Pretty pretty pretty

Obama-pology

Some things to keep in mind regarding Obama-hating by the left:

1. A good portion of the newer Democrats in Congress come from fairly conservative districts. Obama's public support is not necessarily that beneficial to these members. Consequently, Obama has little direct sway over them, especially regarding any kind of highly visible and salient issue.

2. The only domestic policy decisions the President can make directly are executive orders. And while the range of policy decisions that are subject to Executive Orders is a matter of some constitutional complexity, it is clear that there ARE limits. The President's other main tool is the appointment power, and that has been highly constrained by a filibuster-happy Republican minority in the Senate.

3. Despite the recent rise of the Democrats, the mass public is ideologically more moderate than the Democratic Party. The public is to the right of the Democrats and to the left of the Republicans. Liberals (and, in truth, ideologues from the right AND the left) have trouble accepting the following fact: most people in the country DO NOT AGREE WITH YOU!! It may very well be that Obama got elected and has pushed moderate policies because a) he is a moderate and b) government responds to public opinion.

4. The fractured media market the President faces today makes the bully pulpit less powerful than it once was. No longer can the President interrupt some prime-time sit-com and expect to reach the vast majority of the American people. That makes it difficult to marshal public enthusiasm for policy change.

5. As much as I hate to say it, the government cannot willy-nilly ignore and fuck over corporations. Government depends on corporations to provide input, expertise, and jobs. Charles Lindblom explains this unpleasant truth in his Politics and Markets (1977). Why have we allowed BP to continually fuck up the oil spill stoppage? Because nobody else in the Federal government is more qualified than BP to do the job. We have structured our society in a way where corporations always have government by the balls (what Lowi calls "permanent receivership"). Don't get me wrong...I think we should regulate THE SHIT out of the oil industry, and this was undoubtedly a failure of oversight and regulation. But we also cannot blindly impose impractical, ineffective, or unduly damaging regulations on businesses. As long as we depend on markets to distribute goods and services (i.e., as long as we are fundamentally a capitalist society), business will enjoy a "privileged position," as Lindblom would say.

So, why hasn't Obama shoved through more radical reforms on health care, energy, financial sector reform, etc? Well...because he's probably a fairly moderate guy by nature, and because even if he wanted something more radical, the office of the President is simply not powerful enough to do it without a sense of urgency and broad based consensus in the mass public. Bush had that after 9/11; when it faded, his domestic agenda turned to a giant pool of diarrhea. Obama is making deliberate, noticeable improvements on a variety of fronts. If he were trying for anything more...well...we might be looking at a tall glass of ass piss instead of the warm glass of mountain dew that we've achieved. I'll take warm mountain dew over ass piss any day.

Fun!

So Long!

Masks

Joe's Attempt at Abstract Art

Yawn

Too many crannies!!

I've enjoyed teaching this semester, because it's given me a chance to more thoroughly organize my conceptual map of public policy. One way I've done that is by discussing some of the juicy policy debates that have passed before the American consciousness over the past year.

As a field, public policy is not very coherent. It's not like biology or chemistry or physics. Yes, there are major disagreements within these fields too, but there are probably only two or three major theoretical perspectives. In public policy, there are probably 5 or 6, depending on whether one includes public administration/public management or policy analysis as separate fields. Some of the major camps/perspectives/disagreements include:

Micro-level approaches vs. Macro-level approaches

Are you focusing on individuals, organizations/institutions, or systems?

Individuals: Are people rational or irrational? Self-interested or altruistic? Ruled by material incentives or cultural and ethical values?

Organizations: Are these governed more by official rules or unofficial rules? How do rules and structures of organizations impact outcomes and individual behavior? How do private and public organizations differ?

Systems: How do important players interact to create policy change over time? Are individual people and groups the driving force of change, or are outcomes driven by background socio-cultural-demographic variables that are relatively stable over time? What's the balance between stability and dynamism? How do official actors, unofficial actors, and public opinion interact?


Normative v Descriptive Theory

Are you interested in what policy SHOULD look like, or what policy DOES look like?

Should: welfare economics, political philosophy, ethics

Does: political Science, sociology, organization theories, political philosophy

Policy Making Process v Policy Evaluation

Are you interested in the process by which policies get made and get changed, or are you more interested in how policies impact the world? Process questions are generally in the realm of political science. Outcome questions are in the realm of econometrics, research design, statistics, etc. Some might consider outcome questions to be a completely separate field of Policy Analysis.

So, with these kind of meta-theoretical distinctions in mind, you can imagine how complex the field is as a whole. Indeed, there is no "whole." It's a bunch of sub-communities conducting research using their particular lens. It's chaos, basically.

The most comprehensive of the approaches are the ones that try to descriptively model the policy making process. The major camps that take this approach are:

Punctuated Equilibrium Framework

The Multiple Streams Framework

The Advocacy Coalition Framework

The Institutional Rational Choice Approach

The Comparative State Policy Approach

To this list, I would probably add sociological and even philosophical approaches, like post-modernism and marxism and structural-functionalism.


Oh MY GOD!!! TOO MUCH SHIT!!! Every little nook and cranny of all of these permutations of approaches has it's own literature! Barf.

Play time

1.5 more weeks of teaching. Then a month off. Going to frolick and play. And do a lot of reading on social policy and policy theory to get ready for my first exam at the end of the summer. Woo!!!

But tomorrow, I'm going to Louisville for some bourbon and baseball. What what!!!!!

10,000!!!

Wow, after only 4 years, we have reached 10,000 hits!

Oh boy...we have finally arrived. Taking the blogosphere by storm, by golly!

By the way, I'm thinking about switching over to Wordpress. Blogger sucks. I know my two readers will find this very confusing, but bear with me. It's probably not worth it if I just convert to full-time picture posting, but if I keep discussing real things, it would be nice to have more bells and whistles than I can get with blogger.

Speaking of pictures: