TEACHING PUBLIC

POLICY IN POST

GRADUATE

COURSE IN

POLITICAL

SCIENCE

COURSES TAUGHT IN THE DEPT.

Public Policy

Public Policy in India

Development and Public Policy

Ethics in Public Administration, and Public

Policy

Post-graduate Diploma in Public Policy. (to be

offered from the academic year 2013-2014

MEDIA RELATED

Cyberpolitics – a Fourth Semester Elective

Politics and Media – being drafted.

Issues in structuring the courses:

The bureaucratic structure

The turf war – within and without.

Conservative nature of the faculty.

Often tussle over what is core of the subject and

if we are watering down that.

Contradiction – political vs. economic

opportunities

The NPM movement – with its themes of

decentralization, performance measurement,

private sector style management and contracting

out of services – has emphasised the importance

of public policy education – focusing on policy

design, decision styles and intergovernmental

cooperation.

Increased demand for public policy analysts

Harold Lasswell and others expected Policy Sciences to replace traditional political studies

In his presidential address to the American Political Science

Association, Harold Lasswell articulated a vision that

political science was poised to become “the policy science, par

excellence”

Lasswell proposed that the policy science had three distinct characteristics :

Multi-disciplinary

Problem Solving

Explicitly Normative – not cloaked in the guise of scientific objectivity

As Lasswell saw it, political scientists would

combine democratic values, empirical research

skills, and substantive expertise to produce policy

research that was highly relevant to public policy

decisions.

As the decades have passed, economics, not

political science, has emerged as the preeminent

policy science.

Professional Reasons

Profession Estate

Knowledge Scientific Estate

Don Price

Solution to

Practical

Problems

Scientific Reasons –

Public Policy can be studied in order to gain greater knowledge about its origin, the process by which it is developed and its consequences for society.

Policy might be regarded as either dependent or an independent variable.

MODELS OF POLICY ANALYSIS

Institutionalism

Group theory: policy as a group equilibrium

Elite theory: policy as elite preference

Marxist and Post Marxist

Critical

Public choice theory

Demands – poll results; election

returns; protests &

demonstrations; interest group

lobbying

Supports – expressions of

favorable opinion; paying of

taxes; loyalty to state & its

leaders

Feedback – reactions to policy decisions; evaluating

outcomes & determining if they are meeting original

expectations – including adjudication by courts of law

Policy

formulation/

law-making by

legislatures

Policy

execution –

application/

enforcement

by

bureaucracy

Outputs – laws,

rules,

regulations

A contemporary schematic of the public-policy process

AGENDA SETTING POLICY MAKING PHASE POLICY IMPLEMENTATION

PHASE

During the last decade terms on governance,

institutional capacity, networks, complexity,

discourses, trust, deliberation and

interdependence has captured our imagination.

Terms like state, government, power, authority,

loyalty, sovereignty, participation, interest

groups have lost their attractiveness.

Rational choice and structural approach has been

challenged by institutional analysis.

Power, non-decision.

Citizens, in this view, are background invisible

actors in politics; they exert, at best, an indirect

influence on public policy through their efforts to

select, support, and sway elected representatives.

Does not discuss how public policies influence

what citizens want, and how.

Historically, professors of public policy analysis

have also been confronted with a sort of Hobson’s

choice.

On one hand, we could teach rational,

quantitative-based analysis where rigour

While this dominant approach certainly has

appeal and importance, lost in it is the essence of

politics, namely, power and negotiations.

Politics happens when the goals of a policy are

decided, when the desirability or undesirability of

the consequences of different interventions are

assessed.

In the process, the cause and effect arguments provided by the policy analyst become political claims, used for some audiences under some conditions, and perhaps not for others, and concealing the intentions of particular power groups as much as they reveal intentions.

For one thing, while all social analysis is selective, multivariate analysis demands a sharply selective use of data. A narrow range of variables is identified and investigated, treated as independent or intervening or dependent variables, and represented by selected empirical measures.

It is even more important to rescue the study of

policy from what we might call the technologists,

whose main concern has been to develop aids to

assist official decision-makers make in some

sense "better" decisions.

In this view, exemplified by writers like

Yehezkiel Dror policy-making is essentially a

technical question, a matter of developing more

systematic means to canvass alternatives, assess

costs and benefits, and implement choices.

THE UNPREDICTABILITY OF PUBLIC POLICY –

Many complex social problems have no

definitive formulation – we call them “wicked

problems” because they are difficult to both

describe and resolve (Rittel and Webber, 1973)

(e.g., alienation, breakdown of civility, apathy).

Solutions to these problems are not true-or-false,

but good-or-bad (e.g., choosing among divergent

risks – using pesticides on crops vs. risking

famine; using air bags in cars carrying small

children).

Every wicked problem can be considered to be a

symptom of another problem; The choice of

explanation determines the nature of the

problem's resolution (e.g., even if universal

health insurance increases costs to everyone, is it

still the “right” thing to do?).

In the words of Jean-Pierre Lehmann, a

Swiss business school professor who

knows Asia well, there is a lot of tank, but

not much think.

Mahbuban describes public policy studies

as a “sunrise industry”..

First, no one single clear and simple explanation

of something as many-faceted and huge as

modern government is likely to be possible, at

least with our current level of knowledge

TEACHING CHALLENGES

“Public policy has largely been a Western social

science, developed on the assumption that it had

universal applicability. History has proven this

assumption to be flawed.

“Public policy as a field is about what

governments can or should do for the common

good,”

Because the field of public policy studies is so new, it has yet to coalesce around a shared set of principles, theories, and priorities (paradigm).

For public policy to be useful, we must bridge the gap between what academics know and how practitioners and citizens use what we know to make better policy (or better policy arguments).

CHALLENGES FACING STUDENTS OF PUBLIC POLICY

Measurement and comparability: how do

we identify the factors that explain, e.g.,

what makes a policy effective, or what

constitutes civic engagement?

Do concepts mean the same thing from

country-to-country? E.g., what does “health

security” mean – protection against disease,

insurance against economic calamity?

Preventing bio-terrorism?) This is important

to ensure cross-cultural validity.

Are data collected in one place

generalizable to conditions in another?

Data are often unique to a specific society

while others result from “global diffusion”

of ideas (e.g., foreign trade, globalization of

media, intellectual exchanges).

Finally, comparability depends upon the

use of common language: E.g., does North

Korea have interest groups? Not if you

define them in the U.S. sense of “pressure

groups” or “lobbyists.”

Ability to develop theoretically-sound propositions: e.g., “in certain types of political systems (e.g., planned economies, mature democracies, developing nations), y is likely to result when x occurs.”

Some feel that this is what public policy research should focus on because it can advance our ability to predict, e.g., election outcomes, public opinion.

In this context, validity refers to the extent to which an instrument actually measures what it intends; reliability means the extent to which categories applied to cross-national expression constitutes “universals” or are “invariant.”

India is waking up to this pretty late and a very tardy manner.

Professional vs a broad liberal arts education.

Much is based on touching faith. Eg. PPP.

Advocacy research.

Course material.

Deconstructing the Underlying assumptions. Eg, Tragedy of the commons vs tragedy of the anti-commons.

Case Studies – Cuban Missiles Crisis. (nothing like Hallway.org or Harvard Business School)

Resistance from traditional courses. Issue of enrolment.

Tougher Course.. And hence prefer soft options.

Quantitative Analysis- so issues like CBA, evaluation does not get adequate attention.

Not practice oriented – Unlike the American counterparts – no internships.

Issue of widening vs deepening

Thank

You