The Policy Lever

The Reality of Pareto Optimality

2012-01-20T10:17:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week I discussed this question of the Kaldor-Hicks criterion versus Pareto optimality: two standards we use for government intervention from the welfare economics perspective. I argued that unless we constrain our assumptions about the world, a completely Pareto optimal government intervention is impossible to reach. After having thought about the issue some more, I realized that this is really a question about open versus closed systems. In a closed system, we can have a Pareto Optimal solution. A broad long-lasting insurance pool benefits everyone who is a part of that pool, but may raise costs for those outside of it. Foundation grants that fund projects in a single city may benefit everyone who lives in that jurisdiction, but it raises the opportunity costs of those living elsewhere.

Theodore Lowi approaches this idea of policy benefits and burdens from a political science perspective. If you remember from our reading on explaining policy choices, Lowi is associated with the idea that policy shapes politics. He argued that there were four types of policies: distributive, re-distributive, regulatory, and constituent (although his earlier work only acknowledged the first three of these categories) . Key to his argument is the idea that each of these types of policies have their own arenas of power, in other words, each of these types of policies produce different relationships between interest groups, elected officials, and agencies.

For this post, I will focus on distributive policies. The current form of distributive policy would be those earmarks and pork-barrel politics that we discussed during the first week of class. They distribute large benefits to a small group of people, but the burdens they place on others (mostly due to taxes and opportunity costs) are small and diffuse. While these may meet the Kaldor-Hicks criterion, they are certainly not Pareto Optimal. The original use of the term "distributive policy" was to describe 18th and 19th century American land policies. During that time, land in America was considered an almost unlimited resource. The American government was basically giving away land to anyone willing to travel west. From the perspective of 18th and 19th century Americans, I would argue that distributive policies, as defined in this way, were Pareto Optimal. There was enough land to go around, those willing to make the trip to the west could have it, freeing up space and resources for those remaining on the East Coast. Everyone had to travel to the west to benefit, so the opportunity costs were more or less the same for everyone.

I hope that by now you have all recognized the flaws in this argument. This assumes a very closed system. The definition of "American" in this example does not include those who were already living on the land in the West (some of whom had already been displaced from the East Coast), and who were brutalized, killed, and occupied so that American citizens could all benefit from free western land. (Of course, I am talking here about Native Americans/American Indians). Once we extend our system to include Native American/American Indian peoples, we no longer have a Pareto Optimal solution. These policies would not qualify as distributive policies in the modern sense of the term "concentrated benefits with small diffuse burdens", and they would fail the Kaldor-Hicks criterion, as well. The short-term and long-term harms they imposed (most notably genocide, relocation, and rape) likely outweigh the benefits. This would be true for the colonialist actions of other nations, as well.

The interest in these two criteria for government action in class has allowed me to engage in a thought experiment about what they could look like in real-life. While grounded in economic and policy theory, these arguments are not based on research and should only be taken as thought experiments. I think one lesson here is that policy-makers and analysts need to be weary of solutions that seem to be Pareto Optimal. When burdens of any action seem nonexistent or even small and diffuse, we may be guilty of closed-systems thinking. We, as responsible members of a global society, need to at least consider the harms and burdens that our actions will cause to those we consider outside our reference group, our society, and our nation. There may still be a good argument for action, but if we don't at least consider these possibilities we risk history's harsh judgement.

The Affordable Care Act and the Kaldor-Hicks Criterion

2012-01-18T12:35:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday, I gave a lecture in class about different theories and models for examining the design of public policy, the policy process, and the effects of policy on society. I spent a lot of time on economic models of public policy, as this tends to be the dominant paradigm that policy scholars use to study all three aspects of policy. I discussed welfare economics in-depth including the two major justifications that we use for government action to maximize social utility: Pareto optimality and the Kaldor-Hicks criterion. As a reminder, the standard of Pareto optimality posits that government should intervene in the market if it can make at least one person better off without making anyone worse off. In the global, systemic world in which we live, this is basically an impossible task for public policy to achieve. As I will discuss here on Friday, we can think of some examples of Pareto optimal policies when we constrain our models of society in certain ways, but I have yet to come up with a public policy that does not harm a single person once opportunity costs and relative harms are taken into account. I invite you to help me brainstorm to come up with such a policy. In contrast, the Kaldor-Hicks criterion is easier to meet and is usually what we rely on as our standard for policy-making. The Kaldor-Hicks criterion states that if we can make at least one-person better off through government policy and the benefit to that person or group of people exceeds the harm imposed on others, thus creating an overall net-gain of utility for society, then government should act. Further, the person who is made better-off can, in theory, reimburse the person or people who are harmed, creating a theoretically Pareto optimal solution. Of course, this criterion may lead to extreme inequality even while it creates an overall net gain for society if the same people are always made better off and there is no requirement to compensate those made worse-off.

There was a request from one of my students to apply the Kaldor-Hicks criterion to healthcare reform, specifically the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, often referred to as the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In order to do that, we need to take a step back to talk about the concept of insurance in general. Why do we have insurance for some things (car insurance, unemployment insurance, home-owners insurance, social security insurance etc.) and not others? For the basic answer to that question, turn back to my blog post on why we have health insurance, here. In general, insurance is a solution to the problem of imperfect information about our future health that allows us to pool risk across many different people. At a single point in time, we essentially have a classic Kaldor-Hicks situation. The healthy in our (hopefully large) risk pool pay a little more in premiums than they would on medical care for themselves, while the sick pay much less and are not left bankrupt after the sudden on-set of a serious illness. However, rarely is anyone healthy over the entire course of their lifetime. Given enough time in an insurance pool, those who paid in extra when they were healthy will be compensated or reimbursed by paying less than they otherwise would when they are sick.

So how do people decide whether or not to purchase insurance? Those who are unhealthy, who believe that they will spend less in premiums than they will for their own care will of course purchase insurance, if they can. What about the healthy? They are choosing between spending their money on insurance premiums and other goods and services. Remember, we are talking about rationally self-interested utility-maximizers here so they will each have their own individual utility curves that map this trade-off. This curve is a function of their disposable income, their knowledge about their current and past health, their knowledge about family health history, their degree of risk aversion, and the price of health insurance. Those people who are healthy, young, and risk-neutral or risk-seeking likely will choose to spend their money on other goods and services. Those people with very little disposable income may be forced to spend their money on other goods and services. Those people with an extremely high amount of disposable income who are risk-neutral may decide that they have enough money to cover their individual health costs regardless of what happens to them and avoid purchasing insurance.

Like any good public policy from the economics perspective, the ACA adjusts this utility curve. The provision that young people under 26 can be added to their parent's health insurance plan reduces the cost of insurance for that young person (who is more likely to be healthy and less risk-averse then the general population). This should incentivize young people (or their parents) to pay for health insurance. By creating state health insurance exchanges, there is greater risk pooling which should lower the costs of health insurance relative to the individual market, incentivizing more healthy uninsured people to purchase insurance. By providing tax-credits for the purchase of health insurance to low- and moderate- income individuals the act increases the income available to spend on health insurance and increases the opportunity cost of purchasing other goods and services, incentivizing more people who would not have otherwise been able to afford insurance to purchase it. Similarly, by imposing a tax penalty on those who do not purchase insurance, the individual mandate changes the opportunity costs of not buying insurance (for those making enough to afford insurance, see more about this here). All of these changes should increase the pool of healthy people who purchase insurance, making those already in the pool better off, but possibly penalizing those who decide not to purchase insurance.

Once again, this is not the end of the story. We also have provisions that will increase the short-term burden on the healthy individuals in the pool. Health insurers can no longer exclude the sick from health care in the same way that they previously could. They also cannot rescind coverage from individuals when they become sick. The influx of expensive to treat patients into insurance coverage may mean that premiums increase and the Kaldor-Hicks criterion is violated in the short-run. However, in the long-run when these healthy people themselves become sick, these regulations ensure that they will then benefit and be compensated for their previous over-payments. In some ways we can think of an insurance system with a large risk pool as Pareto optimal for those inside the pool. As I will mention on Friday, those outside the pool will likely still be harmed, making the solution technically non-pareto optimal. Now, when we attach insurance to employment and the labor-market shifts from long-term employment in a single firm to high turn-over positions, how does that affect the ability to remain in an insurance pool long-term? How does that affect our Kaldor-Hicks criterion? Of course there's a lot more depth we can go into here, but I will save that for another time.

Semester Wrap-Up Fall 2011

2011-12-05T13:04:00.000-08:00

As we finish up the semester, I wanted to do a quick summary of what I hope you will take away from this course. It has been a pleasure reading your reflection papers and reading your comments about public policy issues. This is the first time I have taught this course online, and I certainly learned a lot; I hope you did, too.

Many people come into this class hoping to find out the "right" answer for how government can solve a problem, be it undocumented or illegal immigration, inequality in the education system, or housing the homeless. I hope that this course has taught you that the world of public policy is never so simple that a single "right" answer is easy to find. The United States, in particular, has a very complex system of government with three branches at the national level, states with at least two branches, and local governments all working alone and in concert to solve problems. Not to mention that nonprofit and for-profit organizations also play an important role in creating, advocating for, and implementing public policies. While the dream of "three-page" bills would certainly increase transparency, it seems as though our system of government is too complex to make such a goal a reality. Next time a politician suggests a simple answer to a complex problem, I hope that you will view such a suggestion skeptically.

I hope that our discussions of substantive policy issues peaked your interest, as well. Although our department does not currently have the capacity to offer classes in each of these substantive areas, there are classes in departments like sustainability, criminology, sociology, social work, and economics where you can explore these substantive areas in more depth. Further, for those of you who are planning to pursue the public service and public policy major, I hope that this gave you some ideas in terms of where you might want to do your internship and possible topics for your capstone. The CQ researcher briefs are all accessible online through the library and they provide a good starting point for understanding the "players" and major debates in each policy area. Peters' book provides a more straightforward look at the background of each of these larger policy areas. I hope you will refer back to these resources as you continue your studies of public policy.

In comparison to some of the other courses you may take in this department, this course attempts to instill more of a critical perspective in each of you. While some may see this perspective as oppositional to the more "scientific" and "objective" courses in cost-benefit, statistical, and economic analysis; I believe that both perspectives are essential to the evaluation of public policy proposals. Without this perspective, you may miss some of the underlying assumptions or as Stone would say "counting as" used in these analyses that can fundamentally alter the results of an analysis. You may also miss assumptions that can alienate or confuse policy targets. Ultimately, I hope that those of you who pursue a career in policy, administration, or politics will take your skills in economics, statistics, and critical thinking and combine them to approach each policy skeptically and then choose the policy alternative that fares the best on all three criteria.

Most of all, I hope that you take away the idea that although we may disagree with each other on these issues we can still have a civil discussion about each of them, and generally find at least some point of common ground. It seems as though our policy discourse will only become more fractured and hostile as the 2012 election approaches, and it's important to keep in mind that those who support a different candidate or take a different perspective on an issue are not our enemy. We can learn a lot more about ourselves and our opinions when we take the time to listen to and understand the other side of arguments, and why others may disagree with our own perspectives.

Thank you all for a great class and I hope you enjoy your winter break!

P.S. Don't forget to turn in your policy memos on the 11th. Make sure you refer back to the rubric from policy memo 1, as we will be using that same rubric to grade your second memos.

The National Debt

2011-12-01T16:03:00.000-08:00

I scheduled our discussion of the national debt for this week in the hopes that we would have a deal from the "supercommittee" (officially known as the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction) to discuss. Unfortunately, they were unable to come to any agreement. Instead, I'll talk a little about the readings and then discuss the implications of the lack of a deal.

This week's reading on the national debt is one of the most up to date that we've read so far. Although the chapter was written before the "debt ceiling crisis" of the summer, it asks many of the same questions that the supercommittee has tried to reconcile over the past few months. Most notably, how can we work to reduce our large deficit without stalling or preventing an economic recovery. Of course, the supercommittee is also concerned with the political ramifications of their actions. We have had two bipartisan committees tasked with reducing the national debt, the Bowles-Simpson National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform and the Rivlin-Domenici Debt Reduction Task Force. Both of these committees were bipartisan and offered recommendations for reducing the debt as models from which the supercommittee could work (even though the Bowles-Simpson commission failed to reach the supermajority among commission members necessary to fully endorse their plan). Even with these blueprints, the committee was unable to make a recommendation for action. As the chapter points out, Americans want to balance the budget while cutting taxes and increasing spending, an impossible task. Any cuts or tax-increases would run the risk of being politically unpopular less than a year before a major national election.

When the Supercommittee was formed as part of the debt ceiling deal this summer, a system of sequestration or automatic cuts to defense, Medicare (providers only), and Social Security was created as a consequence of the supercommittee failing to pass an additional $1.5 trillion in cuts. The good news is that these cuts will not occur until FY2013, so there is still time for Congress to reach an agreement. Policymakers on both sides are already attempting to over-ride sequestration for their preferred programs, but the Obama administration has vowed to veto any such attempts. It seems as though we have reached an impasse.

So, now that the supercommittee has failed, what can we expect? The Obama administration is hoping that the full Congress can pass extensions on the payroll tax cut and extended unemployment benefits before recessing in December. The Republicans are hoping to avoid raising taxes and to make the Bush tax cuts permanent while further cutting domestic spending and fundamentally altering entitlement programs (Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security). Democratic members of the legislature are hoping to preserve Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security while letting the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest members of society expire. Regardless of what happens, as we saw with the debt-ceiling debate, the appearance of a "do-nothing Congress" may be the most damaging aspect of these negotiations to the economy, our democracy, and the faith-and-credit of the US government.

My Thoughts on Peters Ch. 17 - Cost-Benefit and Ethical Analysis

2011-12-01T13:20:00.000-08:00

So here we are in the final week and back to Peters for his final chapter. In this edition, Peters combines cost-benefit and ethical analysis into a single chapter. While I generally prefer to discuss these two issues separately, I think the combined chapter works for the purposes of this class. This chapter helps serve as a teaser for two 400-level courses we offer (or will be offering) as part of the Public Service and Public Policy major. PAF 471: Public Policy Analysis will be a required course for the public policy concentration and will likely focus on economic models of policy analysis, specifically cost-benefit analysis and quantitative analysis. PAF 460: Public Service Ethics is our required ethics course and will help you navigate current ethical issues in public policy, public administration, and the non-profit sectors. I hope that this chapter sparked your excitement for these courses.

There are other reasons why it may make sense to combine these two chapters. In some ways, cost-benefit analysis can be thought of as a specific type of consequentialist ethics. Consequentialism is just a fancy way of saying "the ends justify the means". Of course, this form of ethics can lead to many actions that we would consider unethical, but it is often used in public policy creation. Basically, cost-benefit analysis is attempting to reach a Pareto Optimal outcome, where no one is made worse off but at least one person is made better off, or a Kaldor-Hicks outcome where society experiences a net-gain. In this case, the ends and the means are quantified so that the ends justify the means if the outcome is a net monetary benefit. Of course, opportunity costs, consumer surpluses, unintended consequences, and net values need to be considered in the calculation you use to determine the costs and benefits. I think Peters does a good job of walking you through these concepts using a basic example of cost-benefit analysis. It is important to note that although we rarely use Pareto Optimality as a goal in policy analysis (because it is usually an impossible standard to meet) it likely works much better as a criterion for ethical analysis. Certainly, ensuring that no one is made worse off by government action is a stronger ethical stance than assuming that the individuals who benefit from government action will somehow compensate those who are burdened by government action.

As Peters points out there are many problems associated with the use of cost-benefit analysis. It requires a lot of assumptions about risk and future circumstances. Small changes in those assumptions can drastically change the predicted net benefit of a program. In a policy world where solutions are often looking for problems, interest groups have substantial power, policymakers are politically motivated, and competition for funds is the primary rule of the game the temptation to make favorable assumptions about the future of one's preferred project is overwhelming. I believe the perception that cost-benefit analysis is preferable to other forms of analysis because it is straightforward is really an incorrect perception. Cost-benefit analysis can be just as subjective as ethical analysis.

Further, while cost-benefit analysis can help us choose projects out of a list, it offers very little normative advice. It cannot answer the question "what should government do?" We have to draw on our cultural and social values for that. Peters' discussion of "ethical analysis" is really about these value questions. After Stone, his recommendations likely seem a little quaint but they are as follows: the preservation of life, the preservation of individual autonomy, truthfulness, fairness, and deservedness. In many ways these parallel with Stone's values of security, liberty, and equity with truthfulness added for good measure. Of course as we saw with Stone, actually defining what these values mean and whose definition we should use is the difficult part.

I agree with Peters assessment that we as policy analysts are over-reliant on cost-benefit analysis because of its apparent objectivity in comparison to ethical analysis. Policymakers are a different story. Some policymakers have become little more than rubber stamps for programs with positive cost-benefit analysis, but currently values seem to be the prominent metric determining whether or not policies proceed through the policy process we discussed during the first few weeks of class. Many of the policies Congress is considering are policies that invoke those tough ethical questions such as Don't Ask, Don't Tell; defunding Planned Parenthood, immigration policies, and even the debate over the deficit. Cost-benefit analyses have played very little role in these debates. This leads me to two questions: Would we be better off if policymakers used the cost-benefit analyses provided by policy analysts rather than relying on their own definitions of values, and what is the state of the policy analyst profession if their primary means of analysis is often ignored by policymakers?

Policy Paradox and Homelessness

2011-11-15T13:43:00.000-08:00

This week we aren't discussing any new theoretical topics, instead we are reviewing some of what we learned from Stone and seeing how you would use Stone's point of view to analyze policy debates. This is a transition into the week after Thanksgiving when we will briefly cover Cost Benefit and Ethical Analysis. Policy analysis is the topic for PAF 471, which will be offered next semester so if you enjoy these topics and want to learn more, I would recommend registering for the course.

In Policy Paradox in Action, Deborah Stone analyzes the history and discourse surrounding Affirmative Action using the framework she presents in this book. She illustrates how you can use the critiques she provides to critically examine policy evidence and argument. She points out where she is using each critique in her analysis. You'll notice that we didn't cover all of the goals, problems, and solutions she discusses. I hope that if you are interested in learning more about what we had to skip that you will at least go back and skim the relevant chapters.

In some ways, this may seem like another substantive chapter about Affirmative Action. While I'm happy that this is an opportunity to learn a little more about the topic, that's not what I want you to take away from this reading. I want you to see that you can combine discussions of goals, problem definition, and policy tools to think critically about public policies, legislation, and implementation. As we'll discuss in two weeks, this does not mean that statistical and cost benefit analysis do not provide valuable insight into our public policy choices. All that I ask (and that I believe Stone asks) is that you approach these analyses skeptically, engage with their methods, and question the possible agenda of those who are conducting them. After thinking critically about them, you can decide for yourself how valuable each analysis is and how close it comes to representing "the truth".

As I mentioned on Twitter, one of the challenges for this week is to read the Housing the Homeless chapter and watch the Street Vets documentary using Stone's critical lens. This chapter was chosen for this week because so many of the issues we are debating in homelessness policy have to do with the questions Stone's book challenges us to think about. Most importantly, the question of numbers and defining who to count as homeless is a major one giving the changing face of "housing insecurity" in the current recession. The chapter also raises the question of using veterans as a synecdoche for the problem of homelessness, given the changing nature of the problem. We have stories about inadvertent (PTSD), accidental (temporary job loss), and mechanical (recessionary effects, lack of mental health and substance abuse treatment) causes. We also have a variety of policy solutions that make very different assumptions about their target populations. Were you able to read this chapter without being influenced by Stone's critical viewpoint? How do you think the debates presented in the chapter held up to Stone's scrutiny? Did you see other elements associated with the polis in the chapter?

