve such ambiguity by exercising ability to attract attending to one mode to frame a policy trouble at the expense of others (in other words, non with reference to one superior style to plant cognition).

• Punctuated equilibrium theory shows that policy change is primarily a function of such shifts in policymaker attention.

2. Policy is really a drove of – oft contradictory – policy instruments and institutions, interacting in complex systems or environments, to produce unclear letters and outcomes. As such, what we call 'public policy' (for the sake of simplicity) is subject to interpretation and manipulation as it is made and delivered, and we struggle to conceptualise and measure policy change. Indeed, it makes more sense to describe competing narratives of policy change.

4. Policy theories and storytelling

People communicate significant via stories. Stories aid us turn (a) a complex world, which provides a potentially overwhelming amount of information, into (b) something manageable, by identifying its most relevant elements and guiding action (compare with Gigerenzer on heuristics).

The Narrative Policy Framework identifies the storytelling strategies of actors seeking to exploit other actors' cognitive shortcuts, using a particular format – containing the setting, characters, plot, and moral – to focus on some behavior over others, and reinforce someone'due south beliefs enough to encourage them to act.

Compare with Tuckett and Nicolic on the stories that people tell to themselves.

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Source: https://paulcairney.wordpress.com/2019/12/05/policy-analysis-in-750-words-deborah-stone-2012-policy-paradox/

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