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Think Tanks, Public Policy, and the Politics of Expertise
While the number of think tanks active in American politics has more than quadrupled since the 1970s, their influence has not expanded proportionally. Instead, the known ideological proclivities of many, especially newer think tanks with their aggressive efforts to obtain high profiles, have come to undermine the credibility with which experts and expertise are generally viewed by public officials. This book explains this paradox. The analysis is based on 135 in-depth interviews with officials at think tanks and those in the policy making and funding organizations that draw upon and support their work. The book reports on results from a survey of congressional staff and journalists and detailed case studies of the role of experts in health care and telecommunications reform debates in the 1990s and tax reduction in 2001.
eBook
COVID-19 and the policy sciences: initial reactions and perspectives
The world is in the grip of a crisis that stands unprecedented in living memory. The COVID-19 pandemic is urgent, global in scale, and massive in impacts. Following Harold D. Lasswell’s goal for the policy sciences to offer insights into unfolding phenomena, this commentary draws on the lessons of the policy sciences literature to understand the dynamics related to COVID-19. We explore the ways in which scientific and technical expertise, emotions, and narratives influence policy decisions and shape relationships among citizens, organizations, and governments. We discuss varied processes of adaptation and change, including learning, surges in policy responses, alterations in networks (locally and globally), implementing policies across transboundary issues, and assessing policy success and failure. We conclude by identifying understudied aspects of the policy sciences that deserve attention in the pandemic’s aftermath.
Journal Article
Reframing public policy : discursive politics and deliberative practices
In recent years a set of new ‘postempiricist’ approaches to public policy, drawing on discursive analysis and participatory deliberative practices, have come to challenge the dominant technocratic, empiricist models in policy analysis. In this book, Frank Fischer brings together this work for the first time and critically examines its implications for the field of public policy studies. He describes the theoretical, methodological and political dimensions of this emerging approach to policy research. The book includes a discussion of the social construction of policy problems, the role of interpretation and narrative analysis in policy inquiry, the dialectics of policy argumentation, and the uses of participatory policy analysis. After an introductory chapter, ten further chapters are arranged in four parts: Part I, Public Policy and the Discursive Construction of Reality (two chapters), introduces the re-emergence of interest in ideas and discourse. It then turns to the postempiricist or constructionist view of social reality, presenting public policy as a discursive construct that turns on multiple interpretations. Part II, Public Policy as Discursive Politics (two chapters), examines more specifically the nature of discursive politics and discourse theory and illustrates through a particular disciplinary debate the theoretical, methodological, and political implications of such a conceptual reframing of policy inquiry. Part III, Discursive Policy Inquiry: Resituating Empirical Analysis (four chapters), offers a postempiricist methodology for policy inquiry based on the logic of practical discourse, and explores specific methodological perspectives pertinent to such an orientation, in particular the role of interpretation in policy analysis, narrative policy analysis, and the dialectics of policy argumentation. Part IV, Deliberative Governance (two chapters), discusses the participatory implications of such a method and the role of the policy analyst as facilitator of citizen deliberation .
eBook
Policy capacities and effective policy design
Effectiveness has been understood at three levels of analysis in the scholarly study of policy design. The first is at the systemic level indicating what entails effective formulation environments or spaces making them conducive to successful design. The second reflects more program level concerns, surrounding how policy tool portfolios or mixes can be effectively constructed to address complex policy objectives. The third is a more specific instrument level, focusing on what accounts for and constitutes the effectiveness of particular types of policy tools. Undergirding these three levels of analysis are comparative research concerns that concentrate on the capacities of government and political actors to devise and implement effective designs. This paper presents a systematic review of a largely scattered yet quickly burgeoning body of knowledge in the policy sciences, which broadly asks what capacities engender effectiveness at the multiple levels of policy design? The findings bring to light lessons about design effectiveness at the level of formulation spaces, policy mixes and policy programs. Further, this review points to a future research agenda for design studies that is sensitive to the relative orders of policy capacity, temporality and complementarities between the various dimensions of policy capacity.
Journal Article
Economic geography and public policy
Research on the spatial aspects of economic activity has flourished over the past decade due to the emergence of new theory, new data, and an intense interest on the part of policymakers, especially in Europe but increasingly in North America and elsewhere as well. However, these efforts--collectively known as the \"new economic geography\"--have devoted little attention to the policy implications of the new theory.
eBook