My Thoughts on Inducements and Policy Paradox in Action

2011-11-08T16:26:00.000-08:00

The fourth section in Stone's book deals with solutions to policy problems. Stone lists five possible solutions: inducements, rules, facts, rights, and powers. Sometimes we refer to these solutions as policy instruments or policy tools. They serve as the mechanisms through which government or the community exerts its power on individuals to change their behavior. I chose to assign chapter 11 on inducements rather than one of the other chapters because inducements tend to be our preferred tool in American public policy.

Inducements are the common strategy of rewarding preferred behaviors and penalizing undesired actions. Sanctions and incentives are two-sides of the same coin. They allow the individual to choose his or her behavior but seek to alter the anticipated rewards or penalties for carrying out that behavior. The removal a sanction for good behavior or an incentive for bad behavior illustrates the inter-related nature of sanctions and incentives. This is especially true when we consider research in behavioral economics. Studies have shown that we feel a loss much more sharply than we feel a lack of gain. In other words, you would feel worse about a salary reduction of $300 a month than you would feel about not getting a raise of $300 a month even though they are numerically equivalent.

Inducements are based on the understanding of human behavior characteristic of economics. It assumes that individuals are rational, that they know what will make them happy, and that they act to maximize their happiness. In order for inducements to work individuals must have control over their behavior, they must know about the possible penalty or reward, and they must be able to change their course of action. When inducements are used to act on a group or another collective entity, these assumptions usually fail. At the vary least, it makes the rational decision-making process more difficult. Inducements must be designed differently in these cases to account for the processes of group decision-making in a particular context.

Inducements are also affected by time. It is rare for an incentive or sanction to be delivered immediately after a good or bad action occurs. Even when we can deliver such an inducement, it always occurs after the act. Individuals or groups must be able to anticipate such inducements before they carry out a behavior. Many of our financial incentives and sanctions are delivered through the tax code. This creates a gap in time of up to a year from when the behavior occurs to when the inducement is delivered. If individuals or groups do not believe they will personally have to deal with long-term penalties or receive long-term benefits, then the inducement will be ineffective.

Inducements tend to imply purposeful action. They may try to alter actions with either intentional or inadvertent causes, but they do little to alter mechanical or accidental causes over which individuals have no control. This is why causal stories can be very important. If you want to benefit or burden a group using inducements you have to be able to tell a story about purposeful actions. Although not assigned for this class, the documentary and book, Freakonomics tells a story about the use of monetary inducements to encourage students in a high school to improve their grades. The program seems to work for some students but does not for most of them. This is a common story in public policy. Any time we use a policy tool, particularly inducements to alter behavior we have three groups. We have a group who will always do the desired behavior, a group that will never do the desired behavior, and a group that will change its behavior in response to the right inducement. This group is called the marginal group. Designing a good inducement is difficult because we have to decide the correct value of the inducement and target it to the changeable group. This can bring up a tension between efficiency and equity. It would be more equitable to ensure that everyone who performs a good behavior is rewarded with an incentive, but it is not efficient to reward the group who would perform a good behavior without an incentive.

Although positive and negative inducements are two-sides of the same coin, they can have different effects in the polis. Positive inducements help communities to build trust, goodwill, and cooperation while negative inducements can create conflicts and divisions. Rewards build upon a shared sacrifice. The giver gives up the reward and the receiver gives up his or her desired behavior. Sanctions result in one or both parties experiencing a cost or loss. Of course, we must remember that whether rewards or sanctions are offered, they are both based on an unequal power relationship where one group or individual is able to change the behavior of another.

The design of inducements in the polis is an art. Large positive incentives can lead to excessive competition and even cheating. Large negative sanctions can lead to a reluctance to enforce them. Sanctions or rewards that require a lot of effort on behalf of the giver are often not carried out. Incentives and sanctions can easily become guarantees when the giver is perceived as having little will or power to remove them. When the giver and receiver are very different, there may be a misunderstanding about what type of incentive or sanction will change behavior. Symbolic understandings of need come into play because behaviors that are tied to identity are often impossible to change.

Of course, no inducement operates in isolation. Individuals and groups are motivated by their own desires, but also by inducements imposed by government, business, friends, family, colleagues etc. Even if we accept the assumption that humans are calculating and weigh costs and benefits before they act, an inducement instituted through the policy process is only one small influence on behavior. This is especially true when individuals can adapt their behavior to strategically avoid the consequences of a sanction or reap the rewards of an incentive when it is not really deserved. Going back to the Freakonomics example, if we targeted our incentive only to those students who were able to bring their grades up from a D or F to an A or B, we may see a group of formerly A or B students whose grades drop significantly so they can later receive the incentive for bringing their grades back up to A's or B's. We often refer to this as a perverse incentive, but it is really a consequence of individual rational choice and adaptability.

My Thoughts on Energy and the Environment

2011-11-08T13:39:00.000-08:00

I want to preface this week's post by saying that energy and environmental policy is not my area of expertise. In fact, out of all the policy topics we are discussing this semester, it is the area where I have done the least substantive work. That being said, I think it is incredibly important. I will not be able to add much substantive information to what Peters, the podcast, and the documentary have presented, but I can use my expertise in the policy process to explain why policymaking in the environmental arena is so challenging.

First, I want to call us back to chapter three. In this chapter, Peters talks briefly about wicked problems as areas where the Advocacy Coalition Framework is particularly useful. A wicked problem is a problem that is impossible to solve because of a lack of information, contradictory demands, and complexity. I believe that environmental problems may be the most wicked of problems that policymakers and analysts face. It is impossible to separate the environment from energy use, the economy, and most essentially, our values and way of life. I think that the documentary Heat makes it clear that an American way of life as an ideal for citizens of developing countries is completely unsustainable. Further, humans are very bad at long-range thinking, and even worse at making decisions that will benefit us in the long-run but cause inconvenience in the short-run. In theory, we'd all rather engage in a small inconvenience now if it means avoiding a catastrophic outcome later, but in reality that's not what we choose. It is hard for us to cognitively accept the idea that the future will realistically be radically worse than the present. There have been many psychological and behavioral economics studies detailing this point.

Economic principles like the collective action problem are rampant in environmental policy. Business interests who have been very profitable in the context of the status quo have huge incentives to fight regulations that will immediately affect their bottom line. On the other hand, most citizens will only see diffuse benefits of environmental regulation, spread out over the whole population. Further, these benefits may not be seen immediately and may not be measurable at all. We do not take note when an environmental disaster does not occur only when it does. Measuring the success of environmental policy is nearly impossible because it so often means that something does not happen.

Environmental policy tends to be reactive. When a huge disaster like the BP oil spill, Exxon Valdez, or the failure of the nuclear plants in Japan after the earthquakes takes place we tend to try to take action immediately. Instances like these and Silver Spring lead to reactive environmental policies that try to prevent similar accidents from happening again. On the other hand, issues like global warming which do not lead to immediate and visible accidents but instead act as a contributory cause to many disperse problems become increasingly difficult to deal with from a policy standpoint. They are also easier to deny because they force us to rely on scientific expertise rather than our own experiences of the world. This becomes clear in a This American Life podcast, Act Two of Kid Politics (not assigned) where a leading scientist who studies climate change attempts to change the mind of a high-schooler who is a climate change skeptic.

Ultimately, solving our environmental problems becomes difficult for policymakers because neither of the two approaches work very well. Conservation as proposed by Jimmy Carter requires action on the part of citizens, residents and businesses. Once again we have a classic collective action problem. The benefits of conservation only accrue if substantial numbers of people engage in it. This leads to a free-rider problem where those who do not engage in conservation also see the benefits. The problem is that there are incentives for everyone to be a free-rider causing conservation to fail. Of course government could step in and create economic incentives for conservation like "cash for clunkers" which subsidized the purchase of more fuel efficient vehicles for those scrapping older less efficient vehicles. On the other hand, finding more energy sources may work in the short-run, but ultimately fossil fuels are limited, nuclear power is politically unpopular, and none of our renewable sources can come close to a substitution for fossil fuels. Here too, government can step in with more funding for research and development of new technologies and subsidize the use of hydro-power, wind power, and solar power. Of course, as the ethanol experiment has shown, subsidizing these forms of power may create undesirable unintended consequences.

One of the issues with Peters' book is that this chapter was likely written before fracking aka hydraulic fracturing became a visible problem. Peters' section on natural gas section is very short and provides little substantive information. There is a lot of information about this process from a variety of sources, but the documentary "Gasland" seems to be one of the best sources in terms of explaining the fracking risk.

The Cause of Our Discontent

2011-11-02T13:45:00.000-07:00

So far, we have read about two types of problem definition in the polis: symbols and numbers. Generally, the numbers and symbols we use to make a policy argument are meant to tell, or at least imply, a causal story. When we are unhappy with the status quo, particularly when we feel that things have gone very wrong, our "nature" as humans is to try to find the cause. Quite a bit of our recent politicking has been consumed by the so-called "blame game" in which one politician attempts to claim the other is responsible for the problems we face. We see this phenomenon now, with Democrats blaming the economic crash on the trend of Wall Street deregulation and Republicans blaming the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. Like most problems in the polis, the "true" cause is likely attributed to all of these, plus many other contributory factors, some of which could have at least been partially mediated by policy and others which were out of government's control.

Turning to this week's substantive reading and documentary, another recent instance where things went horribly wrong was the 2005 response to hurricane Katrina. We can establish certain facts about what happened in this case. On August 29th, 2005 Katrina, a category 3 hurricane, hit the southeastern Louisiana coast. New Orleans, LA a southern city, built below sea-level, with large low-income and African American populations was in the path of the hurricane. New Orleans was (and is today) protected from storm surges by a series of levees built by the Army Corps of Engineers. One day prior to landfall, the Mayor of New Orleans ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city. After the storm hit, the levee system failed causing areas of the city of New Orleans, many of them historically Black and lower income, to flood. Thousands of residents who had not left the city were stranded in flooded homes and neighborhoods for days. Those who had evacuated to the Superdome and Convention Center faced overcrowding and resource shortages. Aid from local, state, and federal governments was slow to arrive, and much of the food and water aid did not arrive until seven days after the hurricane hit. Over 700 New Orleans residents lost their lives in the flood and hundreds of thousands were displaced. An estimated 100,000 have yet to return home. The government response to hurricane Katrina has generally been considered a complete failure. Controversy over who is to blame and for what, continues even today.

In her chapter on causes, Stone presents four general types of causes: accidental, mechanical, inadvertent, and intentional. We have seen arguments for all of these causes in the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Least satisfying, and least likely to be true, is the accidental cause argument. Basically, this argument would posit that a hurricane is a force of nature and no one could have anticipated or predicted what the effects of such a hurricane could be. Alternatively, one could argue that even with complete preparation and "mitigation", the levees would have failed and people would have lost their lives. In other words, what happened was out of anyone's control. I believe that evidence from the documentary and the reading shows that this explanation is incorrect in this case.

We often see the argument that FEMA's response was ineffective due to mechanical causes. The federalist system required the state and local government to authorize a federal response, and such a response was never received by the federal government from the state of Louisiana. Of course, state and local officials vehemently dispute this fact. Many have also argued that the reorganization of FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security caused the agency to lose a substantial number of highly-trained experts and funding for disaster response. The employees of FEMA were, in this story, doing their job to the best of their ability, but were hampered by systemic issues. A similar story has been told about the National Guard response to Katrina. There is more about both of these mechanical explanations in the reading and documentary.

There is also an inadvertent story at play in the Katrina story. Many have argued that the people of New Orleans would have left the city if they could but were either uninformed or unable to do so. Many lacked correct information about flood zones and the likelihood that the levees would burst. Public transportation out of the city was lacking. By the time the evacuation order was issued, it was too late for many to coordinate sufficient transportation. There may also have been an unwillingness to believe that this was "the one" or that their usual hurricane preparations would be inadequate. Some argue that the existence of government emergency response agencies was itself an inadvertent cause of the devastation, creating a false sense of security among those affected.

Finally, we heard a substantial number of intentional causal explanations for the devastation caused by Katrina and the botched government efforts to return residents to the city after the storm. As Kanye West famously stated in the televised fundraiser for Katrina relief, "George Bush doesn't care about black people." This sentiment underlies many of the arguments that the devastation caused by the hurricane was intentional. Some believed that the levees were purposely blown to flood low-income neighborhoods and preserve wealthier white New Orleans neighborhoods. Many believe that the bureaucratic red tape surrounding the Road Home program was created to keep poor African American former residents from returning home. Stories of intentional causation are sometimes labeled "conspiracy theories". While they are often untrue, the tobacco settlement discussed by Stone illustrates that some conspiracy theories contain at least a degree of truth. If you have not seen the film "The Insider", it is worth a watch to see how an intentional causal explanation evolved from conspiracy theory to truth.

In reality, the causes of social problems and natural disasters are complex and multi-faceted, but "It's complicated" is rarely a satisfying explanation in the polis. Politicians try to avoid blame for problems by shifting the blame to their political opponents. This occurs with any problem, whether it is a devastating natural disaster or a long-standing persistent issue. How would you use these causal theories to explain a longstanding problem, like poverty or health disparities, in the polis? Have you seen politicians use these theories to explain problems in the presidential primary debates?

My Thoughts on Economic Policy

2011-10-25T13:53:00.000-07:00

Given the current economic climate, I anticipate that this will be a busy week for discussions. I think that the materials provided for this week - the chapter from Peters, the Planet Money podcast, and the documentary - illustrate how broadly the government can intervene in the economy, how important the economy is to the political prospects of the President, and ultimately how little control the government actually has over what happens in the economy.

Although scholars agree that the government has little actual control over the economy, there is still some debate over the degree to which the government can or should intervene. If you have not already seen this "music video" explaining the difference between the Keynesian and Hayek-ian perspective, I highly recommend it.

Here we see both an Austrian school (laissez-fiare) and a Keynesian (interventionist) perspective on what and how much government should do to address economic downturns. During the debt ceiling debate, Senator Dick Durbin stated that the debt ceiling bill "Put [Keynes] to his final rest", signaling a huge turning point in American macroeconomic policy and a return to a more laissez-faire approach to the economy. Of course, we have since seen President Obama present the American Jobs Act, which includes a vast array of Keynesian based proposals (government investment in infrastructure and public service and subsidized employment programs).

The video does not discuss the current prominent understanding of economics, the Chicago School neo-classical perspective associated with Milton Friedman and George Stigler. These economists prefer a laissez-faire form of capitalism similar to Hayek, but arrive at that recommendation through different assumptions and methodologies. Despite Obama's portrayal by some on the right as a "socialist", many of Obama's economic advisers follow the Chicago School approach to the economy, perhaps explaining some of his recent tax and budget compromises. Despite its popularity in conservative political circles, supply-side economics is rarely discussed as a serious theoretical approach to macroeconomic policy. Even when the Laffer curve is invoked, we often ignore the fact that there are two sides to the curve, one side where government revenue rises concurrent with taxation and another where it falls in response to higher taxation.

Perhaps the biggest disagreement among economists and politicians appears to be the mechanism through which government should act on the economy. As the podcast, How Do You Create a Job? illustrates, government can create conditions that are likely to create jobs either through reducing restrictions and taxation of business or through taxing and providing more services. We see this trade-off when localities attempt to attract business, as well. The key is finding the balance that fosters the creation of good jobs and provides services that government can deliver well. As this statement from the former CEO of Intel illustrates, low-taxes alone are not a good economic development strategy.

At this point in time, the future of the economy and government's role as a regulator and participant remains uncertain. We have seen a Keynesian approach with the stimulus package, a more supply-side approach with the extension of the Bush tax-cuts, and a Corporatist approach with the bailouts. Prior to the summer, the economy appeared to be on an upswing, although it was a comparatively anemic upswing in terms of job creation and unemployment. The manufactured debt ceiling crisis (itself a lesson in agenda-setting) seems to have stalled recovery due to uncertainty and anxiety about the American political process. Suddenly, we find ourselves in the midst of a likely double-dip recession with consumer confidence at a low-point and anger from both the political left and right coming to a head. The so-called Super-committee is currently in negotiations to prevent another showdown similar to the debt ceiling crisis of the summer, but early reports seem to indicate that compromise will be difficult to achieve. The President has embarked on a "jobs tour" and is making job creation his current policy priority, but as we have seen, Congress appears unwilling to pass the American Jobs Act as it is written. In response, Obama has shifted his focus to the regulatory and implementation process to implement mortgage reform and other programs that his administration believes will stimulate the economy (If you need any further evidence that the policy stages process is not as neat and tidy as theory suggests, just look at how economic policy is currently progressing). Perhaps the biggest issue with our economy at the moment is inequality; with African Americans, Latinos, low-skilled workers, and the young facing extremely high unemployment and the erosion of wealth accumulated prior to the economic collapse. It is impossible to tell what the next few months will bring, but I can almost guarantee that discussion of the economy will dominate the 2012 elections.

A Number's Worth a Thousand Words - Measuring Phenomena in the Polis

2011-10-25T13:32:00.000-07:00

Numbers tend to be the gold-standard of policy analysis. Master's and doctoral policy programs rarely discuss qualitative analysis and tend to focus on the quantification of phenomena. As we learned last week, stories play a very important role in policy advocacy, but they tend to be ignored in the study of public policy. In my Master's of Public Policy program at Georgetown, for example, we took 3 required semesters of quantitative methods, but were not offered a qualitative course as an elective. Numbers are considered so important because they imply scientific analysis and objectivity. While the story of an individual is considered subjective and unrelated to the experiences of the population, a number is perceived as the objective picture of the issue as a whole.

Of course, anyone who has paid recent attention to political debate knows that both sides have numbers to support their point. Sometimes these numbers are directly contradictory. Occasionally, the number is completely made up like Senator Kyl's "not intended to be factual" statement that abortions are well over 90 percent of what planned parenthood does. Usually, both numbers contain some validity but vary in terms of how they count phenomena.

One of the major questions currently being debated is the extent of poverty in our society. In the section on security, I talked about relative versus absolute poverty and that certainly comes into play here. If you believe that relative poverty is important you would likely consider many more people to be poor than if you think absolute poverty is all that matters. We have two federal measures of poverty, the federal poverty threshold and the poverty guidelines. The federal policy threshold was developed by Mollie Orshansky in the 1970s and counts the pre-tax income, including any income provided by government assistance programs, of all family members and adjusts the count by the number and age of the family members. Non-cash benefits, benefits delivered through the tax-code and capital gains and losses are not counted. If your income falls below the poverty threshold, which is based on the cost of the basic basket of food necessary to meet dietary needs (adjusted for inflation) and an estimate (based on data from the 1960s) of what percent of their income families spend of food, then you are considered to be in poverty. The HHS poverty guidelines are used for program administration and simplify the census measure so that the age of family members is no longer taken into account.

Of course, many people find this measure to be problematic. Much of our aid to the poor is delivered through non-cash assistance and tax credits. Many scholars argue that without taking these sources of income into account the federal poverty level over-estimates the number of families in poverty. Others argue that families spend a much lower percentage of their income on food than they did in the 1960s due to the rising costs of housing and transportation so the federal poverty level under-estimates the number of people in poverty. Still others would argue that the federal poverty line doesn't take into account geographic variations in the cost of living so it under-estimates the number of people in poverty in large cities with high costs of living. When you read political and scholarly discussions of poverty in America (or of any issue) you have to pay attention to how they count who is in poverty and whether or not that measure is appropriate for the given context.

