The Art & Science of Political Decision-Making: Implications for Policy Analysis

1. The Art & Science of Political Decision-Making: Implications for Policy Analysis PA 306 J. Farley

2. Decision-making Theory • A post-WWII phenomenon. Gist p. 225 • Conflicts between rationality and political action. • Centers around the question of science and its place within public administrative practice.

3. How do we actually make decisions? • “habit, social custom, impulse, intuition, or procrastination; by consensus, delegation, bargaining, mediation, trial, voting, or flipping a coin… • The hallmark of contemporary policy analysis is its focus on rational methods of decision making.” Stone, p. 232

4. Rational Comprehensive Approach • Step one: Verify, Define, and Detail the Problem • Step two: Establish Evaluation Criteria • Step three: Identify Alternative Policies • Step four: Evaluate Alternative Policies • Step five: Display and Select among Alternative Policies • Step six: Monitor Policy Outcomes Patton and Sawicki p. 26

5. Core Concepts Inherent to the Rational-Comprehensive Approach: • Goals: Formally and broadly worded statements about what we desire to achieve in the long run. Objectives: More focused and concretely worded statements about end states, most usually with a time dimension.

6. Core Concepts Inherent to the Rational-Comprehensive Approach: • Criteria: Specific statements about the dimensions of the objectives that will be used to evaluate alternative policies or programs. • E.g. cost, benefit, effectiveness, risk, political viability, administrative ease, legality, uncertainty, equity, and timing.

7. Commonly Employed Evaluation Criteria • Technical feasibility • Effectiveness and adequacy • Direct/indirect impact • Short/long term impact • Economic and financial possibility • Political viability • Administrative operability Patton and Sawicki p.157

8. Core Concepts Inherent to the Rational-Comprehensive Approach: • Measures:Tangible, if not quantitative, operational definitions of criteria. Each criterion should have multiple measuresassociated with it. Patton and Sawicki P.140 Costs Marginal Sunk Opportunity Fixed Variable Benefits Externalities—no value assigned, but has social cost or benefit

9. Operationalizing variables • Defining so as to be able to measure • How do we quantify quality of life? • Using probability and statistics • Factoring in likelihoods of outcomes

10. The Problem of Multiple (Competing?) Criteria • What do to when conflicting objectives arise? • Wind energy • Medical errors • Information • Others?

11. Strategies to Compensate for Multiple Criteria • Paired comparisons 1, 2=2; 2,3=2; 2,4=4 • Satisficing • Reducing requirements to eventually come up with a satisfactory result • Non-dominated - Alternatives Method Alternatives evaluated based on each criterion. Ranks weighted to arrive at final solution. P & S p.269 • Weights, Rating Systems and Index Numbers

12. Criteria Matrix Displays

13. Searching for Alternatives • Researched Analysis • No- action Analysis • Quick Surveys • Literature Reviews • Real World Experiences • Passive Collection of Data • Analogy, Metaphors, Synectics • Brainstorming • Comparison with an Ideal • Patton and Sawicki pp. 181-192

14. Decision Analysis • Decision trees • Utilization of weighted outcomes • Based on anticipated likelihood of outcomes • “The technique builds in an assumption that a bad result is less bad if it is not certain to occur.” Stone P.237

15. Lindblom’s Science of ‘Muddling Through’ • “With the exception of Herbert Simon, no author has had as great an impact on the development of decision-making theory than Lindblom.” Gist p.232 • The “Science of Muddling Through” article published in the Public Administration Review in 1959 was a critical piece in a series of his work beginning in the 1950’s and extending over a two decade period. Gist p.232

16. Root Method: Rational Comprehensive Approach • The complex reality faced by most decision-makers makes it impossible to engage in a purely rational (positivist) system. • Root method assumes intellectual capacities and sources of information that men simply do not possess.” Lindblom P.199 • Complexity and lack of knowledge and information forces sub-optimization…

17. Branch Method: Incrementalism • “The capacity of the human mind in formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared to the size of the problem… or even a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality” Simon (1947) • “By the impossibility of doing otherwise, administrators often are reduced to deciding policy without clarifying objectives first.” Lindblom P.200 • “Typically, the administrator chooses—and must choose—directly among policies in which these values are combined in different ways. He cannot first clarify his values and then choose among policies.” Lindblom P.201

18. “Social objectives do not always have the same relative values.” Lindblom P.201 • “Even if all administrators had at hand an agreed ranking of these values, objectives, and constraints, their marginal values in actual choice situations would be impossible to formulate.” Lindblom P.201

19. Values/Goals/Objective & Empirical Analysis

20. Decisions Based on Marginal Values • “The administrator need not try to analyze any values except the values by which alternative policies differ and need not be concerned with them except as they differ marginally. His need for information on values or objectives is drastically reduced as compared with the root method; and his capacity for grasping, comprehending, and relating values to one another is not strained beyond the breaking point.” Lindblom P.202

