Policy Paradox Deborah Stone Flashcards
Chapter 1: Politics
Public policy is about communities trying to achieve something as communities. Unlike the market, which starts with individuals and assumes no goals and intentions other than those held by individuals, a model of the polis must assume collective will and collective effort. A community must have members and some way of defining who is a member and who is not. A model of the polis must also include a distinction between political community and cultural community. The paradox of altruism: when people act to benefit others, they feel satisfaction, fulfillment, and a sense that helping others gives their lives meaning. The strict-self interest paradigm, therefore, makes altruism impossible by definition. The concept of public-interest is to the polis what self-interest is to the market.
Chapter 1: Politics
COMMONS PROBLEM: because people often pursue a conception of public interest that differs from their conception of self-interest, the polis is characterized by a special problem: how to combine self-interest and public-interest, or to put it another way, how to have both private benefits and collective benefits. The gap between self-interest and public interest is bridged by some potent forces: INFLUENCE, COOPERATION, and LOYALTY. INFLUENCE: promotes collective action, bandwagoning, and may become coercion; but, it is at the heart of many policy dilemmas. COOPERATION: politics involves seeking allies and cooperating with them in order to compete with opponents, and it is essential to power. LOYALTY: in politics, loyalty is presumed, and people expect others will normally stick to their friends and allies.
Chapter 1: Politics
GROUPS: People belong to institutions and organizations, even when they are not formal members. Policy making isn’t only about solving public problems, but about how groups are formed, split, and re-formed to achieve public purposes. Groups are important because decisions of the polis are collective. INFORMATION: In the ideal market, information is perfect. Because politics is driven by how people interpret information, political actors strive to control interpretations. Policy information is strategically crafted in politics. Information is never fully and equally available to all participants in politics. Secrecy and revelation are tools of political strategy. PASSION: In the market, resources are finite and are used up when they are used (guns and butter). In the polis, laws of paradox operate alongside laws of matter. Like passion, political resources are often enlarged or enhanced through use, rather than diminished; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; and, things can mean and be therefore more than one thing at once. Ambiguity and symbolic meanings are common in the polis, and the resultant meanings can be anything, and they matter. POWER: is a phenomenon in communities; its purpose is to subordinate individual self-interest to other interests; it operates through influence, cooperation, and loyalty; and, it obeys the laws of passion rather than the laws of matter.
Chapter 2: Equity
Paradox in distributive problems: equality often means inequality, and equal treatment often means unequal treatment. Every distribution has three important dimensions: the recipients, the item (being distributed), and the process. The dimensions of equality include: membership, merit (hard work levels the playing field), and rank ( resources should be allocated on the basis of subgroups rather than individual differences). Group based distributions holds that some major divisions in society are relevant to distributive equity, and that membership in a group based on these divisions should sometimes outweigh individual characteristics in determining distribution. Rank-based distributions assign people to groups according to more or less fine-tuned individual measurements. Need serves to influence distribution processes. When people fight about equity, they are also fighting about these less tangible social and political aspects of distribution. We are quite willing to accept unequal results so long as we know the process is fair. The two most important considerations for inequality are the impact of inequality on community and democracy. Inequality destroys communities. If income inequality has grown to historic proportions, so presumably has democratic inequality.
Chapter 3: Efficiency
Efficiency is getting the most for the least, or achieving an objective for the lowest cost. Challenges in the polis to the free market model of efficiency include: human decision making doesn’t correspond to the rationality model, it includes emotional, moral, and social considerations. People use information strategically, by sharing it and withholding it. Buyers and sellers in some relationships have vastly unequal power. The weaker side may experience the exchange as coercive. Almost all exchanges can have harmful effects on people who are not party to them. Gov’t must provide public goods bu using its authority to require citizens to pay for them. Markets cannot produce some public goods, especially community and the trust necessary for markets to function.
Chapter 4: Welfare
Concepts of Welfare and Need: 1. Material vs. Symbolic Needs: resources have symbolic meanings that can be as important to welfare as their material value. 2. Intrinsic v. instrumental value: Resources are important to meet immediate and direct needs, but also to enable people to fill their broader goals. 3. Volatility vs. security: Welfare depends not only on having sufficient resources at one time but also on being able to count on having sufficient resources in the future. 4. Quantity vs. quality: Welfare depends partly on hard-to-measure intangible factors. 5. Individual vs. relational needs: Welfare depends on being able to satisfy one’s needs to belong, to care for others, and to give and receive help. 6. Absolute vs. relative welfare: Subjective welfare depends on comparisons with other members of one’s community as well as one’s absolute level of resources.
Chapter 5: Liberty
POSITIVE vs. NEGATIVE CONCEPTS: Negative liberty means no one interferes with your behavior. Positive liberty means having active support from others to ensure literacy, education, health care, income, and physical security. Fulfillment of negative liberty does not fulfill positive liberty, and fulfillment of positive liberty may interfere with negative liberty. OBLIGATIONS TO COMMUNITY: Individuals must contribute to the public interest as well as their own goals. Personal liberty can be enlarged by a strong community and thus by requirements to contribute to collective life. PATERNALISM: Individuals might sometimes choose to act in ways that compromise their future freedom. Personal liberty can sometimes be enlarged by coercive requirements to act for one’s own good. FREEDOM OF SPEECH: Boundary between speech and behavior is fuzzy. Freedom to express opinions is necessary for democratic debate, but some kinds of expression harm individuals and groups. MULTICULTURALISM: Diverse multicultural societies create needs for group rights to preserve and express their cultures. Group cultures may conflict with liberal concepts of individual rights and liberty.
Chapter 6: Security
PARADOXES OF SECURITY: Risk assessment, prevention, and planning can increase security. Risk assessment, prevention, and publicizing security planning can increase psychological insecurity. Surveillance can increase security by detecting threats to security. Surveillance can create lack of confidence in government, distrust, and hostility to government, thereby increasing threats to security. Borders create physical protection from outside threats. Protective borders increase psychological insecurity by symbolizing danger and heightening awareness of outside threats. Imprisonment can increase security by incapacitating criminals and deterring potential criminals. Mass imprisonment as conducted in the US can indirectly increase crimes by ex-convicts and destabilize communities. Weapons can increase security by enhancing self-defense. Weapons can decrease security through non-defensive uses - intentional attacks, accidents, and suicides.
Chapter 7: Symbols
Symbolic devices in politics. STORIES - Narratives with heroes and villains, problems and solutions, tensions and resolutions. The most common themes are: CHANGE; stories of decline including the story of stymied progress and the story of illusory progress, and stories of rising and progress; and, POWER: stories of control, including the story of helplessness, the conspiracy story, and the blame-the-victim story. SYNECDOCHE - A small part of a policy problem is used to represent the whole - for example, the horror story. METAPHOR - One policy problem is likened to another. Common metaphors in policy politics include organisms, disease, natural laws, machines, wedges, containers, and wars. Symbolic devices can mean two (or more) things simultaneously. Ambiguity allows policy makers to placate both sides in a conflict by giving the rhetoric to one side and the decision to the other.
Chapter 8: Numbers
WHY COUNTING IS POLITICAL? Counting requires decisions about categorizing, about what or whom to include and exclude. Measuring any phenomenon implicitly creates norms about how much is too little, too much, or just right. Numbers can be ambiguous, and so leave room for political struggles to control their interpretation. Numbers are used to tell stories, such as stories of decline (“we are approaching a crisis”). Numbers can create the illusion that a very complex and ambiguous phenomenon is simple, countable, and precisely defined. Numbers can create political communities out of people who share some trait that has been counted. Counting can aid negotiation and compromise, by making intangible qualities seem divisible. Numbers, by seeming to be so precise, help bolster authority of those who count. NUMERICAL STRATEGIES IN PROBLEM DEFINITION: People react to being counted or measured, and to to “look good” on the measure. The process of counting something makes people notice it more, and record keeping stimulates reporting. Counting can be used to stimulate public demands for change. When measurement is explicitly used to evaluate performance, the people being evaluated try to manipulate their scores. The power to measure is the power to control. Measurers have a lot of discretion in their choice of what and how to measure. Measuring creates alliances between the measurers and the measured. Numbers don’t speak for themselves, and people try to control how others will interpret them.