Stone also discusses some of the paradoxes of counting in the polis. Cost to government is often income to someone else. This is especially important in an era of contracted services. Whole industries have grown up to serve the needs of citizens that had once been fulfilled by government. As fiscal austerity measures are put in place, businesses who rely on government contracts will likely fail.

Averages become a paradox in the polis, as well. An average is a moving number. When a politician says "I want all students with low test scores to be brought up to the average", this becomes an impossible goal because the average test score moves (unless all high scoring students also come down to the average). All people want to be considered middle-class in America so we end up with a theoretical middle-class which bears little relationship to the actual statistical middle-class. We also end up with different definitions of the middle-class by party.

Finally, we have to remember that in the polis people adjust their behavior to adapt to measurement. There is an old adage in program evaluation that says "you get what you measure." If you measure one aspect of performance, that aspect will likely improve whereas other aspects will likely get worse. Measuring quantity of service will likely reduce the quality of service. Measuring pure numbers also creates the perverse incentives to cheat the system. The recent cheating scandal in Atlanta Public Schools illustrates how measurement can lead to corruption at both individual and systemic levels.

Numbers are often imbued with a sense of objectivity and scientific validity, but we have to remember that in the polis they tell stories just like symbols. You have to be just as skeptical when you hear a number as you are when you hear a story. Of course, just because numbers can be manipulated does not mean that they do not often have a degree of truth to them. My advice is to think about the source of the number, how it was measured and counted, and how other ways of measuring could have changed the statistic. Once you have skeptically examined the number, you can decide whether or not you think it is a valid measurement, or at least more or less valid than competing claims.

Policy symbols and culture wars

2011-10-18T22:51:00.000-07:00

This week addresses two of my favorite topics, both as a creative writer who studied poetry in graduate school, and as a doctoral student studying public administration. Our focus is on two intertwined subjects: symbols, from Stone's text, and culture wars from Peters' text. It can seem a little counter-intuitive in our field, since public administration is called on so frequently to provide technical expertise and answers to wicked problems grounded in fact. What, then, are we to do when a problem like the ones Peters describes end up in our laps? Especially since the general public does not appreciate government institutions dictating solutions to these kinds of problems (except perhaps in the courts) navigating a cultural clash can be one of the biggest challenges we will face.

In part, we must acknowledge that these issues--whether they be the debate over abortion, gay rights, environmental causes, the death penalty or other challenging topics--cannot be "solved" in the traditional sense. As Peters notes, these problems will not be resolved by throwing more money at a community, or by bargaining between groups. As public administrators, government officials can often only aid in the process that political bodies undertake, and work to treat each side in an issue as fairly as possible.

Another effort we can undertake to improve ourselves, and to improve the policy process, is to take to heart Stone's discussion of symbols, and to realize that we are affected by the same rhetoric and action that influences the general public. If we're able to dissect how policies become targeted at particular groups (people who are homeless, for example) and what that means for them, and for us as administrators of policy, we can think critically about the role that those symbols play in our own decision-making, and how we can help others to imagine other ways of relating to peers, and the broader community.

Bear in mind how the power of symbols, and the struggle of culture wars play out in this week's documentaries, which each address in their own way topics raised by Peters. You have a choice this week to watch either an episode of In the Life's "Our Bodies, Our Rights," a television program on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues, or a Frontline episode "The Last Abortion Clinic."

As you go through the week's reading, also consider the ways that you may be impacted, or participating in the creation of symbols. Where do we run across broadly accepted symbols in our daily lives, and how do we know what they mean? I look forward to reading more about your thoughts!

Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Policy

2011-10-13T17:33:00.000-07:00

Our documentary for the week focuses heavily on the problems associated with a punitive law enforcement strategy for minors convicted of heinous crimes. While the cases presented in the documentary When Kids Get Life are extreme and shouldn't be taken as characteristic of the experience of all convicted criminals, they illustrate the problems with a one-size fits all criminal justice policy.

As Peters mentions, most law enforcement activities tend to be carried out at the state and local level. Policies like the death penalty, automatic sentencing, diversion programs, and gun control are, for the most part, decided at lower levels of government. One exception to this rule is when a state or local government's practices are ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Relatedly, the federal government intervenes in law enforcement where it is constitutionally allowed. The power to tax, interstate commerce, and activities related to the protection of federal officials have been used to justify the activities of the FBI, ATF, DEA, Customs, Secret Service, and Border Patrol.

Two areas of criminal justice policy that have been hot-topics in the news lately are gun control and the death penalty. Last year, if you remember, the Arizona legislature passed a law allowing individuals over age 21 the right to carry a weapon on campus, but the bill was vetoed by Governor Jan Brewer. It seems certain that a similar bill will be re-introduced in the near-future. While the question of gun control has largely been left up to states and localities to decide, the second amendment limits the degree to which gun ownership can be restricted. The correct interpretation of the second amendment has been disputed throughout the history of our nation. Scholars are divided over whether or not the second amendment provides for a collective right for the states' to organize militias or an individual right to gun ownership. In the 2008 decision, District of Columbia v. Heller the Supreme Court broke with precedent on this issue and decided 5-4 that the second amendment provides for an individual right to gun ownership, striking down the DC handgun ban. Although most Americans tend to be fairly centrist on this issue and support some gun control, gun rights have served as a hot-button political topic or a so-called "wedge issue". Advocates on both sides tend to have had very personal and emotional experiences with guns and so our policies on this issue tend to be more extreme than public polling would suggest. What do you think about gun control? Should we have more restrictions on gun procurement and carrying in Arizona or fewer? Do you think concealed-carry on campus is a good idea? What concerns might you have with such a policy?

Another major hot-topic at the moment is the debate over the death penalty. The Troy Davis case has appeared to mobilize a substantial number of death penalty opponents and has called into question the equity of our judicial system. While Americans remain supportive of the use of the death penalty, in general, new understandings about the reliability of eye-witness testimony, police coercion, and circumstantial evidence has provoked questions about the use of the death penalty when evidence seems uncertain. Despite the fact that one of the leading GOP Presidential candidates seems to be unconcerned that evidence overwhelmingly suggests that an innocent man was put to death while he was governor, many Americans find the death of even one innocent person at the hands of the criminal justice system to be an unacceptable outcome. What do you think of the death penalty? Should we put a moratorium on its use until we are able to improve the equity of our judicial system? Should we abolish it all together? Are the Troy Davis and Cameron Todd Willingham cases isolated unfortunate instances or symptoms of a racist and/or classist criminal justice system?

Defense Policy

2011-10-11T15:31:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned on twitter, the substantive readings for the week combine a lot of policy issues that have been "hot topics" over the past few years. Although I like Peters' reasoning for combining defense policy and law enforcement into one chapter, I think it makes sense for me to talk about them separately. I know a little more about law enforcement and criminal justice policy than defense policy, but I think that I can pull together our readings from Stone and some of the current issues in defense policy to help you think about this policy arena.

I think that even the most libertarian-minded individuals would agree that the basis of the social contract is that government should provide for the people's defense. Civil defense is a classic example of a collective good, for which the market cannot provide. For all those except the most extreme pacifists, the idea that government should provide for the protection of its citizens is not under dispute. The questions of how and to what degree remain.

For the past two weeks, we have been reading about policy goals. From Stone, we have learned that they are often subjective and vaguely defined. Security, liberty, and efficiency are often discussed as rationales for our defense policies. Most Americans would agree that our military should protect us from current and future harms in the most efficient way possible, but does that mean that we should allow pre-emptive strikes and water-boarding to ensure our safety? What about assassinations? Should we grant citizens, non-citizens, guerilla forces, and opposing military forces the same protections or do certain groups deserve more protections than others? I think the chapters in Stone about policy goals can help us think about all of these issues.

I want to take a moment to address one issue in particular, in the context of Stone. Peters discusses the all-volunteer army and military procurement as two of the problems currently facing defense policy. We have decided that contracting out not only the creation of new weapons and strategies, but also the carrying out of on-the-ground security, as the most efficient way to fight our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Like the library analogy, however, we have to ask "efficient at what and for whom?" If our ultimate goal is to engage in many conflicts in a variety of so-called "theaters" then contracting out security, language, and logistics while enlisted men and women focus on combat may be the most efficient way to allocate responsibility. On the other hand, if you are concerned with a military that is more responsive to commands then contracting out services seems less efficient. If our ultimate goal is to avoid conflict whenever possible, requiring the military to carry-out all services on the ground would be the most efficient way to achieve that goal. (After all, it would require us to either reduce our conflicts to what a volunteer military can handle or institute a draft). If our goal in any individual conflict is to win at any cost, then we might consider contracting out even more services. If our goal is to win the hearts and minds of the people in the countries where our conflict takes place it may be more efficient for military personnel to be conducting fewer combat operations and more humanitarian missions and to contract out more of the security and combat duties. Some of these options may not be legal or ethical, but to say that contracting is efficient suggests an objective understanding of efficiency.

Of course, the contracting out of defense services also brings up real questions of equity. If soldiers in the military are the ones tasked with the most dangerous jobs, is it fair that military contractors far out-earn them? You may say yes if you are most concerned with process, assuming that everyone has the opportunity to either become a contractor or a soldier, because it is only the most experienced professional soldiers who will earn the higher paying contract jobs. On the other hand, you may consider that the military is more likely to recruit historically disenfranchised groups, while the contractors tend to recruit professionals. If this is how you think about the issue, then paying more to contractors is highly inequitable.

You could also think about the structural harms that contracting out may impose on the survival of our military. By incentivizing career military employees to transition to a higher paying contractor job, the reliance on contracted service may reduce the degree of expertise present in our military. Because contractors are not required to remain at their posts in dangerous circumstances, contracting out may reduce troop morale and community trust.

These are just some examples of how we can use Stone's perspective to understand one hot-topic under debate in the defense policy arena. I think the most important take-away here is that there is not one-single objective answer to the question of whether contracting out military services is equitable, efficient, or harm-inducing. Instead, we are arguing and debating our points based on our subjective understandings of each of these concepts.

Free to be You and Me - My Thoughts on Stone Ch. 5 - Liberty

2011-10-11T14:15:00.000-07:00

Liberty is probably the central American value. Freedom is an inherent aspect of the American Revolution and an important part of the American story. We are fairly certain that we know what we mean when we say liberty or freedom, but when we take such a grand ideal and operationalize it into policy action, it is just as complex as all of the other values. In the United States, we tend to focus on negative liberty or freedom from restraint. This is the idea behind our Bill of Rights. Government cannot restrict your ability to practice religion as you choose or to speak your mind. We could also take the lead of some European countries and define liberty as positive rights or rights to the prerequisites of freedom. A right to health care would be one such right, as would the right to a basic living wage. The right to a basic education and the right to emergency medical care are two such positive forms of liberty that we practice in America, but negative liberty is still dominant in the United States.

Stone asks two important questions about liberty on p. 109. "When, if ever should community or social purpose be allowed to trump individual choice? Under what circumstances should public policy ever limit individual privacy and autonomy?" Many political theorists would turn to the work of John Stuart Mill to answer these questions, as does Stone. Mill's On Liberty argues that society can only restrict an individual's liberty if it causes harm to others. This brings to mind the "fist-swinging" analogy. I can swing my fist around in the air as much as I want as long as you are not close enough that I would hit you.

This can be considered the standard of bodily harm. It sounds like a simple standard to uphold, but as you know by now, nothing is ever simple in the polis. There are bodily harms that affect some people more than others, for example air pollution affects asthmatics, young children, and the elderly more than the general population. There are bodily harms that accumulate over time, for example exposure to small doses of toxic chemicals may not be hazardous in the short-term but may cause cancer in the long-term. There are indirect bodily harms, for example a budget crisis could lead to a lay-off of air traffic controllers, which could cause the remaining controllers to be overworked, which could lead one to falling asleep on the job, which could lead to an accident. We then must also ask the question, which action should we take to prevent these harms. Do we keep asthmatic children inside for recess on bad air quality days, regulate air pollution, or both? Both of these solutions restrict someone's liberty. The problem of bodily harm is rarely ever the simple issue of one person intentionally causing an immediate harm to another.

Of course, if you think about our criminal justice policies, causing bodily harm is not the only standard of harm that we use as an excuse to restrict liberty. We are also not allowed to inflict material harms on others. We cannot take our neighbor's new big screen television, even if they are on vacation, it is not being used and there is no way we would inflict any bodily harm on them. This would not only be illegal but it violates the norms and values of society.

Stone discusses two types of material harm on page 112: harm that destroys property and harm that destroys the market value of property. The latter reminds me of proposition 2, which Phoenix residents rejected in the last local election. The brief summary of the proposition is that it would have allowed the re-zoning of a plot of land so that a gas station could be built on a vacant lot in East Phoenix. Neighborhood residents opposed the station because they argued that it would bring crime to the area. In other words, it would indirectly harm them. While it does seem like a bizarre issue to bring to referendum, it seems like a perfect issue to discuss in this context.

Residents of the neighborhood could also have argued that the gas station would have amenity effects. They could have said that the 24 hour gas station would make the neighborhood less pleasing because the lights will be on all of the time and it will bring late night traffic to the area. Certainly, a gas station is not aesthetically pleasing. It could have also been argued that a gas station is more aesthetically pleasing than a vacant lot. Of course as Stone points out, now that we are dealing with harms that are not physical we are engaging in argument, debate, and claims-making.

The most abstract harms are emotional, psychological, moral and spiritual harms. Many of these harms would not have been recognized 50 years ago. Should we restrict an individual's liberty because it causes stress to another individual or group of individuals? What if it violates the religious or spiritual beliefs of another individual? Should a pharmacist be able to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions because it's against his or her religious beliefs? Should a group Muslims be able to build an Arabic cultural center a few blocks from Ground Zero? Should Westboro Baptist Church be able to protest the funerals of soldiers killed in battle? Although emotional, psychological, religious, and spiritual harms are relatively new issues, they have certainly been hot policy topics over the past few years. Of course, if we granted protections based on these harms, we would likely be harming others; specifically women seeking birth control, the Muslim community, and the families and friends of military heroes. We must find the delicate balance here.

Of course, in the polis we also have harms and liberties related to community. Mill argued that there are some community duties that individuals can be compelled to perform. We often restrict the liberty of individuals for the good of the social order. Citizens have to pay taxes, serve on juries, and obey the laws. In America, all males 18 and older have to register for the draft. Structural harms are a community harm that affects the ability of a community to successfully function. Stone uses the example of school vouchers as a structural harm because it reduces integration and the visibility of the public education system. Another structural harm could be google books because it reduces the use of the library by relatively well-off citizens and makes the library less important as a community meeting place. Of course, in both of these cases, removing the structural harm would likely cause individual harms. Accumulative harms are actions that are not harmful in isolation but become harmful when everyone in a community does them. The individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act is based on this logic. If one healthy person does not buy insurance then it won't raise premiums by much, but if every healthy person does not buy insurance than premiums will sky-rocket and the health insurance industry will go broke. Finally, we can extend individual harms to examine their effects on the community. Remember, in the polis all actions have ripple effects. Here again, we must strike a delicate balance.

Stone firmly believes that we cannot restrict our understanding of harm and liberty to the individual. Corporate actors including businesses, churches, non-profits, and government agencies can harm people and be harmed. Further, because they generally have a much larger reach than an individual, the harms they cause can have a greater impact on the community as a whole.

Once again, Stone ends her chapter with a discussion of trade-offs. This time we have two: liberty and security, and liberty and equity. Starting with liberty and security, Stone presents the traditional or conservative understanding of the relationship between the two: security creates dependence, self-sufficiency is necessary for liberty, and government paternalism reduces freedom. She then presents her understanding: individuals cannot make free choices unless they have basic security, no one is ever truly self-sufficient, and policy can make determinations about who is competent to care for him or herself and who is not. The liberty and equality trade-off is presented similarly. The traditional or conservative understanding is that redistribution for the sake of equality reduces the liberty of the well-off, either you have complete liberty or none at all, and coercion by public policy reduces liberty. She believes that equalizing power, wealth and knowledge leads to positive liberty, liberty is measured in degrees, and society's control of some problems can expand human freedom. I am guessing that if you have not agreed with Stone's argument in the previous chapters, you will not agree this time. Either way, I hope you have taken the time to understand both arguments.

Efficient at what and for whom? - Stone Ch. 3

2011-10-11T13:55:00.000-07:00

Since the late 1970's and early 1980's making government more efficient has been a primary goal of policymakers and administrators. Efficiency has often been treated as a goal in itself leading to the privatization and marketization of government services to avoid the inefficient bureaucratic process. As Stone points out, however, efficiency is not really a goal, it's a process-based measure that strives to get the most output out of a given input. It says nothing about an ultimate outcome. There always has to be something you want to do efficiently, or more efficiently. Again here, Stone reminds us that efficiency is comparative. The only way we can judge whether or not a process is efficient is in comparison to another process.

Stone takes some time to problematize what we think of as efficiency. She uses the story of a library from Wildavsky and Pressman's Implementation. Wildavsky and Pressman believe they have a handle on what makes a library efficient, but Stone argues that this is too simplistic. It may not just be a count of books that is important but the quality of books. It may not be the variety of books that's important as much as having a sufficient number of the most in demand books. It may in fact not be the books at all that are most important, but the services being provided by the librarians. The problem is that Pressman and Wildavsky do not really explore how they would define the ultimate goal of the library. Is it to educate residents, provide residents with entertainment, help schoolchildren learn, increase literacy, help residents with job search and skills, or all of the above? Pressman and Wildavsky define the goal of a library solely in terms of an output, the number of books they provide to the community. This comes close to using efficiency as a goal in and of itself.

When we talk about efficiency as an ideal in the United States, we are usually defining it in market-based terms. From pp. 66-71 Stone gives us a lesson in critical economics. Although we tend to elevate economics as the best of the social sciences in America, we must remember that economics makes a lot of assumptions about human behavior that are not always true. Stone believes that these assumptions generally fail when it comes to public policy and we should be relying on the model of the polis more often. Things in the polis are not as simple as they are in the market. She repeats a lot of the contrasts between the two models that she discusses in chapter one. Ultimately, she arrives at the conclusion that markets can only be considered the ultimate form of efficiency if you define efficiency objectively. As she showed us with the library example, efficiency is often subjective.

The reason I assigned chapters 2 and 4 or chapters 3 and 5 and not just any two of the four chapters is that Stone discusses trade-offs between these goals at the end of each chapter. In America, we tend to believe that equality and efficiency are trade-offs. In debates about jobs, the economy, social welfare, education, and even healthcare; we hear the argument that increasing equality will make our economy less efficient. Again, we are relying on the straightforward assumptions of neo-classical economic theory here. If we assume that individuals are motivated solely by basic needs and individual well-being then this trade-off makes sense. If we instead believe that basic security, self-esteem, and community well-being are necessary for productivity then there may not be such a straight-forward trade-off.

What do you think? Can you think of an example where efficiency is subjective? Do you think efficiency and equity are trade-offs or does some degree of equity improve efficiency?

