Public Policy (2): Policy Formulation and Transfer

For March and Olsen (1996), there are two conventional stories of democratic politics. The first story sees politics as a market for trades in which individual and group interests are pursued by rational actors. It emphasises the negotiation of coalition and 'voluntary' exchanges. The second story is an institutional one. It characterizes politics in a more integrative fashion, emphasizing the creation of identities and institutions as well as their structuring effects on political life.

Political democracy depends not only on economic and social conditions, but the design of political institutions (1984). The bureaucratic agency, the legislative committee, and the appellate court are arenas for contending social forces, but they are also collections of standard operating procedures and structures that define and defend interests. Political actors in their own right.

Political activity is not just a game played within rules, it also often involves the efforts to renegotiate those rules. The revision or reinterpretation of rules, (i.e. meta policy making), is important. The other point, which Skopol's work emphasises, is the way successful action then generates new constraints (i.e. rules of structures). Emphases on dramatic events and exogenous changes, to which the political system needs to respond, offer bases for prediction in contrast.

Knoepfel and Weidner (1982) use the term “policy programming” rather than formulation to address this issue and use a model that sees the detail of a policy as forming a series of layers around a policy core. These will include:

Policy Objectives	for example in relation to anti-poverty policy, the adoption of such a policy must imply a stance on the definition of poverty
Operational Elements	include the 'instruments' to be used to make the policy effective
Political-administrative arrangements	involve the specification of the authorities whose duty it will be to implement the policy, the notion that such authorities need money and other resources to do that follows self-evidently from that point
Procedural Elements	namely the rules to be used in the implementation of the policy

Dolowitz and Marsh (2000) defined “policy transfer” as the process by which knowledge about policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in one political system is used in the development of policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in another political system. Comparison of policy formulation and the degrees of policy transfer are as follows:

(1) National Pattern Approach puts the emphasis on institutional features, at the national level, that potentially exert a major impact on public policies.

(2) Policy Sector Approach suggests that different policy styles may be manifested in different policy sectors, even within the same country, let alone between countries.

(3) International Regime Approach is uncontroversial that policy making takes place in a globalised context and that interdependencies between countries, between nation states and supranational institutions (e.g. EU), have major impacts on domestic policy process and outputs.

(4) The Temporal Pattern Approach involves policy scholars investigating the evolution of a public policy over time and trying to find out regularities about policy dynamics.

Title: The Public Policy Process (7th Edition)

Author: Michael Hill, Frédéric Varone

Year: 2016

Region: UK

Publisher: Routledge

Genre: Politics, Social Sciences

Score: 6.5/10