I’m working on a management case study and need an explanation and answer to help me learn.

1. Think of examples of public policy that you think is poorly designed. Explain why you think it is poor policy design? How or what steps would you take to redesign such a policy for what you believe is better. (write 1 page)

2.  Explain what material and symbolic policies are. Provide examples of material and symbolic polices and then discuss/debate over these policies and explain why symbolic policy is necessary and its effects/influences in politics and policy making. ( write 1 page)

Textbook

Thomas A. Birkland, (2019), An Introduction to The Policy Process: Theories, Concepts, And Models of Public Policy Making. (Fifth Edition), Taylor & Francis Group. Other editions (3rd and 4th) can be used too.

Optional Materials

Thomas R. Dye, 2012. Understanding Public Policy. (15th edition), Pearson. (This book is optional and may be available at the GGU library. Other editions of this book can be used too).

Lesson Review Week 5: Chapters 7 and 8

In this week, we focus on different policy types, design and policy tools. What we’re going to learn are general ideas of some theories that can be used to analyze policy from different point of view. They are not the only theories out there in public policy making and analysis, but they provide some tools for us to understand the policy making process.

Birkland defined that policy is a statement by government of what it intends to do or not to do, such as laws, regulations, ruling, decision, or order, or a combination of these. It is a collection of documents, statements, decisions, and other elements.

The study of public policy process is to understand: 1) how various interests are organized; and 2) how various interests react to different kinds of policies.

Reasons to the study of policy typologies are to understand why and how some policies are made the way they are, and why some groups do better than others in policy making and policy implementation. However, it is difficult to analyze the way public policies are made by one single type. The policy typology is a way to help us better understand the policy making process theoretically.

Policy Types: Birkland introduced Lowi’s (1964) theory of policy types as distributive, regulatory, and redistributive

• Distributive: policies are made by the involvement of congressional committees, subcommittees, executive bureaus, and small interest groups, and tend to distribute a good or benefit to a particular interest group or well-defined, relative small groups in the society, by the whole costs are not deeply felt by another group in society. This type of policy making create interest group politics which Lowi calls as interest groups liberalism, meaning that politics is designed to distribute benefit to many individual groups without considering the tradeoffs and priorities inherent in the distribution of benefit. In such system, the elected officials are interested more in serving particular interests than in serving the public interest. Policies example: federal funding for schools, highways, and farm subsides.
• Regulatory policy: policies to govern the conduct of business. Two types of regulatory policies: competitive and protective

Competitive regulatory policy: policy that limits the provision of goods or the participation in a market to a selected group of people or organizations, most of the time made at the state level, e.g. California Bar association policy, policy for teaching credentials, medicine practice.

Protective regulatory policy: policy to protect the public from the negative effects of private activities, e.g. air pollution regulation, consumer safety.

• Redistributive policies: policy gives benefits to of groups by seemingly to impose a cost on another group. Redistributive policy is highly controversial. It can involve the transfer of resources from the less well off to the better off, and from the better off to the less well off, e.g. welfare policy, tax cut.

Wilson’s Cost-Benefit policy typology: James Wilson asserted that it is difficult to assign policies to just one category defined by Lowi. He argued that some distributive policies also have the characteristics of regulatory polity attributes. Wilson developed a system in terms of the costs and benefits that a policy is focused on particular groups or interests. In this typology, a policy that provide obvious benefit to one groups would motivate that group to press for enactment of the policy, the enactment would even be easier if the costs are distributed broadly throughout larger group. If the costs target a particular group or interest, the policy is likely opposed by the cost-bearing group. The importance of Cost-Benefit typology is a way to study policy from the point view of the distribution of costs and benefits of policy to groups and interests in a society. You can read more about Wilson’s Cost-Benefit typology from Table 6.2 on page 147.

Other Policy typology:

• Substantive Policy: policy provides goods and services to the public. There three elements to be considered for substantive policy: 1) the allocation of government recourses must be at stake; 2) the issue must generate massive amount of attention from the citizens and from the public policy makers; and 3) the issue must contain the potential for great change. Substantive issues often appear to require urgency demands response from those in position to make change. Commonly, economic issues provide substantive questions for public policy agenda. For example, the recent economic stimulus plan is the response to the current economic issues. Social issues, such as school prayer, gun control; abortion are now loom as vital elements of the substantive public policy agenda. The tax cut under the Bush administration is another example. The more substantive an issue becomes, the more imperative it is for policy makers to satisfy competing interests and goals.
• Symbolic policy: symbolic policy focus more on value than on resources. Most often, symbolic policy captures attention of the public and decision makers alike, e.g. the concept of good citizenship is symbolic because it centers on the “rights” and “wrong” of society. Symbolic policy do not make any substantive changes to the laws or policy outcomes, e.g. laws to declare holidays, naming or recognizing agencies. Symbolic policy is an important element of politics. Symbolism is important for its ability to transform relatively narrow themes or action into broad issues and can be abused and can quickly impact the public agenda, for example the quick passage of the Patriot Act shortly after the terrorist attacks in September 11, 2001 was meant to give law enforcement the tools to hunt down terrorists in the US. Yet, within months of the implementation of the Act, critics argued that authorities were using the law to investigate everything from libraries to copy shops, putting citizens civil liberties in the process.