The American Welfare State

2011-10-04T15:58:00.000-07:00

Our substantive topic for the week is what I refer to as social welfare policy and what Peters refers to as income maintenance policy. What's the difference? I would say that social policy is broadly a set of policies that regulate social relationships between citizens. This category of policy includes social welfare policies as well as social policies dealing with issues of gender and sexuality like abortion and gay marriage. Social welfare policies deal with regulating relationships of economic inequality and tend to be redistributive policies. Income maintenance policies are, in my view, the sub-set of social welfare policies that subsidize income. I would argue, for example, that Medicaid is a social welfare policy but would not consider it an income maintenance policy because it is an in-kind benefit. The combination of these redistributive social policies make-up the institution we call the welfare state or welfare system. Of course, you'll see that in Peters' discussion of welfare he does not draw a clear line between income maintenance and in-kind benefits. He discusses policies that could be considered health care and education policies in this chapter.

For simplicity's sake, I am going to focus on two types of "income maintenance" programs, Social Security and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) which is the program we usually refer to when we talk about welfare. Both Social Security and TANF have a similar goal, they attempt to redistribute income from taxpayers to individuals or families who are in need of income support. Of course, this is how we think of welfare and not at all how we think of Social Security. The major difference is the structure of the two programs. Social Security is structured as a social insurance program, while TANF is structured as a means-tested program. The welfare systems of some countries like the Scandinavian countries only include social insurance programs. In the United States, we have a mixed welfare state made up of means-tested programs like TANF, food-stamps, and Medicaid, social insurance programs like Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, and Medicare, and corporate and non-profit provided benefits like health insurance, shelters, and soup kitchens.

Social insurance programs like Social Security use the logic of insurance pools that we discussed when we talked about healthcare reform. The idea is that we have uncertainty about how long we will live, if we may become disabled, or if we may lose our jobs. Because we cannot accurately predict these things, and all of us are at risk, we join together into an insurance pool where the workers provide for the disabled, retired, and unemployed with the understanding that we will be provided for when we find ourselves in such a state. By design, social insurance programs have no income eligibility criteria. This ensures that everyone has a stake in the continuation of the program because everyone feels as though they benefit. Of course, we have this idea that we pay for our own Social Security when we are working and get it back when we retire, but this is not actually how the system works.

The genius of social insurance programs is that they build civic trust and a sense of community, and there are strong incentives to continue the program. The first generation who was eligible for Social Security received the best deal because they paid very little into the system and received benefits, but the last generation to pay fully into the system without receiving benefits will be the ultimate losers. Many people in their 20's and early 30's believe that Social Security will not be around for them. This is somewhat disturbing because it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The small, technical changes Peters discusses in the chapter can make Social Security solvent, but convincing the young that they will not receive Social Security is one way to eliminate the program without a lot of political risk. Politicians usually make changes to Social Security and Medicare that take effect many years in the future because of the perception that young people do not vote and when they do, they are not paying attention to programs that they will not receive for years to come.

We think about means-tested programs very differently. To qualify for a means-tested programs you have to be low-income and have few assets. Although in theory social mobility means that one has an equal chance of moving downward in class as upward in class, Americans do not believe that being in poverty is something we are all at risk of. We tend to believe that people who qualify for these programs are poor because they have made bad decisions. Means-tested programs tend to be stigmatizing and degrading, and easy political targets. Although we had a welfare rights movement in the 1960's, individuals who qualify for means-tested programs tend to be difficult to mobilize because of the stigma of receipt and the lack of political power held by recipients. On the other hand, means-tested programs at least attempt to target benefits to those most in-need.

The story of welfare is a little more complicated than the story of Social Security. No major changes (aside from expansions to new groups) have been made to Social Security since its creation during the New Deal. In contrast, welfare has been radically changed. Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the pre-cursor to TANF, was created at the same time as Social Security. It was created to support widows with children in a time where women were expected to be homemakers and caretakers rather than labor market participants. The program was an entitlement so anyone who qualified had a legal right to receive benefits. This meant that as family structure changed and there were more single-parent households the program became more expensive. As the recipients of those households were portrayed increasingly as lazy, African-American lifetime recipients (which bore little relationship to the reality of program recipients) the program became increasingly unpopular.

In 1996, Bill Clinton's administration "Reformed welfare as we know it" through the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). The reforms repealed AFDC and replaced it with TANF. TANF can be considered a "workfare" program where the emphasis is on labor market participation. It also decoupled the receipt of benefits like food-stamps and Medicaid from receipt of TANF (previously, all of these programs had been packaged together). Under TANF, families can only receive benefits for up to two years at any one time and five years over a lifetime. To receive benefits recipients have to either get a job or engage in activities that prepare them for work. Immigrants were basically ruled ineligible to receive either TANF or food stamps. Child support enforcement was an important part of the reform, forcing women receiving TANF to identify and provide information about the fathers of their children to the state. There were also substantial provisions providing funding for marriage promotion among recipients. Finally, TANF provided states with a lot more discretion in program administration than they had under AFDC. States differ significantly in terms of the inclusion and adequacy of their TANF programs.

When PRWORA was passed, opponents of reforms predicted dire consequences. They argued that children would be dying on the streets and poverty and crime would be at all time highs. They also predicted that states would engage in a "race to the bottom" with all states providing the bare minimum to avoid attracting undesirable residents. In reality none of this came to pass. This has been attributed to a few different factors. 1) PRWORA was passed during the late 1990s when the economy was doing well and there was high demand for low-wage, unskilled labor in most states. 2) Bill Clinton also passed a substantial increase to the Earned Income Tax Credit which significantly subsidizes the wages of low-wage families. 3) "Liberal" states provide generous benefits for cultural and social reasons, not just purely self-interested economic reasons. I think we are starting to see some of the problems with TANF in a poor economy. Despite the increase in need due to high, long-term, unemployment associated with the 2008 recession, TANF use has changed very little. This shows that the program has for some reason become unresponsive to family needs. If you want to read more on TANF during the recession, here is a good policy brief on the topic.

Social Security and TANF represent two sides of the coin for addressing poverty. Thanks to Medicare and Social Security, elderly poverty (by official measures) has all but disappeared in the United States. In contrast, child poverty continues to increase. Should we create a social insurance program like a family allowance to address poverty? Should our poverty alleviation policies change in response to the business-cycle? What's the best way to ensure that Social Security persists as an effective social insurance policy targeted at the elderly? Are you convinced that Social Security will not be around when you retire?

Needs and Security - Stone Ch. 4

2011-10-04T15:15:00.000-07:00

Normally when you hear the word security, what do you think of? I know my first thought is homeland security or a security guard. Generally it connotes bodily safety, but in this chapter Stone uses a broader definition of security. This is the same type of security that we use when we discuss Social Security or the goal of financial security. Basically, it's the idea that different dimensions of need are met.

Stone tries to challenge us on our decisions about the degree to which government should meet the basic needs of its citizens. There are some policy analysts and policymakers who think that government is responsible for providing only defense and some who think government should be assisting individuals in their goals of self-esteem and self-actualization. Most people fall somewhere in the middle. This chapter should remind you of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Unlike Maslow, however, Stone does not discuss the dimensions of need as a hierarchy where needs are met in succession, but as a group of needs that everyone must fulfill. Surely, Stone would not argue that one cannot survive without basic food, shelter, and water, but I think she would also argue that companionship, respect, and self-esteem are crucial to long-term human survival.

Taking needs one step beyond the extreme libertarian ideal that government should only provide for the basic defense, most Americans believe that we do not want people starving and dying on the streets. They would agree that either through direct services or support of non-profit efforts government should make sure that people have basic food and shelter. This seems simple, but defining what we mean in this case is difficult. Is it acceptable to provide citizens with the cheapest basic nutrition they need to function or do we want to make sure that they can be productive? Should we only provide them with one type of food, day in and day out or should we make sure that they can have a balanced diet? Should we allow enough so they can participate in cultural traditions like turkey dinner on Thanksgiving and BBQs at fourth of July? What about those people with dietary or religious restrictions on what they can and cannot eat? We have the same problems when we think about basic shelter. Is a shack okay because many poor individuals around the world live in shacks or do we need to provide our citizens with running water and safe, stable, indoor housing?

Much of our political disagreement about these basic needs has to do with a divide over whether absolute needs are the most important dimension of need or whether relative needs matter too. Some policy analysts who believe that only absolute need matters argue that poverty does not exist in America because the poorest in America are better off than most residents of developing countries. They also point out that America's poorest citizens are far better off than many of the wealthy were 100 years ago. In contrast, scholars who focus on relative needs find it unacceptable that in a country of such wealth, children still grow up hungry living in rat infested housing. Of course, for the first time since the turn of the 20th century in America the youngest generation of adults is not predicted to do better than their parents. It will be interesting to see how the debate between relative and absolute need is framed in the future.

Most of our social policies address the issue of relative need. The same can be said for defense policy. It does not matter how powerful our weapons are in comparison to the past or in absolute terms. What matters is how powerful our weapons are relative to other nation-states. It's interesting to think about education needs in these terms. The number of comparisons we make between our education system and that of Japan or the European Union illustrates that once again we define relative needs as most important.

Increasingly, we have decided that government needs to go beyond providing for current needs and actually attempt to prevent our future needs. Many of the safety regulations government has in place are there to prevent our future needs. For example, food regulations are meant to prevent our future need for medical care due to ingesting rotten food. When we talk about communities or individuals "at-risk", we are engaging in a discussion about the degree to which they need to be protected so that they will not need services X,Y, or Z in the future.

Of course, returning to Maslow's pyramid, humans also have relational needs. We are social beings. Dignity, respect, self-esteem, and belonging are important to us. Many government programs have been criticized because while they may meet all the other needs, they reduce the relational security of participants. The idea that we should have policies that empower citizens and build community has been around since the 1960s, but we have struggled to create programs that do this in any meaningful way.

One of the paradoxes of public policy (and of human behavior in general) is that needs can never be completely fulfilled. Once one need is met, new needs are created. Interestingly, this is one point on which Marxists, Liberals, and Conservatives all agree, though of course they differ in their explanation of the causes. Because we cannot define an objective level of need that must be met, we engage primarily in argument, debate, and as Stone puts it, "Claims-making" (p. 98). On pages 98-104 Stone walks us through how this "claims-making" plays out in different stages of the policy process.

Stone ends her chapter with a question about trade-offs, this time between security and efficiency. If you believe there is a trade-off you would argue three points: 1) humans are motivated by basic needs and making them secure removes their motivation to be productive, 2) providing security relies on the service sector which is the least efficient sector of the economy, and 3) technological changes necessarily make some people worse off. Instead, Stone would argue that 1) basic needs are not what motivates us and providing security makes us more productive, 2) the service sector is deemed inefficient only because of the way we have defined efficiency, and 3) macroeconomic policies can and should mitigate any suffering due to advancements in technology that create economic change (p. 107). Here's a nice little video from RSAnimate about human motivation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc.

I leave it to you to decide if you are convinced by Stone's argument. Are humans driven by basic needs, or do we need to know those basic needs are satisfied before we can be productive? Does relative poverty matter or should we only be concerned about absolute poverty? Do we need to concern ourselves with the symbolic, goal actualization, and community needs of the poor? What should government's role be in all of this?

Equity and Cake - Stone Ch. 2

2011-10-04T14:28:00.000-07:00

As someone who studies redistributive public policy, this is probably my favorite chapter in Stone's book. The cake analogy Stone presents on pp. 39-41 is an ingenious way to present different and often competing visions of equity. Depending on one's perspective, each of these forms of equity could in turn be argued as completely inequitable. Stone discusses eight ways that we can define equity:

Membership-based Forms of Equity

1) Equal slices but unequal invitations - In the book, Stone gives equal size slices to all of her students, but what about those students who missed class that day? What about the students who tried to enroll in the class but could not get off the wait-list? What about the students who had to work full-time and couldn't fit her class into their schedule? They all missed out on cake. In the realm of public policy, social insurance programs like Medicare, which are available to all citizens and some documented immigrants but not non-residents and certain immigrants, fall under this category. It is likely that most Americans think that Medicare is fairly distributed, but the elderly legal resident who has worked in the US for nine years (just one year short of qualifying for Medicare) who finds herself hospitalized would likely find the system unfair and arbitrary.

2) Unequal slices for unequal ranks but equal slices for equal ranks - In Stone's example, she gives big slices with extra frosting to full professors, assistant professors get slivers, and undergraduates get crumbs. This is a basic rank- or merit-based system of equity. You can think of either military or union pay-scales as examples of this type of equity. The career civil-servant likely thinks that the rank-based system is fair, while the new employee who feels she has contributed great ideas to the organization would likely disagree. Some would argue that market-based pay-scales fall under this category, but others argue that arbitrary factors and discrimination are more important in market-based pay structures than merit.

3) Unequal slices but equal blocs - In the chapter, Stone uses a somewhat silly example, in which, male students claim that women have traditionally had greater access to chocolate cake so men as a group should have an equal share of the cake. While this is a somewhat silly example for chocolate cake, it is often the argument made for quota based affirmative action. Although quota systems for college admission have been ruled unconstitutional, we can think of quota systems as a form of group-based equity. Americans tend to be very uncomfortable with this form of equity.

Item-based forms of Equity

4) Unequal slices but equal meals - In Stone's example, the distribution of the cake is tied to a previous luncheon event where not everyone was given equal amounts of food. Some of the students got extra shrimp cocktail and better cuts of roast beef. In the policy realm, this form of equity goes beyond the current good being provided and looks at the full experience of individuals. An example of this form of equity in the policy arena is the GI Bill. It ties in-kind and financial rewards to past military service. Although Stone argues that this viewpoint is characteristic of redistributive policy, we rarely think of these policies as reparations for unequal circumstances, in our current political context (The first edition of this book was written in 1988). Instead, the culture of poverty thesis has seemingly won out as the dominant explanation for poverty in the United States. We'll discuss these different perspectives in-depth when we talk about income maintenance policies.

5) Unequal slices but equal value to recipients - In the cake analogy, Stone cuts her cake so that those who don't like chocolate cake or who are allergic to cake get small or no pieces and those who love chocolate cake get bigger pieces. This definition of equity is tailored to meet the individual needs of recipients. Assuming funding large enough to sufficiently cover individual needs, market-based programs like school vouchers could fall under this definition of equity. Programs serving individuals with disabilities like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and Vocational Rehabilitation must be tailored to the needs of the individual and they could fall under this definition, as well. This form of equity is characteristic of a welfare economics perspective. Those who love cake will be willing to trade more potato chips for cake and those who hate cake will be very willing to trade their cake for potato chips. If they get together these two groups will trade their cake for potato chips making everyone better off.

Process-based forms of Equity

6) Unequal slices but equal starting resources - In Stone's analogy, everyone gets a fork and they have at it. This is the definition of equity that Americans tend to be most comfortable with. It is a process based form of equity that allows for unequal outcomes. The logic behind the Harlem Children's Zone is to ensure that the children of Harlem have the same resources as children from wealthier neighborhoods from birth to age 18. If inequality persists despite the provision of equal resources, we attribute that to personal preference.

7) Unequal slices but equal statistical chances - In Stone's analogy, she only had enough batter to make a cupcake so she puts everyone's name in a hat and gives the cupcake to the winner. This is the classic lottery system. In the policy arena, charter schools in low-income areas are mandated to use lotteries rather than merit based admissions to receive public funding. Every child who applies has an equal statistical chance of admittance to the school.

8) Unequal slices but equal votes - In Stone's analogy, she yet again has only a cupcake and the students vote to determine who among them will be the Cupcake Eater. This is the logic of democracy. In the policy realm, each of us who are citizens get an equal vote in referendums, ballot initiatives, and elections. We may not end up with the outcomes we prefer, but because the process is seen as fair, we accept the outcome as equitable.

It is important to note that all of these forms of equity can lead to very unequal outcomes, and that one person's equity is another's unfairness. Even the first example, which is the closest to equality leaves people who are not members without. We should also note that each form of equity has three elements: the item being distributed, the process of distribution, and the recipients of the item. Each of these different definitions focuses on one of these elements.

I think that we sometimes forget that equity is an important goal and value in American society. A certain vision of equity underlies the foundation of our society, as the Declaration of Independence states "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." Of course, we can look back at the world of the founding fathers and see that these differing definitions of equity came into play back then, as well. Most notably, membership in the group of recipients was restricted to white, land-owning males. As we gear up for the 2012 elections, I believe that you will hear a lot of competing understandings of equity. I think it will be useful to think about which form of equity you believe is most appropriate for a particular context, and how different items, different definitions of recipients, and different processes lead to different forms of equity. We've heard a lot about tax reform so far in this primary cycle. Can you think of examples of how differing forms of equity lead to different recommendations for a fair tax system?

Do We Live in the Market or the Polis?

2011-09-27T11:23:00.000-07:00

This week we switch gears to Deborah Stone's perspective on policymaking. Deborah Stone is a post-modern and interpretive policy scholar. This can be a difficult perspective for some people to grasp. It assumes that policy is really about story-telling, ideas, and argument. Policy analysts, policymakers, and citizens are not as concerned with trying to create efficient policies, but are instead using metaphors to try and make issues seem like one thing rather than another thing. The choice of these metaphors is strategic and meant to reinforce the worldview of the analyst, citizen, or policymaker.

Let's step back for a minute. What is Stone's book arguing against? She is arguing against the predominant view of policy choice as rational choice. The rational model stems from the market-based model of society. We have talked a little about this previously. In the rational model, the decision-maker goes through logical steps to make her decision. First she identifies the objectives or goals she wants to achieve, then she identifies alternative courses of action and the possible consequences of all the alternatives. She evaluates these possible consequences and selects the best alternatives. This should sound like the decision analysis process that Peters presented in chapter 4 (p. 89). Stone argues that this process is "missing the point" because politics is everything. Even in the rational model, decisions are ultimately political with the steps serving as rationalizations for the preferred choice.

In chapter one, Stone emphasizes the difference between the market model of society and the political model of society, which she calls the polis. Polis is the Greek word for city-state and she will use this term throughout the book to describe the model that she believes is closest to how the policy process really works.

We have talked a little bit about market failure in this class (see the notes on health insurance). Market failure occurs when individuals cannot use the rational decision-making process or when using the rational decision-making process does not lead to optimal societal outcomes. Some forms of market failure are commons problems, imperfect information, and externalities. These situations are seen as rare problems in the market model. In the polis, these are facts of life. This is because community is the major unit of analysis in the polis, not the individual. Everything we do has effects on the community and individuals think about both their self-interest and their community (or more appropriately communities) in their decision-making process. Tying the community interest to the self-interest of community members is the major policy issue in the polis. Information is never perfect in the polis by design. It is strategically manipulated and withheld by everyone. (Think about the last time you applied for a job, asked your professor for an extension, experienced a conflict with a loved one. My guess is that you strategically withheld certain information in these cases, as did the other party. It is socially expected to do so.)

There are two other major differences between the market and the polis. In the market, all resources are scarce and competition is the means of success. In the polis, many resources like social connections and advocacy skills grow with use. Stone calls this the law of passion. Stone published the first edition of her book in 1988, and we have since seen the introduction of these types of "anti-rivalrous" goods into market models. Open source software is the common example in the market because as more people use it, it becomes better and expands. The market also assumes that all individuals have equal power in transactions. In the polis, power is derived from all of the other components. Stone explains this much better than I can on page 32, "I save power for last because it is derived by all the other elements. Power cannot be defined without reference to them. It is a phenomenon of communities. Its purpose is always to subordinate individual self-interest to other interests - sometimes to other individual or group interests, sometimes to the public interest. It operates through influences, cooperation, and loyalty. It is based also on the strategic control of information. And finally, it is a resource that obeys the laws of passion rather than the laws of matter."