Chapter 9: Causes
TYPES OF CAUSAL THEORIES: MECHANICAL (Intended, Unguided) machines that perform as designed but cause harm, people who act like automatons, rigid bureaucratic routines. INTENTIONAL (intended, guided) oppression, conspiracies, harmful side effects that are known but ignored, “bad apples”, blaming the victim “hard variety”. ACCIDENTAL (unintended, unguided) natural disasters, fate, bad luck, machines that run amok. INADVERTENT (unintended, unguided) unanticipated harmful side effects of policy, avoidable ignorance, carelessness, blaming the victim “soft variety”. Causal arguments in the polis are used to: challenge or protect an existing set of rules, institutions, and interests; assign blame and responsibility for fixing a problem and compensating victims; legitimize certain actors as “fixers” of the problem, given them new authority, power, and resources; and, create new political alliances among people who perceive themselves to be harmed by the problem.
Chapter 10: Interests
The quintessential political point of view defines problems not by their causes but by their effects. Interest representation has a dual quality: leaders define an interest by portraying an issue, showing how it affects people, and persuading them that the portrait is accurate; and, leaders speak for people in the sense of standing for them and articulating their wishes in policy debates. When people understand their problems as shared by others and they organize to influence policy, the process is called mobilization. Rational choice theory demonstrates the obstacles to cooperation and mobilization with two important concepts: prisoner’s dilemma and the free-rider problem. In the polis, people don’t live in isolation; people can do and talk to each other; cooperative efforts generate a kind of perpetual energy that keeps on generating more collective action; participation in collective efforts tends to follow the laws of passion rather than the laws of matter; the internet and social media dramatically facilitate communication and group action; and, symbols and ambiguity so prevalent in the polis can change the way people interpret their interests an defeat the logic of rational choice. Policy issues don’t determine the kind of political contests that occur; instead, politics shapes the way policy issues are portrayed and perceived in the first place.
Chapter 11: Decisions
Decision making in the polis differs from the rational model. The rational model ignores or neglects some of the most important modes of thinking and techniques that political leaders use to structure their decision making and to gather political support for their policy choices. By labeling goals vaguely and ambiguously, leaders can draw support from different groups who otherwise might disagree on specifics. Another strategy is to make one’s preferred outcome appear as the only possible alternative. The way we think about problems is extremely sensitive to the language used to describe them (framing).
Chapter 11 (cont’d): Decisions
State goals ambiguously, and possibly keep some goals secret or hidden. Be prepared to shift goals and redefine goals as political conditions change. Keep undesirable alternatives off the agenda by not mentioning them. Make your preferred alternative appear to be the only feasible or possible one. Focus on one part of the causal chain and ignore others that would require politically difficult or costly policy actions. Use rhetorical devices to blend alternatives; don’t appear to make a clear decision that could trigger strong opposition. Select from the infinite range of consequences only those whose costs and benefits will make your preferred course of action look best. Choose the course of action that hurts powerful constituents the least, but portray your decision as creating maximum social good for a broad public.
Chapter 12: Incentives
Incentives and deterrence are flip sides of a motivational coin. Incentive systems have three parts: incentive giver, incentive receiver or target, and the incentive itself. Incentives work by getting people to change their minds. Theory of incentives assumes: individuals are adaptable, that givers and receivers are unitary actors, and, that the receiver has some orientation toward the future. Incentives are thus negative or positive only in relation to the target’s expectations, and understanding the target’s point of view is critical in designing them. In a democracy, incentives are: instruments of power; can be coercive if the target is needy or dependent on the giver; are intended to interfere with targets’ autonomy by inducing them to make different choices than they have made in the past; can signal disrespect for targets’ choices and imply that they can be bribed. Citizens in the polis do and should make choices partly on the basis of promoting the public interest.
