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.