In summary:

The characteristics of the market model of society are:

Individuals are rationally self-interested utility maximizers. They make exchanges when trade is mutually beneficial Trading is not a necessity but a net benefit\ Competition for scarce resources They try to minimize costs and maximize benefits Competition leads to better outcomes for society.

The characteristics of the polis model of society are (from Stone p. 32):

Community is the major unit of composition with ideas, wills, goals etc. outside of the individual. There is a public interest beyond individual interests. Most policy problems are commons problems. Influence sometimes verging on coercion, cooperation, and loyalty are the major forms of interaction. Groups and organizations are the building blocks of the community. Information is never perfect. Some resources are scarce and rivalrous, but many are anti-rivalrous and abundant.

Stone believes that the polis model more closely represents the way we make and understand public policy.

It is important to keep these two models of society in mind as we continue with Stone. She uses a lot of examples from social policy - most notably, welfare and affirmative action - because of her background and interests as a scholar, but also because we can see the differences between these two models very clearly in the social policy arena. That does not mean that we cannot apply Stone to other substantive policy areas, and we will do just that as the course progresses.

So far, what do you think? Is this all just "touchy-feely" stuff or is Stone onto something? Do you think we are living in the market, the polis, or do you see evidence of both? Can you think of areas of policymaking where we rely on the polis model rather than the market model? Have you heard any politicians or scholars (aside from Stone) reference ideas from the polis model?

My Thoughts on Education Policy

2011-09-20T12:24:00.000-07:00

What do you expect from a good education system? What is the purpose and function of our public school system? At the turn of the 21st century, most of us expect an education system that serves two basic functions: we expect that it will provide American workers with the skills to compete in a global economy and that it will serve an equalizing function to ensure opportunity for success for all individuals. This has not always been the purpose of education in America. Historically, education was considered a privilege for elite white male members of society, only. Education has also served as a force of assimilation in order to transform immigrants and Native Americans into proper Americans. (If any of you have not yet visited the Heard Museum and seen the exhibit on Remembering Our Indian School Days, I highly recommend it). With so many different understandings and visions of what an education system can and should be, it is no wonder that we are constantly attempting to reform our education policies.

From early childhood to graduate education, a lot of attention has been paid to our education system over the last few years. The general consensus has been that our education system is no longer serving us as well as it once did. No one today would argue that America's elementary and secondary education system is the best in the world (Although, I think such an argument can easily be made about our post-secondary education system). Test scores show that Americans rank about average relative to other developed nations, and there is a general belief that we are faring especially poorly in terms of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

The policy solutions we have developed to address these problems are market innovations and accountability through testing. The theory is that by introducing competition into the education system and creating a system of visible accountability, schools will be forced to improve services to their students or lose them. Both George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind and Barack Obama's Race to the Top emphasize standards and assessments as ways of improving education. Certainly, measuring a problem is one way to emphasize it and place it on the policy agenda, but is this the only way?

One of the reasons that I assigned education policy as the substantive chapter along with Peters' chapter on evaluation is that we can see the debate about education policy evaluation and change happening before our eyes. What are the goals of our education system? How do we measure those goals? If test scores are valid forms of measurement and many public schools are failing, how should we change our policies? Do we tweak our current policies or come up with something new? Is school choice effective? Are smaller class-sizes effective? Should we give low and middle class parents the freedom to move their children our of a "failing school" if it means that it will leave those students who cannot take advantage of a voucher, and the public school as an institution worse off? How much can we really expect from the public education system?

Most policymakers seem to accept the idea that our current policies on K-12 education need to be changed in some way. We are currently trying to figure out what changes we want to make, and innovation is really the buzzword for education. Usually, this comes in the form of new charter schools that enter the education market. Some of these innovations, like the KIPP schools and Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone have been incredibly successful at addressing educational inequality. But there have also been downsides to the charter movement. 37 percent of charters actually perform worse than public schools on standardized tests (Of course, I am not completely convinced as to the validity of standardized tests). Some, like the for-profit colleges presented in College, Inc. have been created primarily for the benefit of their CEOs who make six-figures for managing small schools. There are a substantial number of innovations occurring within public schools, as well. Groups like Communities in Schools work to build support networks to help public school students succeed. Mentoring and support programs help attract and keep experienced teachers in the classroom. Federal loan forgiveness programs help attract and keep qualified teachers in low-income public schools.

Of course, in any discussion of education policy we have to keep in mind the factors that influence kids' lives outside of school. In the Planet Money podcast Eric Hanushek illustrates how important good teachers are to a child's education. As important as they are, what happens outside the classroom is even more important. Test scores tend to be better measures of socioeconomic factors than anything else. Low-income children generally start kindergarten and early education with a deficit in their exposure to vocabulary and reading skills. Parent participation, housing stability, neighborhood safety, and poverty all affect how well a child does in school. This is why I believe that Harlem Children's Zone is one of the best education initiatives we have. They have decided to do more than just educate their children, they have programming from birth to college that includes social services, community building, health care, and whole family interventions. They've decided to do "Whatever it Takes" to never let the children in their community fall behind. I think the big question is, would we ever have the commitment to implement something like this at a national level and would it be as successful in a different neighborhood?

There is a lot more that we can say about education in the United States, but since we are about to start reading Deborah Stone's critique of public policy, I want to leave this on a radical note. I have two resources to share with you. The first is an article about Finland, which has one of, if not the best education system in the world right now and has implemented education reforms that are the polar opposite of the U.S. education system. The second is a video from RSAnimate about rethinking the goals of education.

Do Our Policies "Work"? How Can or Should We Change Them? - My Thoughts on Evaluation and Change

2011-09-20T11:57:00.000-07:00

Finally, we have reached the last stage of the policy process: evaluation. Once a policy has been passed and implemented, we generally want to know if the policy is successful (This is probably what you were interested in learning when you took this class). We have to develop measures to determine whether or not the policy is meeting its goals, if it was the best way to address a problem, and if we need to change our policy in some way. Evaluation and policy change are intimately tied. After all, it is hard to justify continuing to pay for an ineffective policy.

Like everything else in the policy process, program evaluation is harder than it seems. Generally, evaluations of public programs show that the program has no effect on targets. This may be because the program is ineffective, but it may also be due to the difficulties of measuring program success. Hopefully those of you who have taken a research methods class in the social sciences recognized some of these problems.

Peters starts with goals. He's discussed the goals of policy as problematic throughout the policy process. If you remember, in chapter four we learned that there are incentives to make goals vague and even contradictory in order to get bills passed by the legislature. When this happens, organizations who implement programs and analysts attempting to evaluate them do not know which goals are most important. Establishing success is impossible when successfully meeting one of the goals means failing to meet the others.

We also learn about the challenges of measurement. What time span should we use to show success or failure? Are participants reacting to our study? Would these participants have done just as well without the program? Which program is really affecting recipients of multiple programs? Are there unintended consequences of this program? How valid are the measures we have established? These are all questions that a good evaluation should ask, but some are nearly impossible to answer. They all affect the determination of whether or not a program is effective. Often, if we change a measure, the time span, or the method of participant selection we see completely different results. Next time you hear that policy X is a huge success or failure, I want you to remain skeptical and think about how the evaluators of the policy made that determination.

On a related note, we must always remember that political factors and values are affecting evaluation. Most pilot programs require some work in order to participate so they tend to attract the "best" of the eligible group. Often this may not be the group we actually wish to target. Organizations, policy analysts, and policymakers have self-interested reasons for wanting their programs to do well, and while they often do not intentionally bias their results, they may be gearing their studies to show programs in a positive light (of course, the converse is also true). Political partisans may be the most likely to seek biased results for political gain and will manipulate the evaluation process.

Government has become increasingly concerned with program evaluation since the 1990s. Evaluations using quantitative data with easy to cite statistics are considered particularly valid. Presidents have made various attempts at creating cross-program measures of efficiency and effectiveness to determine which programs to change and which to expand. One has to think about what types of programs will most likely show consistent results and which present more challenges. It is much easier for NASA to collect data and quantify the results of its activities than the public health department, for example. NASA will be much more likely to show outcomes (the effects of their research), while the health department will have to rely on illustrating inputs (funds) and outputs (the services they deliver).

Policy change can be thought of as the beginning of the policy stages cycle all over again. Based on evaluations, policymakers have to decide whether to maintain, terminate, or change policies. When government takes the time to evaluate and re-consider policies, they are rarely terminated or left in their exact same state. That being said, policy maintenance has become increasingly likely as Congress has struggled to pass meaningful legislation that seriously debates and considers policy. Even when programs have sunset provisions, they often are maintained because of a lack of political will to either end or change the program. For example, I worked for an organization in DC that was founded in 2000 to influence the reauthorization of the Workforce Investment Act, which was supposed to take place in 2003. Although there were many proposals over the years for WIA reauthorization, the program has been maintained without any changes for eight years beyond its reauthorization date. This happens to programs all of the time.

As Peters states, programs are rarely terminated. It is difficult for government to terminate a program once advocates, agencies, clients, and businesses benefit from their existence.

Policy change is generally the ideal option for policies, and tends to be the most likely outcome. We want policies to be changed as context and evaluation dictates. Sometimes changes are for the good and make the program better, but often change has just as many downsides. Peters discusses four types of change: linear succession, consolidation, splitting, and nonlinear succession. He gives examples of each. The consolidation of programs into the Department of Homeland Security is a good example of the pros and cons of policy change. It does seem as though consolidation has helped organizations and agencies in the sharing of information and anti-terrorism actions. On the other hand, FEMA has become a much less effective agency. Now that it is no longer independent, it is fighting for agency resources to deal with relatively common natural disasters in a department that is concerned primarily with terrorist threats. There is little reason to believe that advocating for FEMA is at the top of the Secretary of Homeland Security's priority list when it is often dealing with issues removed from the rest of DHS's mission. This is one of the consequences of the reactivity of policymaking in the United States. We often change policies in reaction to a visible, large-scale event that is judged to be a policy failure. In doing so, we may be setting the stage for the next policy failure in another area. Although there are many explanations of causation for the 2005 Katrina disaster, FEMAs consolidation into DHS certainly can be considered a contributing factor.

Transit in the news

2011-09-15T22:35:00.001-07:00

Hey folks,

Didn't get it into the last post, but I thought it would be interesting for you to see what's been happening with public transit in the news lately. Below are links to some news stories that point out how implementation in theory doesn't always work quite the same way in practice.

"Phoenix Transit Union Says Bus Strike Now 'Very Probable'"
The Phoenix Public Transit Department contracts with private companies to provide transit service. In part, this means that bus operators and other transit employees have the ability to strike.

"Phoenix Homeless Transit Passes at Issue"
The Valley Metro regional agency provides transit passes for nonprofit organizations that serve the homeless, at a 50 percent discount. These passes are intended to help individuals pursue work, attend medical appointments, and meet other needs that can improve their situation. The current program is being taken back over by the City of Phoenix to provide additional oversight.

"Judge Slams Arizona For Raiding Transit Fund"
An example of how the implementation of any service that involves multiple levels of government can be complicated; here, a lawsuit has forced the State of Arizona to basically refund money swept from a transportation fund to balance the previous year's budget.

Feel free to let me know your thoughts on these stories!

Transit in the City

2011-09-15T22:05:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone! As we move through this week's readings, and the required documentary on transportation, it seems that news events are conspiring to provide us a great deal of real world challenges to implementing and running a transit system.

As you watch this week's documentary, Blueprint America: The Next American System - The Road to the Future, I think it's an excellent exercise to consider where our community is on the continuum of municipalities that are described. Most people would say that we're very far removed from places like New York and Portland (both in distance and landscape, but also in our views on public transportation). Both cities have extensive infrastructure for public transportation, and have made a concerted effort to invest in their transit systems.

But how do we compare to a city like Denver, that isn't such a distant neighbor? Consider issues addressed of land use, urban sprawl, and the sort of "car-focused" policy development that cities adopted in the 1950s. Phoenix, in particular, went from having an actual trolley system between 1887 and 1948 to jumping completely on the automobile band wagon, promoting buses and individual car use through an expansion of street infrastructure. To get an idea of what Phoenix was like in those early days, check out the Phoenix Trolley Museum, which carries you through the early days of Phoenix transit to the latest success with light rail.

What is similar in each case, both for those cities covered in the documentary and the cities in the Valley, including Phoenix, are the vital role that municipalities play in providing public transportation. In fact, the majority of what we understand as the Valley Metro transit system did not exist l several municipalities went through the process of presenting their voters with sales tax proposals to fund public transit. In Phoenix, that proposal was Transit 2000, a 4/10ths of a cent sales tax intended to provide expanded local bus service; improved Dial-a-Ride service for people with disabilities; and a new kind of commuter service called RAPID, which used a streamlined system of highway-centered routes and park-and-rides to provide service. Of course now Phoenix, like many other cities, is facing the challenge of implementing transit service in a austere financial environment. Service cuts and efficiencies have been necessary as sales tax revenues continue to decline, and just what the Phoenix transit system will look like in the future is hard to say.

What you can be sure about is that transit service will continue to play an important role in the city's development, and the support of its residents.

Transportation, a service and an ideal - Guest Post from Matt Heil

2011-09-13T13:16:00.001-07:00

Hello everyone! This week I'll be providing “guest lectures” on our topics for this week, implementation and transportation. Why me, you may ask? In my other life outside of graduate school, I work full time for the City of Phoenix Public Transit Department, in the public information office. So I see every day how implementation plays a role in successful government service provision, and how the unexpected can challenge our understanding of the best way to approach a problem. The article we read from the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, and the research brief from Congressional Quarterly both drive home the point that implementation is a process, and that its success lies as much in the interpersonal savvy of administrators as it does any kind of technical expertise. These subjects are an excellent pairing, in my opinion, because most transportation systems in the United States, (I won't say absolutely all, but I suspect nearly so) combine many aspects of implementation that are essential for public administrators to familiarize themselves with, if they are going to be successful working in the community.

First and foremost, transportation of any kind—from roads and highways to buses, light rail and alternative transportation for people with disabilities—is a significant investment. Expenses come in many shapes and sizes. From my own experience, compare light rail and local bus. The first light rail line in the Valley cost approximately $1.4 billion to build, exclusive of operating costs. A local bus can cost anywhere from $300,000 to $500,000 to fabricate and “build out” with all the components to be fully functional on the street. And typically, to run a bus one city block, over and over again for a year, could cost as much as $100,000. How do you compare these numbers and make a decision on what's best to provide passengers and the surrounding community? If we were simply making choices based on cost, then, bus would be the far and away best choice. But other considerations, including future investment by business and government, and intangibles like civic pride and a city's reputation, all play into these choices.

As the article by Peter and Linda deLeon shows, implementation usually requires more than sound financial reasoning. To get transportation in almost any community, there must be buy in from the community and elected officials. That comes, primarily, from good public involvement processes, and a clear sense of the goals of transit projects. Again, from my own experience, the Phoenix Public Transit Department operates on a $275 million annual budget. The majority of this funding comes from a local , 4/10ths of a cent transportation tax enacted by Phoenix voters in 2000 called rather intuitively Transit 2000. Just to get that tax passed, a lengthy process of community involvement was conducted. Voters were polled on their concerns and hopes for public transit in the region. A multi-modal transit plan was developed, and projects were programmed throughout the 20-year life of the tax. It was this plan, in effect, that allowed the tax to get passed, after several previous attempts by the regional agency and cities in the Valley had failed. Light rail was an important component of this plan, as were services for people with disabilities, and bus rapid transit for commuters. In the end, it was a mixture of factors, including costs, services that were to be provided, public involvement, political investment in a new and larger transit system, and likely the luck of timing that brought our current regional transit system into being.

As you read this week, and ponder implementation and transportation, consider what steps it would take for an elected official, a public administrator, and an average resident to support such a transit plan. Not only would they have to be invested in the ideas offered up, they would also have to see a successful road to implementation. And not only implementation of the first bus route, for the first year, but year after year, as the economic climate changes, as natural resource costs fluctuate, and as population—especially in Phoenix—continues to grow. Implementation is an ongoing challenge and one that you'll all be faced with should you work in the public sector.

If you'd like additional information on transit in the Valley, here are a few places you can look:

Valley Metro RPTA, (the regional public transportation authority)

www.valleymetro.org

The City of Phoenix Public Transit Department

www.phoenix.gov/publictransit

The City of Tempe Public Transit Department

www.tempe.gov/tim

The Maricopa Association of Governments (which provides regional transit planning and research)

www.azmag.gov

The State of Arizona Department of Transportation

www.azdot.gov

A Tale of Justice, Need, and Anxiety - My Thoughts on Crossing Arizona

2011-09-08T22:09:00.000-07:00

This week, we have our first non-Frontline documentary. You will notice as we go through the semester that many of the documentaries from sources aside from PBS will have a stronger point of view. Of course, you are always welcome to discuss any biases in your reflection papers and discussion comments. That being said, this may be one of my favorite documentaries that I have assigned this semester. I don't often work on immigration policy, but in Arizona we have all had some first-hand experience with this policy issue. In my opinion, Crossing Arizona highlights the diverse voices of individuals affected by immigration policy, many of whom often go unheard in our immigration policy debates.

You'll notice that the reading on immigration policy focused as much, if not more, on policies affecting legal immigrants, while the documentary focuses primarily on illegal or undocumented immigration across the U.S. Mexico border. Of course, both are intimately related. As we learned, not all immigrants are created equal when it comes to our immigration policies. One of the great points that this documentary makes is that human rights groups, anti-immigration groups, public servants, politicians, and residents of border communities all see the current immigration policies as problematic. Despite this, we have been unable to change our policies. As the law stands, we essentially pose a high risk of death to anyone who risks crossing the border, while simultaneously benefiting from the cheap labor of those who make it across. Certainly, this creates a lot of ethical questions and quandaries for people who live on the border and for our policymakers.

The documentary presents a question that is relevant for our readings this week. What are the possible unintended consequences of policies when we do not fully understand, or are afraid to acknowledge, the causes of problems? In this case, by not acknowledging our demand for cheap labor and our trade policies as push and pull factors affecting immigration, we have instead created "a solution" that does not solve the problem. If a 40 hour walk through the desert in 110 degree heat is not enough to keep people from crossing the border into Arizona, perhaps we need to re-think our understanding of immigration policy.

This documentary also highlights some of the topics we will be discussing next week when we talk about implementation. If you were paying attention at the beginning of the documentary, you may have noticed that the Border Patrol agent talked about policy changes that occurred in 1993 and 1994. If you remember, the readings discussed bills that were passed in 1990 and 1996. The policy change discussed in the documentary is a change in implementation or the carrying out of policies of the border patrol to stop immigration. This change locked down the easiest places through which immigrants could pass, filtering them through the most difficult terrain. I believe that Matt, who will be taking the reins and leading the class next week, will also discuss co-production, or citizen engagement in public service delivery. In this documentary we saw many examples of co-production from the samaritans providing water to the Minutemen camping out on the border. Normally, we think of co-production as a positive thing, but depending on your point of view, you may have seen some examples that made you uncomfortable.

So, what do you think? Did the documentary bring to light a point of view that you did not previously know about or understand? How do you think the various activists and public servants came across? Could you put yourself in "the shoes" of any of the individuals featured?

