My Thoughts on Stone Ch. 8 - Causes

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

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

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

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

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?

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)

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.

My Thoughts on Healthcare Policy

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?

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

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

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!