Sometimes symbolic policies are adopted by government decision makers to respond to serious substantive issues with a token or symbolic response due to shortage of resource or concerns not widely shared throughout society, but to acknowledge the importance of the issues with little done to solve the problem, for example, the public education gets attention from policy makers and but with little resources to support to carry on policies that aim to improve public education.

• Public goods: are goods that once provided for one user, are available to all in a society, and that cannot be exclusively consumed by a single person or group of people, are indivisible, e.g. police protection.
• Private goods: goods that can be used only by the immediate consumer and whose enjoyment is then denied to others.

Some times argument as what public goods are and what private goods occurs when analyzing policy design in terms of benefits of the policy per se, for instance, policy addressing welfare which is politically risky because of such benefits are perceived as addressing individual problems at the expense of the public goods.

Chapter 8: Policy Design and Policy Tools

The focus of this chapter is to understand policy output and policy outcome, the elements of policy design and tools, especially to understand the difference of policy output and policy outcome. It is critical to understand the difference between policy outcome and output. Please read carefully on the explanation of policy output and outcome below and do some more of your own research on this topic. (Personally, I am not that much fond of Salamon and Lund theory on types of policy tools/instruments discussed in this chapter. I felt they were trying to define public policy in a far too much political science method, which contributes more confusion than clarification for policy analysis. So if you find it hard to go on reading of this part, you are not required to read this part.)

Birkland explained that there two aspects of policy process: policy design and policy tools and implementation. These two aspects are hard to separated, but closely related to each other because the choice made in the design of a policy will influence the way a policy is implemented.

• Policy design: Birkland explained that it is the process by which policies are designed, both through technical analysis and through the political process, to achieve a particular goal. Policy maker should consider five elements of policy design: 1) policy goals/objectives; 2) the causal theory – about what causes the problem and what policy response to the problem would alleviate the problem; 3) the tools/instrument used to put the policy into effect; 4) changes of target groups of the policy; and 5) how to implement the policy.
• Policy tools and Policy implementation: after the policy is designed, the administrative agencies translate the will of the executive and legislative branches into actual policy outcomes.
• Outputs of policy: the things that policy process produces such as laws, regulations, rules, decisions, and the like, the goods and services provided to target groups of a policy, or the effort or activity (such as the oversight of Congress) that government expends to address problems. For example, the number of dollars spent per member of a target group is a measure of output of a policy. It is important to explain the difference between outputs and outcomes.
• Outcomes (impact): (simply put it: what change has the policy accomplished.)are changes in behavior that results from policy output, or the results of the implementation of a policy. Outcomes can be intended or unintended, positive or negative, immediate impact or on future conditions. To measure whether what actually happens is good or bad, right or wrong, worth the investment, or not worth the price. Outcome are the actual changes that has taken place from the time of the policy’s formulation through the period of its implementation. Outcome deals with qualitative assessments. The extent of changes is important for determining the continuing of a policy. With outcomes assessments, the policy analyst has opportunity to recast an issue on the public agenda, thereby starting the public policy making process anew. Outcome assessments can guide the public resources allocation by funding more effective programs and provide valuable services. Measuring activities such as number of arrest, traffic tickets and response time by policy departments, are the measuring output, but not the outcome (impacts) of these activities on crime. Counting graduation rates (output) and assess the test scores to show the impact (outcome) of education activities on students are different.

Policy Tools or Instruments: a method through which government seeks a policy objective (Lester Salamon & Michael Lund). Tools or instruments used to create a desired outcome.

Types Policy Tools: four types defined by Salamon and Lund:

1. Looking at what government is doing to achieve a goal. Four activities to look at: outright money payment, provision of goods and services, legal protections, and restriction/penalties (such as regulations or laws).

2. Examining the types of “structure of the delivery system.” It reflects how policy is implemented.

3. Looking at the “degree of centralization” of policy implementation. In general, the more direct the services to be provided, the more the administration of the program is centralized. Birkland set the example of the Social Security as a centralized program in Washington.

4. Looking at the “degree of automaticity.” Tax incentives, Salamon and Lund argued are self-executing because individuals will seek them out, thereby promoting the goal of the tax policy. Another example they gave is the mortgage tax deduction is a way for government to promote homeownership.

The detailed explanation of the different types of policy tools by leading scholars is displayed by Table 8.2 and Table 8.3 from page 248-251. If you’re very interested in learning their characteristics, please read these tables carefully. It’s not the main focus of our discussion for this week though.

Using examples to explain the difference between measuring activities (outputs) and impacts (outcomes) of public policy. This is a good practice for analysis of public policy. It would be helpful to deepen your understanding what outputs and outcomes are when you think of some examples.