Immigration Policy

2011-09-07T13:42:00.000-07:00

The chapter on immigration policy provides a good overview of the history of our policies toward immigration and the current status of our federal immigration laws. Immigration is an issue that has been on the systemic agenda of the United States since the mid-19th century. During times of recession, depression, war, or turmoil immigration policy is moved to the institutional agenda, often as a scapegoat for economic and security fears. Immigration policy has historically only been on either agenda at the federal level, but for the past 15 years, immigration policy has been placed on an even more active agenda in many state legislatures. For this reason, I decided to match immigration policy with the theoretical chapter on agenda-setting.

Despite the fact that immigration policy has been on the institutional agendas at both the state and federal-levels since at least September 11th, 2001, it may have surprised you that the core of our immigration policy was created by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. The law has been modified by the 1990 Immigration Act and the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, but many of the provisions set forth in 1965 are still active. Did this surprise you at all?

Another thing that may have surprised you from the reading is that we place preferences and restrictions on immigration that make it easier for some immigrants to come through legal channels than others. We have tended to give preference to European immigrants over other nationalities, skilled workers over unskilled workers, and the extremely wealthy over all others. Refugees and members of current immigrants' immediate families also receive preferences. Did any of these preferences surprise you or seem unfair?

Since the mid-1990s, we have increasingly been concerned with the problem of illegal or undocumented immigration. I think that this chapter gives a nice balanced overview of the concerns of those on both sides of the debate. It makes clear that increased immigration, particularly illegal or undocumented immigration, may cause problems such as straining the education and public health systems. It may also create benefits through contributions to social security by young temporary immigrants and creating a supply for both extremely high and low-skilled jobs that Americans are either unwilling or unable to fill. Less obvious in the readings are the human rights concerns associated with a highly demanded underclass supply of labor. Certainly, immigration is a complex issue and one thing that both sides agree on is the need for reform.

One of the strongest parts of the chapter comes in the conclusion of the article. On page 420, Cochran et al. (2011) state:

The arguments over immigration often appear to be driven by anxieties that have nothing to do with immigrants. Immigration is easy to exploit as the cause of many of the nation's problems because immigrants are an easily identifiable and usually relatively powerless element of society. The nativist arguments resonate with people who fear what they do not know or understand. Those who suffer economic dislocation or fear poverty and crime find an easy target in immigrants. Immigrant rights groups often oversimplify the issues and see immigrants as victims in every effort to gain some control over the problems related to immigration. Most observers of immigration policy recognize that some regulation of the flow of immigration is desirable. How to achieve that regulation and how to ensure fairness and humane considerations are at the root of the controversies over immigration policies.

This paragraph perfectly illustrates the difficulty of passing compromise legislation on this issue. One side of the debate is driven by anxiety and the other by a sense of justice. The rational economic man we discussed last week is rarely seen on either side, and policies that appeal to rationality tend to be lobbied against by advocates and activists on both sides of the issue. It is no accident that the only immigration policies we have seen pass recently are highly partisan policies in states with legislatures dominated by a single political party; for example the anti-immigrant SB1070 and Act 2011-535 in Arizona and Alabama, and the pro-immigrant DREAM Act in CA. Of course, the Supreme Court will likely be asked to weigh in on the constitutionality of many of these propositions in the new future. What do you think about the authors' statement? Do you agree? Do you think any of the policies enacted by states will successfully address the problems associated with immigration? Will they ultimately be upheld by the Supreme Court? What policies do you think might help address the issues?

Policy Stages - Agenda Setting

2011-09-07T10:43:00.000-07:00

This is the first of our chapters on the policy stages. In this chapter Peters covers the "first" two stages of the policy process (remember, stages theory is a tool to help us think about policies, and in reality the stages aren't so neat and orderly). Agenda setting is commonly thought of as the first stage of the policy process. The ability to place items on the agenda for consideration and keep other items off is one of the most important powers in the policy process. This is why party control of the House and Senate can be so important. Think about how different some of the issues considered by the Republican House are from some of the issues being considered by the Democratic Senate (this difference becomes even greater when we look at the bills coming out of committees in one house versus the other).

Peters talks about two types of agendas: systemic and institutional. Systemic agendas are broader and more stable over time. They include any issue that has been deemed appropriate for consideration by the public sector. Institutional agendas are much more variable and only include those issues that are under active consideration at the time. While some advocacy groups are trying to move their issues onto the systemic agenda, most are attempting to move their issues from the systemic agenda to the institutional agenda. As you can imagine, at any given time most issues are on the systemic agenda with relatively few issues on the institutional agenda.

A lot of debate in political science and public policy studies concern who sets the agenda. The study of public policy really originated with Robert Dahl's Who Governs, a work that takes a pluralist perspective on policymaking. Pluralism emphasizes a marketplace of ideas. Pluralist theory argues that society is made up of different interest group with many divergent ideas, with government acting as the primary mediator between these groups. Individuals join the groups that advocate for things they care about and act as bystanders on other issues. Policies are ultimately decided by competition, and in the marketplace of ideas the best idea wins.

While pluralism assumes that all groups have equal power in the marketplace of ideas, elitist theory assumes that policy is primarily made by the wealthy and powerful. C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite is often considered the classic of elite theory, and argues that business owners, politicians, and military leaders all engage in the same circles and work together in their various sectors to distribute power and wealth among themselves. Keeping and increasing the power of those who are already powerful is an important aspect of public policy, from the perspective of elite theory (of course elite theorists generally see this as a problem in democratic societies).Other scholars like E.E. Schattschneider point to the difficulties that the poor have in organizing into interest groups and understanding the public sector.

The State-Centric approach tends to center agenda setting with government actors rather than interest groups or other outside actors. Congressional committees and bureaucratic agencies become the key actors in deciding what government should consider at any given time.

Once we have established who can set the agenda, we move to the question of how issues make it onto the agenda. Of course, this will have a lot to do with the political ideologies, personal values, and rational self-interest of those with the power to set the agenda. Emergencies, life or death issues, issues concentrated in districts of powerful policymakers, and visible issues will all likely be included on the agenda. Mancur Olsen's The Logic of Collective Action discusses how the dispersion of costs and benefits across the population influences which issues are included in the agenda and ultimately passed. Where benefits are concentrated and excludable and costs are dispersed, policies will generally be placed on the agenda and passed. Where benefits are dispersed and costs are concentrated policies will generally be kept off the agenda. Further, where issues can be tied to older issues, national symbols, and existing solutions, they will often be added to the agenda.

From an economic perspective, government should intervene where we find market failure. The private sector will not provide the optimal level of public goods because there is no way to exclude those who do not pay for the good. Public goods are those goods that are non-rival (my consumption will not limit your consumption) and non-excludable (there is no way to exclude those who do not pay for the good). We can think of our Fourth of July fireworks as public goods (within a certain range). The private sector would be unlikely to provide the optimal amount of fireworks because there is no way to exclude those who do not pay to see the fireworks from viewing them. Market failure also exists in the case of externalities. Externalities exist when either the full cost or full benefit of a good cannot be privatized. For example, an economist would likely argue that the lightrail should be subsidized by government (ideally from a road toll or tax on driving fuel inefficient vehicles) because the benefits of reduced traffic and emissions cannot be fully privatized. In this day and age, it is hard to think about goods that are entirely private goods and without any external costs or benefits.

Once an item is placed on the agenda, the second stage of the policy process begins. Government needs to determine how the issue will be solved through policy formulation. As Peters points out, sometimes this is based more on habit and analogy than theory or scientific evaluation. The bureaucracy, think tanks, interest groups, and legislators all participate in policy formulation (often legislators participate much less than you would assume). Two tools are often used in the United States to formulate policy, Cost Benefit Analysis and Decision Analysis. Both of these tools should be covered in an advanced policy analysis class. Briefly, Cost Benefit Analysis is based on the premise that all actions and goods can be converted into a monetary value, and government should choose the policy with the highest ratio of benefits to costs. Decision analysis takes cost benefit analysis and adds uncertainty. Using decision analysis, the action that is the most profitable or the least costly, given the likelihood that a specific event will occur, should be taken.

Obama's Deal and Ok, He Signed it Now What?

2011-09-01T20:51:00.000-07:00

Last week our documentary was Cheney's Law and this week we saw Obama's Deal. I mentioned two of the other possible Frontline Documentaries I could have assigned for this week Sick Around America and Sick Around the World, policy-wise they may have been more interesting, but I think that Obama's Deal complements what we saw last week and the theoretical readings very well. I am not going to say much about the documentary because I think this is one of the weeks where it was clear why I chose to assign it. Did anything about the "story of healthcare reform" surprise you? Did you see any of the theories of policy choice Peters discusses in the readings come to fruition in the process of healthcare reform? What do you think of the final bill? Were there any policy alternatives passed over in the process of writing the bill that you would have liked to see included in the final law? Finally, what do you think of the relationship between policy and politics in the passage of healthcare reform?

The podcast "Ok, He Signed it Now What?" reiterates much of what both the documentary and the chapter from CQ researcher said about healthcare reform. I think the podcast makes clear that the bill we ended up with is very different from what the Obama Administration initially set out to do. Of course, that does not mean that there is nothing "good" in the bill. I think the biggest concern among health care policy experts is that the bill does very little to stem the rise in health care costs. There is some funding for pilot studies (policy experiments carried out on a small scale) that attempt to evaluate some possible cost-cutting measures. hopefully some of them will show promising results.

Of course, there is more to health care policy than the Affordable Care Act. Peters' chapter on health care policy provides a good overview of all of the different ways that public policies affect health care. If you have an interest in Medicaid, Medicare, or drug regulation, Peters' chapter 11 is a good place to start.

The Affordable Care Act and Why we Need Health Insurance

2011-08-30T11:50:00.000-07:00

This week we read about the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act (sometimes referred to as the Affordable Care Act). The article from CQ Researcher gave us a good overview of the provisions of the act, a timeline of health care policy history, and a debate over some of the Act's more controversial policy changes. The chapter covers the most important aspects of the bill, but may not go into as much detail on the policy provisions that are of interest to you. If that's the case, here are some resources that you may find helpful. This dynamic timeline shows you when different parts of the healthcare law take effect, and what aspects are already in place. You can click on the policy change that interests you for more information about the specifics. Kaiser Family Foundation is a liberal-leaning think-tank focused on healthcare. They have a whole section on the health care reform law. If you are interested in the conservative perspective on the Affordable Care Act, the American Enterprise Institute will give you a nationwide take on the issue and the Goldwater Institute, located in Arizona, describes their case against the federal health care reform bill here.

Rather than give you even more information about the Affordable Care Act, I'd rather take a step back and talk about why we have health insurance in the first place. One of the comments I sometimes get in class about healthcare reform is that it's not fair to have a system where the healthy pay for the sick and the wealthy pay for the poor. Setting aside the second half of this comment, the healthy paying for the sick is the essential idea behind health insurance. Borrowing from Karen Pollitz, one of my former MPP professors at Georgetown and an expert in the individual health insurance market, I present the swoop. (Please note that this is a very informal graph and would not be acceptable to include in an academic paper)

When it comes to healthcare, at any point in time most people cost very little, but there is a small group of very sick people who cost a lot. Pretty much everyone will fall into this small group of costly healthcare consumers at some point in their lifetime, and they have almost no control or ability to anticipate when that will be. Heart attack, pregnancy, cancer etc. can all shift someone into the high cost group. Sure, there will be some unlucky people who spend more time in the costly group and some very lucky people who remain relatively low cost throughout their lives, but we have no way of knowing who that will be. This is what we call "an information problem", using applied economic speak. Because we don't know how much we would need to save to pay for our healthcare needs or when we may need it and because we can all anticipate being high cost healthcare consumers at some point, it makes sense to enter an insurance pool.

When you have a large insurance pool where there are lots of people who do select in based on some reason: (employment, residence, citizenship etc.) aside from health status, you create a system where the healthy transfer money to the sick (because remember, most people are relatively healthy most of the time) with the knowledge that when they are sick, the healthy will in turn transfer money to them. The bigger the insurance pool, the more healthy people there will be to transfer money to cover the very sick, and the less costly one major illness will be for everyone. This is why the individual insurance market is so inefficient. It creates a system where more of the sick select into the insurance pool, and the relatively healthy stay out. This is also why the individual mandate is an important component of healthcare reform from the perspective of the insurance companies. They need healthy people in their pool to keep premiums low and ensure a profit.

In terms of the wealthy paying for the poor, the evidence is more mixed on this case. You can argue from a public health perspective the wealthy benefit from the poor having healthcare coverage. When people are able to get treatment for infectious diseases more quickly, it reduces the likelihood that the diseases will spread. Also, immunizations are an important aspect of preventive care. Children with certain diseases are unable to tolerate vaccines and have to rely on herd immunity to keep them well, if access to immunizations is reduced, herd immunity becomes less likely, and these children are more likely to get sick. This becomes especially true with the current cultural movement against immunizations that some more well off families are participating in. Preventive care also reduces the strain on our emergency systems, freeing up medical personnel for true emergencies. Finally, a healthy workforce is a productive workforce so greater healthcare coverage of low-income families is good for business' bottom line.

A recent ground-breaking study from the National Bureau of Economic Research evaluated the impact of Medicaid coverage on low-income Americans and found that despite the issues with lower acceptance of Medicaid by doctors and healthcare providers, individuals on Medicaid had better outcomes than those without insurance. They got better health coverage, had better mental and physical health status, and were financially more stable. The study used a randomized design to avoid selection bias, and is a very strong study methodologically. This paper illustrates the importance of health insurance, especially for individuals and families who are already struggling.

If you want to learn more about healthcare access in the individual market prior to health care reform, the Frontline documentary Sick Around America features Americans telling their stories of denial for pre-existing conditions and insurance recissions for incomplete medical histories. It's a moving documentary that is eye opening for those of us who have never had to purchase health insurance using the individual market. It does a great job of illustrating the problems with health care access in America. If you want to learn more about health care systems in comparable developed nations, the Frontline documentary Sick Around the World shows you how other five other countries have decided to address health care access, cost, and quality. This documentary does a great job illustrating health care policy alternatives. While both of these documentaries offer good insights into the healthcare system, we are talking about policy choices this week and the assigned documentary Obama's Deal shows us how we arrived at the health care reform bill that was actually passed.

What do you think about the Affordable Care Act? Have any of the enacted changes benefited or burdened you? Do you think the individual mandate is a "necessary evil" or should it be overturned as unconstitutional? Do you think the other parts of the Affordable Care Act can survive without it?

Theories Explaining Policy Choices

2011-08-30T10:44:00.000-07:00

Often when we discuss the study of public policy, we are actually talking about two types of analysis. For the sake of simplicity we usually separate studies where policy is treated as an outcome of political and social causes, and studies where policy is treated as a cause of some social outcome. Of course, the world is not so simple and policy is is caused by and causes politics, society, and culture simultaneously; but for the purposes of discussion and academic research it is much easier to divide the field in this way. In this class, we are primarily focused on policy as an outcome. While the substantive chapters touch on the effects of policy, we will not be doing policy evaluation in this class. We will leave that to PAF 471-Public Policy Analysis.

In this class, we are primarily concerned with studying the policy process. How do policies get passed? Why are some policies passed and not others? Why do policies persist? Chapter three introduces us to some of the major theories for understanding the policy process. We will spend all next few weeks on the policy stages heuristic (I hope you all looked up this word) so I will skip over that for now and discuss some of the other perspectives. Remember, public policy is an interdisciplinary field so you will see theories here that are based in political science, economics, and sociology.

Currently, the study of public policy in the United States is dominated by economic thinking. If you went to the annual APPAM (Association of Public Policy and Management) conference, you would, for the most part, see presentations of papers using market-based theories or institutional models to explain policy choice. The easiest assumption to make about human behavior in public policy analysis is that individuals act on their rational self-interest, but sometimes that interest is constrained by organizational culture, history, or social norms. We may also think of them as making decisions based on "bounded rationality", not only are they constrained by outside factors, they are also constrained by limited cognitive capacity. We tend to assume that they "satisfice" or choose an option that works, or seems the best, out of limited options. This may seem like the obvious way to think about human behavior, but it's not the only alternative. Think about how different our policies would be if we adopted the assumptions of psychoanalysis, that individuals acted largely based on irrational urges and passions.

Peters also offers us theories that explain policy choice based on who advocated for specific policies. The Advocacy Coalition Framework and policy networks perspectives try to explain policy choices using this logic. Both of these perspectives tell us who is working together to pass a policy and who they are working against. They can also help to explain why problems are defined in certain ways or how relevant groups change alliances over time. There's an adage that "politics makes strange bedfellows", and both ACF and policy networks analysis can help us parse out occasionally strange alliances.

Peters talks about other perspectives too. Lowi's idea that policy causes politics has been very influential in explaining why we see strong interest groups in some policy discussions and not in others. Many have used his theory in conjunction with constructivism and economic theories to understand differential power relationships, particularly in the context of redistributive and regulatory policy areas. The constructivist approach is more popular in Europe and really delves into the role that social control and stratification play in the policy process (in other words examining how race, gender, class, able-bodiedness, sexuality etc. influence policy decisions.)

I hope that you will keep these various theories for explaining policy choice in mind when we read the substantive chapters. Often, we look at policies from one single perspective and assume we have the right answer, when other perspectives can shed an interesting light on a particular substantive area. If you think about healthcare policy, constructivism might help explain why there is more support for Medicare than Medicaid even though they serve many of the same people (so-called dual-eligibles) because we perceive the recipients as two different groups; seniors and the disabled who deserve our help and poor people who do not. On the other hand, historical institutional models might explain the evolution of a public healthcare system that covers the elderly, the destitute, and veterans but not others. The optimal design perspective would explain why the market cannot provide sufficient healthcare to these groups, in particular.

What do you think of the theories that Peters discusses in this chapter were there any that sounded particularly interesting? Were there any that you just "didn't get"? Do you think that public policy experts should assume recipients are "rational actors" when designing policies? Are there better ways to explain human behavior that we should consider?

Taking and Giving Away Power in a Federalist System

2011-08-25T12:22:00.000-07:00

This week's podcast A City Throws in the Towel and documentary Cheney's Law tell us two different tales about power in a federalist system with a separation of powers. On one hand, we have a story about the Bush Administration successfully attempting to consolidate power in the national executive branch. In the other we have the city of Reading, Pennsylvania ceding its power to the state in order to avoid financial ruin. In both of these instances we can see how a policy decision like re-defining torture and selling off government property can have a larger meaning in terms of the distribution of power between branches and levels of government. We can also think beyond the effects on the executive branch (in Cheney's Law) and the city government of Reading (in A City Throws in the Towel) and hypothesize about the long-term consequences of these decisions for other branches and levels of government. Giving up power is a very difficult thing to do, and once power is consolidated or distributed it tends to stay that way until another emergency or shock to the system emerges.

In terms of the executive branch, it remains relatively powerful since Bush and Cheney have left office. The Obama administration continues the practice of issuing signing statements to laws, but I think the debt ceiling negotiations revealed that Obama is more hesitant about exercising executive power. Here's a NYTimes article about executive power under Obama.