21. Relationship Between Means and Ends

22. The Test of “Good Policy”

23. “If agreement directly on policy as a test for ‘best’ policy seems is a poor substitute for testing the policy against its objectives, it ought to be remembered that objectives themselves have no ultimate validity other than they are agreed upon… In an important sense, therefore, it is not irrational for an administrator to defend a policy as good without being able to specify what it is good for.” Lindblom P.202-203

24. Comprehensive vs. Noncomprehensive Analysis

25. The Efficiency of Democracy • “Democracies change their policies almost entirely through incremental adjustments. Policy does not move in leaps and bounds.” Lindblom P.203 • “In addition, it can be argued that, given the limits on knowledge within which policymakers are confined, simplifying by limiting the focus to small variations from present policy makes the most of available knowledge. Because policies being considered are like present and past policies, the administrator can obtain information and claim some insight.” Lindblom P.204

26. The “hidden hand” of specialinterests. • “Without claiming that every interest has a sufficiently powerful watchdog, it can be argued that our system often can assure a more comprehensive regard for the values of the whole society than any attempt at intellectual comprehensiveness.” Lindblom P.204 • “Even partisanship and narrowness, to use pejorative terms, will sometimes be assets to rational decision-making, for they can doubly insure that what one agency neglects, another will not; they specialize personnel to distinct points of view… a high degree of administrative coordination occurs as each agency adjusts its policies to the concerns of other agencies in the process of fragmented decision-making…” Lindblom p.204-205

27. Theory vs. Comparison

28. Importance of succession of incremental changes: • “In the first place, past sequences of policy steps have given him knowledge about probable consequences of further similar steps. • Second, he need not attempt big jumps toward his goals that would require predictions beyond his or anyone else’s knowledge, because he never expects his policy to be a final resolution of a problem. His decision is only one step, one that if successful can quickly be followed by another.

29. Third, he is in effect able to test his previous predictions as he moves on to each further step. • Lastly, he often can remedy a past error fairly quickly—more quickly than if policy proceeded through more distinct steps widely spaced in time.” Lindblom P.205

30. Central Elements of Lindblom’s theory of policy decisions were: • Decisions are serial—issues never solved all at once • Decisions are remedial—policy addresses problems • Decisions are marginal(ly) different from the status quo.p.223 Gist

31. And What About Politics?: Bringing Stone Back In • “Sometimes we value the way a decision is made more than the outcome…” Stone P.234

32. Some assumptions about rational decision-making: • Actions are evaluated by their consequences, not, for example, by their causes, by principles of right and wrong, by the processes that produced them, or by their emotional appeal. • E.g. war in Iraq • Decisions should be made by specifying goals and means, and then by evaluating different courses of action and choosing the best one.

33. The best action can be found by a single criterion. • Uncertain consequences can be measured by multiplying their likelihood times their magnitude, and the results can then be treated like certain values. Stone P.241

34. “Good decisions are portrayed as the result of cogitation, not bargaining, voting, or logrolling. The model depicts a problem from the point of view of someone—the ‘political actor’ or ‘decision maker’—who has the psychological capacity and legal authority to make a coherent, single decision.” Stone P.241

35. “In the polis, rational choice models of problems are—no less than other types of problem definition—persuasive appeals mounted by people with stakes in the outcome. Portraying a problem as a decision is a way of controlling its boundaries: what counts as problematic and what does not, how the phenomenon will be seen by others, and how others will respond to it.” Stone P.243

36. “In the polis, statements of goals are not only wishes and intentions: they are means of gathering political support. They are portrayals of a future meant to enlist the aid of others in bringing it about. For this purpose, ambiguity is often far better suited than explicitness and precision.” Stone P.243

37. “In the polis, controlling the number and kinds of alternatives considered is the essence of the political game.” Stone P.245 • Keeping alternatives off the agenda may be better than defeating them. Examples? • “Another part of strategy in the polis is to make one’s preferred outcome appear as the only possible alternative…” Stone p. 246

38. Hobson’s Choice: • The speaker “offers the audience an apparent choice, wearing all of the verbal clothing of a real choice, when in fact the very list of options determines how people will choose by making one option seem like the only reasonable possibility.” Stone P.246 • Two ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is through greed based plutocracy, one dollar one vote– the technique of the market place-- and the other through cooperative democracy, one person one vote– the technique of democratic socialism. • “Once the audience accepts the structure of a Hobson’s choice—that the alternatives presented are the only ones and that they have the qualities the author imparts to them—then it is stuck with the offerer’s preferred alternative.” Stone P.246

39. Merits of Deliberately Ambiguous Actions • 3 Mile Island evacuation Stone p. 251 • Houston evacuation

40. “What the rational model conceives of as abstract costs and benefits are in politics losses and gains to real people. They do not play an important role in politics unless someone mobilizes around them. Whether something is even noticed—much less counted—as a cost or benefit of a program depends on whether there are available cultural frameworks for identifying it and organized political interests for expressing it…

41. Any rational analysis is necessarily shaped by the structure of interests surrounding the issue. The harms and benefits to diffuse, unorganized interests are unlikely to be counted, while the losses and gains to concentrated interests will be weighed heavily.” Stone P.254