In A City Throws in the Towel we heard about Reading, PA as an example of a city that was taken over by the state as a financial disaster area. The podcast hints at the fact that many cities throughout the nation are facing the same issues, as population decreases and poor economic conditions decimate their tax bases. In Reading's case they chose a state takeover, but this is not always the case. The city of Detroit, Michigan is currently at risk of being involuntarily taken over by the state if they cannot cut $200 million in spending. Local governments are not protected by the Constitution, unlike state governments, so this may be a coming threat for many cities and counties. State governments are feeling similar financial crunches, particularly because so many have balanced budget provisions in their constitutions or state laws. The question remains, what will happen to our federal system if states can no longer meet their financial obligations to residents?

The Complex Systems of American Government - Peters Ch. 2

2011-08-23T14:53:00.000-07:00

In this chapter Peters discusses the structures of the American political system. The unique way that the United States' government is structured creates both barriers and opportunities in terms of public policy. The United States is a federalist system with federal, state, and local governments. Our constitution allocates powers to the federal government and the remainder is reserved for the states. For the most part, state governments determine the powers left to local governments. Many court battles arise out of conflicts concerning which level of government has jurisdiction over particular issues. Normally, federal law supersedes state law and state law supersedes local laws, but not when it concerns powers reserved for lower levels of government.You should keep this in mind when we discuss the individual mandate part of health care reform next week.

At each level, there is also a separation of powers. At both the federal and state levels power is balanced between a legislative, executive, and judicial branch (hopefully, at this point you are familiar with the idea of separation of powers and checks and balances. If not, go to Google and look it up.) We also have strong bureaucracies that act as part of the executive branch. The bureaucracy has significant powers in executing laws and making public policy. In fact, some scholars argue that the bureaucracy has more influence on how citizens experience policy than the policymakers. We will talk about this more in week five when we discuss implementation.

The interactions between the legislature, the bureaucracy and private interest groups is often referred to as an iron triangle. In some ways, iron triangles make our government more efficient. They allow policymakers and bureaucrats to specialize in areas that they care about. It creates connections between the experts in the private and public sectors, and certainly increases the degree to which technocratic expertise plays a role in our government. Unfortunately, this means that the public interest at large is largely left out of the conversation. It can lead to revolving doors, where politicians and upper level bureaucrats who leave public office are rewarded by interest groups with good positions in the private sector. It also increases pork barrel politics and log-rolling where legislation is made to serve the interests of specific policymakers, districts, and agencies. Rather than acting as agents of the public good, bureaucrats in these agencies often become agents of the very industries they were mandated to regulate.

As I mentioned in the "What is Public Policy" post, we also have a system that encourages a blurring of the line between public and private. Since the 1980's the dominant political perspective has assumed that competition leads to better service provision, and many of the services that had been administered by government for much of the 20th century have been contracted out to non-profit and for-profit organizations. This means that government policies are often carried out by private actors, and new businesses have been created for the primary purpose of public service provision. We often refer to this as the "shadow government". Once these private employees are taken into account, we see that the federal government has increased significantly in size (and dollars) since the 1950s.

Peters emphasizes the ways in which the unique and complex American system hinders policymaking, but it also creates advantages. There is an old adage that states are the laboratories of democracy. Our federal system allows us to try public policies at the state and local level before we implement them nationally.Obama's healthcare reform bill was loosely modeled after the Massachusetts' universal health care program. It also allows for diversity across different localities. Not everyone in this country agrees on the definition of good public policy. Our federal system allows California to make appropriate laws for its citizenry and Alabama to make appropriate laws for its citizenry.

The blurring of private and public creates a symbiotic relationship between the private and public sectors. Business owners have greater buy-in to the public sector and government can work with local non-profits who may have better training and experience in working in certain areas with certain populations. Americans tend to be less suspicious of the private sector than the public sector, which may make contracted out programs more politically palatable.

On the other hand, there is some evidence that contractor jobs are not as good as government jobs in terms of their salary, benefits, and stability. Contracted projects may also be planned primarily for short-term cost savings rather than long-term stability. Diversity in policy can lead to inequalities and a "race to the bottom" where fewer and fewer social services are offered to avoid attracting "undesirables" to a specific locality. The complexity of our system means that policymaking will often be reactive and slow to move when major changes are needed. Finally, iron triangles, log-rolling, pork barrel politics, and multiple veto points mean that the effectiveness and efficiency of policies become less important than their political palatability to interest groups and constituents.

It is important to keep these structures in mind when we talk about substantive public policy areas and policy analysis. Are you surprised by the complexity of the American political system? Do you think this complexity helps or hinders American government in meeting the needs of its diverse citizenry? What would you change about the structure of American government to make it more effective?

The Instruments of Government - Peters Ch. 1

2011-08-23T14:37:00.000-07:00

The second question Peters attempts to answer is "What tools or instruments does government have at its disposal?" Peters lists six major policy instruments that government can use to distribute benefits and burdens to groups and individuals.

The first instrument is law. Laws are probably what you thought of when you considered the definition of public policy. According to Peters, laws are "authoritative decrees" (p. 7). Unlike the other instruments of public policy, only a legitimate government can make laws. The more legitimate a government is perceived to be, the less authority is necessary to make sure that individuals obey the laws. During the Arab Spring, we saw quite a few governments whose citizens deemed them to be illegitimate, we also saw these regimes attempt to enforce their laws through extreme force. In contrast, most of us obey the laws of the United States, even when we are not being observed and coerced. This is because most Americans view their government as legitimate, even when they disagree with its policies. Laws can either confer rights or prohibit actions. Sometimes these are basically the same thing. For example, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 gave the right to vote to all citizens over the age of 18 by prohibiting states and counties from barring people of color from voting. To ensure rights for one group, they had to prohibit the actions of another group.

Government also provides direct services, although this is becoming less common in the United States, as government often contracts with for-profit and non-profit organizations to provide services. Still, there are two major areas of public policy where government continues to provide direct services: education and defense. Many have argued that the government is not the most efficient provider of services, so we are even seeing the privatization of these major areas of government provision.

Government increasingly provides its citizens with money. Usually, this is accomplished through tax credits. Paradoxically, the distribution of money directly to citizens can be considered inefficient and efficient at the same time.On one hand, it does not require separate specialized institutions and organizations to distribute money through the tax code. If you define efficiency as a lack of administrative costs, then the direct provision of money is very efficient. On the other hand, government has no control over how individuals spend the money they receive so it can be very inefficient in terms of regulating behavior. The federal government also distributes money to lower levels of government through grants. These grants may be categorical grants, which are very restrictive and require that the money be spent in specific ways. They may also be block grants, which allow states and localities to spend the money on a variety of projects. Categorical grants are one way that the federal government can increase its power over the states.

Tax expenditures are very similar to tax credits. Peters breaks them up in his chapter but sometimes they are discussed together. Tax expenditures are funds that the government did not collect because individuals were able to "deduct" them. Of course, in order to benefit from tax deductions you have to already have made enough money to have income tax liability. Therefore, tax deductions often benefit wealthy and middle class individuals, while credits may benefit even those whose income is so low that they do not have to pay income taxes.

Government may also tax certain behaviors instead of passing laws prohibiting them. For example, pollution may be taxed rather than regulated. The money gained from these taxes may then be redistributed to individuals or cities affected by pollution. Usually, when we talk about government incentives or disincentives for certain behaviors we are talking about a tax credit or a tax on something that benefits or burdens society.

When a government is viewed as legitimate suasion can also be used as a tool of government. Suasion can basically be thought of as persuasion. When governments attempt to influence behavior without actively passing legislation, that is suasion. We have observed a lot of examples of suasion throughout our history. Some have been very successful like John F. Kennedy's call to service: "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." Others, like Jimmy Carter's call for energy conservation in the 1980s have been unsuccessful. Suasion tends to be most effective when it does not ask citizens to significantly change their behavior, and when the country's political leaders are well-liked.

Peters also discusses other economic tools that government can use. These include the guarantee of loans and the issuance of insurance. These programs tend to be small and represent very low levels of government expenditures. They greatly benefit their recipients; students and residents in flood and hurricane zones, but are often invisible to other citizens.

As Peters points out, governments draw on these tools to distribute goods, services, benefits, and burdens. By examining them, we can determine "Who gets what, when, and how". I hope that you will continue to think about these tools when we talk about substantive policy areas. The choice of instrument can make a real difference in how individuals and groups experience policies. Which tools do you think are most efficient? Which are most effective at changing behaviors? Which would you prefer governments use?

What is Public Policy? - Peters Ch. 1

2011-08-23T13:56:00.000-07:00

Our readings for this week are meant to set the stage for the rest of our class. For most of the subsequent weeks will be discussing a policy area - like healthcare policy or immigration policy - but first we need to understand what we mean when we use the term public policy and how the American context affects our policy choices and decisions.

In this first chapter, Peters tackles these two primary questions "How do we define public policy?" and "What policy tools does government have at its disposal?" In reference to the first question, Peters defines public policy as "the sum of government activities, whether pursued directly or through agents, as those activities have an influence on the lives of citizens" (p. 4). This is certainly not the only way to define public policy, but lets pull apart this definition a bit.

The sum of government activities: Peters define public policy as the totality of government action. This definition is broad in the sense that it includes implementation, all levels of government, and action on a variety of substantive issues. It can be interpreted as somewhat narrow by today's standards, however, as many have sought to redefine what it means to be public versus private. Many scholars want to extend the definition to activities taken by corporations or NGOs working on their own behest. We can draw from history for an example. At the turn of the 20th century many workers were living in company towns where healthcare, housing, schools etc. were provided by the company. In Peters' definition this would not be considered public policy even though the services provided by the companies are very similar to what government provides today.
Pursued directly or through other agents: Peters broadens his definition back out here. He allows for businesses and non-profits to be public policy actors if they working on behalf of the state. "Contracting out" to for-profit or non-profit organizations has become an increasingly popular strategy for delivering government services so this is an important part of the definition.
As those activities have an influence on the lives of citizens: Peters restricts his definition once again to those activities that affect the citizenry. I think that this is unintentionally narrow. We have foreign policies, trade policies, and immigration policies that directly affect individuals who are not citizens. As a world leader, American public policies also affect non-citizens indirectly. Further, our policies have an effect on the animal and natural world. I doubt that Peters would argue that foreign policies are not public policies so I think the use of citizen here is just poor word choice.

Hopefully, you came into this class with at some ideas about what public policy might be. How did your definition differ from Peters? Do you think his definition is too broad, just right, or too narrow?

Comments from the Syllabus Quiz and Student Questions

2011-08-23T10:46:00.000-07:00

Before I get into discussion of this week's readings, I wanted to comment on a few things related to the syllabus and the assignments.

First, I have added a revised syllabus with the Peters 7th edition readings in parentheses for the relevant weeks. I think this will cut down on some future confusion, but again please make sure that the content you are reading for the week matches the content listed on the syllabus. That being said, because this is an online class you MUST be familiar with the syllabus. Unless I state otherwise, follow the schedule and directions outlined there.
Second, I know some of you are anxious about the reflection papers. Although there are 13 documentaries listed on the syllabus, you only need to turn in five over the course of the semester, but you have to turn them in the week that they are due on the syllabus. So, for example if you choose to write your first paper on Obama's Deal which is assigned for next week, you must turn it in by 9/4 to receive credit. This is because I have chosen the documentaries to go with the readings we have each week. In terms of content there are four things I am looking for:

The paper needs to be well-written: The papers do not need to be as formal as a research paper, and it is expected that you will write in the first person, but you need to be able to adequately communicate your ideas to your reader.
The paper needs to reference the substantive reading for the week. Most weeks this will be fairly easy. For example, the reading for next week is on healthcare reform and the documentary is on the process of creating the healthcare reform bill. You should be able to pull out parts of the documentary that parallel with the reading.
The paper needs to reference the theoretical reading for the week. This will often be a little harder, but again, I have matched these up so that you can do this for every week. How did the documentary bring a concept from the reading to life? For example, next week's theoretical reading is on explaining policy choices. When watching the documentary, you should keep in mind which theories discussed in the chapter explain the final health care reform bill as a policy choice.
Finally, I want to hear your thoughts about the documentary. What did you like? What didn't you like? Do you think the filmmaker was overtly biased or were they more or less presenting the truth? What, if anything, did you learn? etc.
Most importantly, I do NOT want a summary of the film.

I have also had some students express concerns about the weekly participation credit. You only have to participate once per week to get full participation credit. You can participate by posting a comment or question on blackboard, tweeting using the #paf340F11 tag, or posting a comment or question on my blog. Again, you only have to do one per week so it is your choice which you want to use.
Finally, for those of you who are nervous about twitter, I know it can be overwhelming at first, but the best advice I can give is to start using it. I sent out my first tweet in May and now I am using it for class. Tweetdeck is a really great resource to keep things organized. You can set up a column with the course hashtag and anytime someone tweets with the tag for the class, it will show up. Here's what mine looks like:

The people I am following are on the left hand side, tweets that mention me are in the middle, and those that use the #paf340F11 tag (this is a column that I created, the others are default columns) is on the right hand side. There isn't anything here that twitter can't do, but it looks a little nicer.

Welcome to Contemporary Policy Challenges Fall 2011

2011-08-15T13:54:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone! I hope you had a great summer and you are ready to get back into the swing of things. If you are reading this post, you are either someone who really loves public policy or (more likely) a student in my online section of PAF 340 for the Fall semester of 2011. This class is an intermediate undergraduate class that will guide you through some of today's theoretical, critical, and applied issues in public policy. My hope is that you have come into this class with some knowledge of current events and an interest in learning more about how policy decisions are made. For each week, you'll have a theoretical chapter on the policy process or policy theory and a chapter on a substantive policy issue. You will also be assigned optional documentaries and podcasts to help you understand the readings better. I will be blogging at least twice a week, and you can ask me questions here. It's a big class so we have two TA's who are also doctoral students in the School of Public Affairs who may be weighing in from time to time, Matt Heil and Mark Martz.

My hope is that by the end of the course you will have a better idea of how policy is made in the American political context. I also hope that you will understand the complexity of public policy issues and emerge a public policy skeptic whenever you hear that a problem is simple and a solution obvious. I hope that you enjoy the multimedia components of this class and the use of blackboard, twitter, and this blog. I look forward to getting to know you better as the semester progresses.

My Thoughts on Stone Ch. 8 - Causes

2011-07-29T00:41:00.000-07:00

We talked a little bit about causation in the policy process in Peters' chapters on policy formulation and implementation. As usual, Stone has a different take on causation. While Peters believes that causation can be determined in the policy process, which leads to better policymaking, Stone believes that this mechanistic understanding of causation does not exist in the polis. She believes that establishing cause in the polis is about burdening certain groups and creating political alliances. The symbols and numbers we discussed in chapters six and seven are combined to create these causal stories.

In the polis, we generally try to attribute cause to social forces. Although there are some scientific innovations that attempt to control nature, we tend to believe that we have more influence on events when their causes are social. One of the reasons that I assigned a documentary on Katrina survivors for this week is this debate over the cause of the devastation. If it can be attributed to the natural disaster of Katrina alone, then there is nothing that possibly could have been done to improve the situation, and there is not much we can do to prevent similar devastation in the future. If causation can be attributed to social or political causes like extreme poverty, corruption, incompetence, or bureaucratic red-tape then we have significantly more control. We can create policies to help reduce suffering in the future.

Stone lays out a table on p. 191 with four types of causal stories: mechanical, accidental, intentional, and inadvertent. The first type of cause she discusses is the accidental cause. These are used to explain any incident that is caused by fate - this can include natural disasters, disease, famine, car crashes etc. Many of our torts and class action lawsuits are attempting to prove that causes we thought were accidental are actually intentional or negligently inadvertent. Defenders of the status quo often try to claim that any major problem can be attributed to an accidental cause.

This brings us to intentional causes, which are the converse of accidental causes. An intentional causal story states that someone or a group of people acted willfully, knowing the consequences of their actions, to cause harm to a group or individual. This is the story that tort and class action lawyers want to be able to tell. In the tobacco lawsuit, the plaintiffs were able to prove that the tobacco companies knew full well that their cigarettes were addictive and causing cancer and they took no action. All conspiracy theories, true and untrue fall under the intentional cause story. Stories of oppression can also fall under this category. For example, radical political scholars have argued that the true purpose of welfare reform is to intentionally keep low-income people in poverty to ensure that there is a desperate low-wage labor force for employers.

We often hear about inadvertent causes in policy. Sometimes policy is the cause of unintended consequences. This is the crux of the welfare dependency thesis, which argues that rather than helping the poor the provision of goods and services keeps them dependent on government. Policy can also be the remedy for inadvertent causes of social problems. Obesity is often explained as a problem that is caused by inadvertent actions. It is argued that consumers don't know how bad cheap processed food is for them, and if they knew they would make better choices at restaurants and the grocery store. Negligence and recklessness can also be considered a nefarious inadvertent cause. In this case, individuals or groups should know better but do not act in ways that avoid causing a problem. Often, we punish recklessness or negligence if it is discovered before anyone is hurt. If someone is caught driving under the influence, they are charged even if they didn't harm anyone because they are acting recklessly and could cause harm to someone.

Mechanical causes are often systemic problems, and can be the hardest to address. They can also result in horrible consequences. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, racial inequality has often been attributed to a mechanical cause. While some individuals and institutions still intentionally discriminate, it is more often the case that systemic factors lead to inequality. Whites tend to have more connections, more wealth passed down across generations, and more soft-skills that help them succeed in the labor market in comparison to minority groups. A lot of effort is exerted to transform a mechanical cause into an inadvertent cause so that policy may address the issue. If, as this podcast suggests, these soft-skills can be traced back to early childhood development then policy can intervene and provide pre-schools to help African-American and Latino children develop these soft-skills.

Generally, we cannot establish a single cause of any major social problem. The obesity epidemic is likely caused by a combination of all four types of causes: a desire on behalf of individuals to eat fatty processed foods (intentional), a lack of information about how bad these processed foods really are for us (inadvertent), government subsidies to corn producers which subsidizes foods containing high fructose corn syrup (inadvertent), droughts or other natural disasters that raise the price of produce relative to processed food (accidental), the systemic problem of food deserts (mechanical), changing socio-economic conditions that require both parents to work and/or increase the number of single parents leaving no one to cook at home (mechanical), and so on. Of course, we rarely hear about all of these causes in the polis.

Instead, we are generally offered a strategic causal explanation. On page 204, Stone gives us four reasons why policymakers and analysts would propose a single causal story, "First, they can either challenge or protect an existing social order. Second, by identifying causal agents, they can assign responsibility to particular political actors so that someone will have to stop an activity, do it differently, or possibly face punishment. Third, causal theories can legitimize and empower particular actors as "fixers" of a problem. And fourth, they can create new political alliances among people who are shown to stand in the same victim relationship to the causal agent." There are always multiple individuals and groups to whom cause can be attributed, and multiple stories we can tell. By singling out one cause, policymakers can strategically choose who to benefit and burden, and they can gain some semblance of control over the problem.

My Thoughts on Stone Ch. 6 - Stories

2011-07-27T13:40:00.000-07:00

When you are working in advocacy there are usually two things you want to find to support your case with policymakers and sway them to your side. First, you want numbers to support your cause. If you can show that your program of choice helps X number of people in policymaker Y's district or that the program has a positive return on investment, you will often have a good chance to sway policymakers who are on the fence. Next, and sometimes more importantly, you want a symbol. You want someone from the policymaker's district who has personally been helped by program X to come to Washington and tell their story to the policymaker. As important as expert testimony or in-depth economic analyses are, they often have limited impacts on actual policies. When we get to chapter 17 we'll talk about some of the ethical issues that the desire for one-sided numbers and symbols can bring about.

In my opinion, Stone's chapter on symbols really gets to the crux of her argument that policy is really a battle of stories and argument. In policy, the symbols we invoke become short-hand for longer stories about the people, places, and things we want to influence. Finding neutral language to explain a situation becomes increasingly difficult as the word you choose to explain a phenomenon automatically invokes the story you are trying to tell.

As I have mentioned, I sometimes work on anti-prostitution policy. I try to stay neutral in my analysis of the problem, but this becomes difficult because the word I use to describe prostitution automatically implies a side. If I use the term "sex-trafficking" you know that I likely take the position that prostitution is always exploitative to women. If I use the word "sex work" it implies that I think that prostitution is an occupation. This same dynamic comes into play when we talk about abortion (Are you pro-choice or pro-abortion? Anti-choice or pro-life?) and immigration (Are they illegals, illegal aliens, illegal immigrants, or undocumented immigrants?) The word I use automatically gives away my underlying position because it automatically invokes the story I want to tell you.

Stone gives us some really interesting examples of types of stories. I will use the timely example of the deficit to explain these stories. The first is the far-right story of the deficit, the story of decline, "America used to be a much better country when we lived within our means, government spending is out of control and we need to eliminate the deficit or risk being taken over by China." Stymied progress can be seen as the partisan Democratic approach to the deficit "The deficit is important and we need to reduce it. Bill Clinton's administration balanced the budget and gave us a surplus. Since then, the Bush tax cuts and two unfunded wars have caused the current budget deficit." The change is an illusion story is represented by the GDP argument "As a percentage of GDP the deficit is a little higher than usual thanks to the economic collapse, but certainly not radically different from the past, and much lower than during the 1910s and 1940s." When it comes to the deficit, we don't see the helplessness and control story often, but it could be called the "Keynesianism is dead story". It goes like this "We used to think that government must run deficits to stimulate the economy in economic downturns, we now know that government stimulus doesn't affect the economy so we can control our deficit despite the recession." There might be multiple conspiracy stories about the deficit, but one such story is that politicians don't really care about the deficit, they are just using it as an excuse to shrink the size of government. Finally, the blame the victim story would argue "The deficit is the fault of government "leeches" like the welfare queens and illegal immigrants who don't pay taxes but expect government services." All of these stories have a grain of truth to them, but none of them represent the whole truth and each proposes a specific government action.

Synecdoche is another common use of symbols, which I will not get into because it is one of your reading quiz questions for the week.

Metaphor is one of the most powerful uses of symbols in the polis. We've talked about metaphor quite a bit. I think this is an important issue that policy analysts have to think about. When I am writing about the problem of prostitution and possible policy solutions, I have to ask "What is this problem like?" Is it like other types of service work? Is it like the drug trade? Is it like kidnapping? Is it an individual issue, a community issue, or a societal issue? Whichever I decide will influence how I look at the problem and the solution I ultimately propose.

Stone gives us lots of visually striking metaphors. If we choose to see institutions like living organisms we may wonder if a problem is really part of a life-cycle of an institution. If we see society as a machine we may wonder how a problem either acts as one of the cogs pushing society along or how it could "gum up the works" and make society less efficient. Wedges and slippery slopes are common political metaphors. A wedge issue is one that is meant to divide a formerly united group. We often talk about the social issues abortion, gun rights, and gay marriage as wedge issues because they divide groups that might normally vote together. We hear about slippery slopes in terms of these same issues. The National Rifle Association tends to argue that any gun regulations are slippery slopes that will lead to the eventual banning of firearms. We may also use the metaphors of ladders, steps, or containers in similar ways. The metaphors of disease and war are interesting ones. We often hear them used in terms of social problems like crime and poverty. We hear of the "War on drugs" and the "War on poverty" or how the teaching of homosexuality in sex-ed "will infect the minds of our children."

One thing I've noticed is that once you read this chapter of Stone's book, you start to see these stories and symbols everywhere. What symbols have you noticed in policy debates?

My Thoughts on Peters Ch. 7: Budgeting

2011-07-15T21:31:00.000-07:00

Although budgeting is rarely included in policy stages theory (and you will see on p. 47 that Peters himself does not include budgeting as a policy stage), it is an important part of the policy process. Sometimes it is considered to be part of implementation and sometimes it is considered part of policy formulation. Either way, the budget is just as important, if not more so, in determining the effectiveness and efficiency of a policy as the authorizing legislation or agency rules. An underfunded program will likely be seen as ineffective and an over-funded program will likely be seen as inefficient.

Peters goes into a lot of detail about types of budgets and approaches to budgeting. A lot of this goes beyond what you really need to know for a public policy class and delves into the management and administration literature. My hope is that you have learned three major lessons from this chapter:

1) The budget process is complex and takes a long time to complete. Planning for budgets begins almost a year and a half prior to when the budget is enacted. It starts with the president's economic advisers, it moves to the agencies, comes back to OMB and the president for review. In early February, the president releases his budget publicly and the action moves to the legislative branch. The appropriations committees in both houses of Congress take the President's release into account and then after hearings and negotiations send their own versions to the floor of their respective houses. Often the president's, Senate's, and House's bills are all very different reflecting the different political ideologies of their leadership. Once the appropriations bills pass both houses, they go to conference where leaders from both houses attempt to eliminate the differences between the two bills. The resulting reconciliation bill is voted on by both houses and goes to the President once it passes. The president can veto, sign, or let pass the bill as a whole. All of this has to be finished by mid-September for a new budget to take effect. It should be no surprise that the deadline is rarely met, particularly when both houses are divided politically, so Congress is often forced to pass continuing resolutions, which fund programs at the same level as the previous fiscal year (remember, fiscal years are October-September).

2) Congress has very little control over a large portion of the budget. Annually, only about 30% of the budget is discretionary spending, the rest can't be changed without substantial, politically unpopular policy change. The remaining 70% includes entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security and interest on the debt. For more information see the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' fact sheets on the budget. This means that during all of the negotiations and hearings about the budgets, most of the disagreements and advocacy effort concerns a small piece of the budget pie. Organizations that may be allies during other parts of the year sometimes end up as adversaries during budget debates.

3) The budget, deficit, and debt all suffer from definitional problems. How they are counted and what is included is often strategic, and rarely represents "the truth" of federal spending and debt

4) The system is full of perverse incentives, or incentives that make the process less efficient. The short-term focus, out of date projections, lack of line-item veto, pork barrel spending, overhang, supplemental appropriations, and incrementalism may all lead to budgets that are larger than necessary and an inefficient use of funds.

Of course, this isn't to say that government spending is bad (although there are certainly economists and politicians who would argue that point). There are, however, places where funding could be more efficiently allocated. I want you to keep this is mind when you read the program evaluation chapter. Funding and implementation both have as much of an effect on program performance as the legislation itself.

My Thoughts on Peters Chapter 6

2011-07-14T14:38:00.000-07:00

Once again, we return to the story of our naive policy analyst. She has gotten her issue on the agenda, formulated the best policy response, determined the best arena for successful "passage" of her policy, and the policy has been adopted. Now she is done, right? The answer of course is not yet.

A lot of policy scholars focus almost exclusively on the policy formulation and evaluation stages of policy and leave implementation studies to the public administration scholars. Implementation is the administration of the policy, and can be the most important stage of the policy process in determining how citizens experience policy and the success and failure of policies. The study of implementation really took off in the 1970s with the publication of Pressman and Wildavsky's classic Implementation. Their work examines how the failure of Great Society era anti-poverty programs in Oakland, CA can be traced to relationships within and among agencies and citizens.

When most people think of the policy process in America, they think that the legislature passes a law and the executive branch administers it. The power to determine what should happen in this case lies with the legislature. From this perspective, when the administrator does not carry out the law exactly as the policymaker intended, the result is undemocratic and problematic. In reality, implementation rarely works this way. The political process tends to produce laws with little practical guidance, vague statutory requirements, and often contradictory instructions. Much of the work is left to administrators, who are generally experts in substantive areas, whereas policymakers are not. Of course, this brings up a lot of questions about legitimacy in a democratic country.

Implementation takes place in agencies, which tend to be hierarchical and bureaucratic. The character of these agencies can make implementation of new policies difficult, even when everyone agrees how to implement them. Max Brooks' World War Z is a great work of fiction that deals with the same issues that Peters discusses. In the book, Standard Operating Procedures, communication problems, horseshoe-nail problems, and interorganizational problems slow the response to the zombie-pocalypse. Further, the military and CDC treat the zombie plague and war as standard epidemics and wars, which leads to an ineffective response. The author even directly states (through the mouths of his characters) many of the problems with implementation that Peters brings up. I highly recommend reading the book.

My Thoughts on Peters Chapter 5

2011-07-12T21:51:00.000-07:00

Policy analysts are generally concerned with problem-solving, and finding the "best" solution to a public problem. (Of course, the determination of what is best could be based on quantitative, qualitative, cost-benefit, decision, or ethical analysis.) Often, we believe that once the best solution has been found, the work of the policy analyst is done and now the solution will be handed over to the policymakers to pass and implement. This is the view of the policy analyst as scientist or technocrat, but policy analysts who stop here are often not successful at seeing their policies carried out.

In many ways, the policy analyst must become an advocate and enter the political realm. After all, if you have discovered what you think is the best solution to a problem, you will of course desire that such a solution be put into practice. This is where the policy legitimation stage becomes so important.

The United States in particular has many branches and levels of government, each with varying degrees and types of legitimacy. A strategic policy analyst will try to find the branch and level of government with the proper legitimacy to carry-out her proposed policy. This is where Peters' modes of legitimation (Figure 5.1) comes into play. Based on her assessment of her policy as majoritarian versus non-majoritarian and appealing to elites versus the masses, she can choose the branch of government through which she will attempt to implement her policy. Further, the degree of relative legitimacy between federal, state and local governments may also influence her decision of where and how to attempt to carry-out her policy.

Policies that appeal to elites and majorities will likely see successful passage through Congress. Of course, logrolling and pork barrel politics can turn a policy that many legislators and elites feel ambiguous towards into a successful policy. At the same time, it becomes very easy for a policy that is objectionable to a very small number of legislators to be vetoed in Congress. This is particularly true in the Senate where the tradition of unanimous consent allows for one strenuously opposed Senator to hold up a bill for a substantial period of time.

For policies that tend to be nonmajoritarian and appeal to elites, a policy analyst would likely try to carry-out her preferred policy through the bureaucratic rule-making process or the courts. Policies that are overly technical are rarely completely formed by legislators. The bills passed on technical issues often express the intent of the Congress on a particular issue and leaves the details to be filled in by the appropriate agency. Issues like healthcare reform and bank regulation by necessity require the skilled professionals in the respective agencies to determine detailed policy prescriptions during the rule-writing process. The podcast Writing the Rules covers this process for the bank reform legislation passed last year. As you will see, policy as it is experienced by banks and consumers is really determined by the professional bureaucrats who are more knowledgeable in the subject area than the policymakers.

On the other hand, policies concerning constitutional rights and responsibilities are likely to be carried out through the courts. It should be noted, however, that the courts do not choose to decide whether X, Y, or Z is constitutional. Policy analysts and advocates will have to create a test case to bring before the courts. The famous Scopes trial portrayed in Inherit the Wind and Roe v. Wade are famous examples of test cases created to bring an issue before the Supreme Court. Many believe that recent ballot initiatives and legislation proposed in conservative states to ban abortion are really attempts to create a new test case to challenge the Roe v. Wade decision.

This brings us to the third cell in Peters' modes of legitimation typology, policies that have mass appeal and are majoritarian. Peters' argues that these policies will have the greatest success as referendums or ballot initiatives. We have recently seen a surge in the popularity of ballot initiatives as a means for passing preferred policies. Sometimes, these initiatives are put forth in a single state, but more often than not we see initiatives put forth in many states at once. Because these policies appeal to the masses and are majoritarian, there is sometimes a fear that they will lead to "tyranny of the majority over the minority". The relationship between referendums and initiatives and court actions, is I think an interesting one that brings up issues of populism v. elitism and majority rule v. minority rights. In Arizona, we see a very interesting process occurring where elected officials are asking the courts to weigh in on the approved medical marijuana ballot-initiative.

Peters leaves the fourth cell of his typology (Mass and Non-majoritarian) blank. He argues that protests and revolutionary movements could be placed there. I would argue that the Wisconsin collective bargaining protests would be a modern example of a mass and non-majoritarian mode of legitimation. Although increasingly uncommon in the United States, I would also include labor strikes in that cell. On the other hand, I would hardly consider the protests and revolutions occurring in the Middle East to be non-majoritarian. What would you put in that cell? The Tea Party? Communities that go "off the grid"? The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s? Riots?

Why do we have health insurance?

2011-07-10T10:38:00.000-07:00

One of the comments I sometimes get in class about healthcare reform is that it's not fair to have a system where the healthy pay for the sick and the wealthy pay for the poor. Setting aside the second half of this comment, the healthy paying for the sick is the essential idea behind health insurance. Borrowing from Karen Pollitz, I present the swoop. (Please note that this is a very informal graph and would not be acceptable to include in an academic paper)

My Thoughts on Healthcare Policy

2011-07-10T09:52:00.000-07:00

I hope by now you have all seen one of the assigned documentaries for this week, "Sick Around America" or "Sick Around the World". The first discusses many of the problems individuals face in the US healthcare system and the second discusses the ways, in which, different countries have structured their healthcare systems. Both of these documentaries were made prior to the passage of the healthcare reform bill. I posted a good overview of the new bill on the blackboard site.

I chose healthcare policy as our first substantive area because I hope you all have some familiarity with the political debate over the healthcare reform bill that was passed last year. Healthcare policy is also one of the issue areas where I have some expertise. For those of you who watched "Sick Around America", Karen Pollitz was one of my professors in my MPP program at Georgetown.

I think the first important point that Peters brings up is that government intervention in healthcare is not new in the United States. The U.S. government has provided healthcare services to certain populations through Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA for much of the 20th century. The U.S. government also invests substantially in research and development and regulates the pharmaceutical, insurance, and healthcare markets. At the same time, the United States has historically done very little to address access and cost issues compared to other developed nations.

As Peters points out, we are usually addressing three issues when we discuss healthcare policy: access, cost, and quality. Sometimes these issues can be in conflict. Increasing access to healthcare for the sick and elderly risks sacrificing cost containment. A market system may provide incentives to increase quality for those who can afford to pay for cutting edge services and pharmaceuticals, but it limits access to the highest quality care to only those who can afford to pay. The United States does better on quality, at least for those who can afford the best services, and does poorly on access and cost containment. Of course, the lack of access shows how some aspects of quality, access, and costs are related. At the population level, our healthcare system does not perform well in terms of healthcare quality measures because so many individuals are priced out of the healthcare system.

The healthcare reform bill passed by Obama in March, 2010 is mainly concerned with reducing costs and increasing access to healthcare. While it will fall short of universal coverage, CQ Researcher estimates that it will cover 32 million of the 45 million uninsured individuals in America. The bill also provides funding for pilot studies to determine how best to restructure our healthcare system to incentivize preventive care and efficient and effective medical treatment. The current controversy over the bill concerns the constitutionality of the individual mandate, which requires everyone who can afford it to purchase health insurance or face a monetary fine. The issue will almost certainly be decided by the Supreme Court in the next few years. Without the individual mandate, it is unclear what will happen to the healthcare reform law.

I hope that by reading through the history of attempts to pass universal health care in America, you also got a sense of what a big deal the passage of the reform bill really was. As Peters states, Presidents since Truman have been trying to pass some form of universal healthcare in America and we are the last developed country without comprehensive access to healthcare. While there is plenty to dislike about the bill from both sides of the aisle and the standpoint of policy effectiveness, sometimes good politics has to be good policy for anything to change. For those of you who watched "Sick Around the World", I hope you saw that relative to the healthcare systems of other countries, the system created by the healthcare reform bill is still quite ideologically conservative and market-based.

What is a Policy Lever?

2011-07-03T15:55:00.000-07:00

I'm sure you are asking yourself why your instructor has decided to call her blog "The Policy Lever", "Why not just Contemporary Policy Challenges or PAF340?" "What is a policy lever and what does it mean?" The policy lever is an analogy we use in public policy studies. We like to think that policies are levers we can pull to change the behaviors of individuals and groups. You will often hear people refer to new policy recommendations as policy levers. The story goes something like this. "We have lots of research that attending pre-school improves the life chances of low-income individuals so we pull the universal pre-school policy lever (or the pre-school voucher policy lever). Government provides these services to citizens, more people go to pre-school, and eventually we see a change in society. More generally, we think that doing X will cause Y so government will do something to encourage more people to do X if Y is a good thing, and fewer people to do X if Y is a bad thing. I think it's a really interesting metaphor for what public policy is, does, and should be.

Key Points from The Syllabus

2011-07-03T15:44:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

I just wanted to emphasize a few things about the course before we get started. This is not my first time teaching this course, but it is the first time teaching the course online. My goal is to use the technology to our advantage. I know you have all read the syllabus, so I am sure you noticed that we will be using Twitter, podcasts, and streaming videos on a regular basis. This may be a little messy so please let me know when issues come up. I'm hoping we can engage on policy issues in ways that feel less like work and more like discussion.

Since we will not be meeting in person, it is important that you read and understand the syllabus on your own. This means asking me questions NOW not an hour before assignments are due. For every week except the final week, you have three assignments due: The twitter or discussion board comments, the documentary reflection paper, and the reading quiz. The final week, you will have a paper due instead of a reading quiz.

Because we are using twitter in this class, it is important that you share your account name and tag your posts with #paf340sum11. I recommend creating an account for this class and using it to follow policymakers, newspapers, think-tanks etc. It is likely that new accounts will not appear in search right away so if you are creating a new account, you will probably want to post your comments on the discussion board during week 1. You can search for yourself to verify if your account is visible.

We have two books for this class Stone's Policy Paradox and Peters' American Public Policy. Both are on reserve in Hayden library and available from multiple sources.

I tried my best to find at least one free documentary per week, but that was not possible for week 4 so you will have to use iTunes or Netflix to access the documentary you choose. Of course, documentaries are designed to tell a story so you cannot take them as the absolute truth. I hope that you will view everything that you read and watch in this class and online with a skeptical eye. We will explore this more with Stone's book.

The quiz for this week is a "Welcome Quiz" on both the readings and the syllabus so please be sure you read the actual document posted on blackboard and not just this post!

Welcome to Contemporary Policy Challenges Summer 2011

2011-07-03T15:16:00.000-07:00

Hello all,

Welcome back from your hopefully fun and exciting holiday weekend. I am Andrea Mayo, your instructor for PAF 340: Contemporary Policy Challenges. I am starting my fourth year as a doctoral student in the School of Public Affairs. I came to Arizona to pursue my doctoral degree. Prior to that, I worked at a non-profit advocacy organization in Washington, DC called the National Skills Coalition. I have a Master's in Public Policy from Georgetown University and a Bachelor's in Sociology and Anthropology from Colgate University. I have experience working for lobbying groups, polling firms, campaigns, and "On the Hill".

My primary areas of interest are social welfare policy and anti-prostitution/sex-trafficking policies. I also have some substantive knowledge in education, economic, healthcare, and criminal justice policy. Of course, I see many of these policy areas as inter-related, which we'll talk about later in the semester. I'm really excited about this course and using the online format. I hope you are excited to learn!