Month: August 2014

The policy garbage can

“March and Olsen… began with the assumption that both the rational and incremental models presumed a level of intentionality, comprehension of problems, and predictability among actors that simply did not obtain in reality. In their view, decision-making was a highly ambiguous and unpredictable process only distantly related to searching for means to achieve goals. Rejecting the instrumentalism that characterized most other models, Cohen, March, and Olsen (1989) argued that most decision opportunities were:

‘a garbage can into which various problems and solutions are dumped by participants. The mix of garbage in a single can depends partly on the labels attached to the alternative cans; but it also depends on what garbage is being produced at the moment, or the mix of cans available, and on the speed with which garbage is collected and removed from the scene.’

Cohen, March, and Olsen deliberately used the garbage-can metaphor to strip away the aura of scientific authority attributed to decision-making by earlier theorists. They sought to drive home the point that goals are often unknown to policy-makers, as are causal relationships. In their view, actors simply define goals and choose means as they go along in a policy process that is necessarily contingent and unpredictable.”

Howlett, Michael, M. Ramesh, and Anthony Perl. Studying Public Policy: Policy Cycles & Political Subsytems: Third Edition. 2009. p. 152 (paperback)

See also: The Thick of It

Peter John sums up

“A synthetic approach implies there are multiple causes of policy change and variation. Accounts that rely on one process to explain why decision making takes a particular course are too narrow and relegate other factors to some dominant principle. The common view of contemporary social scientists is that there is no one general principle governing social and political life. Instead, social scientists need to make sense of the complexity, variation, and changeability of the empirical world, which is constituted by conflicting ideas. As such, theories of policy variation and change must incorporate and account for continuous change and adoption. It is not possible to say that only institutions count, or that social and political phenomena can be reduced to economic drivers. Policy outputs and outcomes are the result of a confluence of the five processes [institutions, groups, exogenous factors, rational actors, and ideas] that the book outlines in chapters 3 to 7.

There are three sets of authors who try to synthesize these factors. They are Sabatier (policy advocacy coalition theory), Kingdon (the policy streams approach), and Baumgartner and Jones (the punctuated equilibrium model). The first seeks to combine ideas and networks in public policy, where policy subsystems are driven and sometimes fractured by large socioeconomic or external events. The second is based on the continual interplay of problems, solutions, and policies in the garbage can model of policy choice. The third is a model of agenda setting, seeking to describe how agendas and policies move fro periods of high stability to times of rapid change and fluidity. All three models are contemporary because they place ideas at the center of their analysis. The time when writers believed that only interests drive public policy is now over. Conceptions, discourse, beliefs, and norms define the process of policy making. Yet unlike some of the ideational theories described in chapter 7, Sabatier, Kingdon, and Baumgartner and Jones seek to place ideas with the complex interplay of individual choice, networks, institutions, and socioeconomic changes. Thus each framework has all these elements.

In keeping with the critical approach of this book, none of these authors quite succeeds in creating a theory of public policy. For all the role of knowledge and advocacy in Sabatier’s approach, the policy advocacy coalition framework is too static, as it is driven by outside events. Kingdon’s approach is highly attractive, but it relies too much on change and fluidity. Baumgartner and Jones neatly contrast stability and instability in the account of policy making over time, but in the end it is not entirely clear that they explain the transition between stability and change and back again.”

John, Peter. Analyzing Public Policy: Second Edition. 2012. p. 176 (hardcover)

In solid and informative surroundings

It may be something of a hulking brutalist monstrosity in terms of architectural design, but it is both extremely useful and aesthetically appealing to live a block away from such an extensive store of knowledge as Robarts Library. The long summer hours on weekdays are also appreciated.

I have been occupying long stretches of time on the eleventh floor – in the company of most of the political science books – reading, summarizing, writing out definitions of terms, sketching the content of theoretical schools and the relationships between them, and fervently hoping that Friday’s exam yields the A- or better which I need to move on to the research stage of my PhD.

Fixing the apostrophe with two marks for two purposes

Both for people who are new to English and for life-long speakers, one of the most consistently confusing aspects of the language is the apostrophe.

There†s a pretty straightforward reason for this, I think, and it†s one that could be addressed fairly easily if people are willing to consider a minor linguistic change. There are two main uses for the apostrophe:

  • Indicating possession, as in: “The cat’s bed is beside the dog’s bed, on the floor between Carol’s bed and Peter’s bed” and
  • Indicating a contraction, as in: “I’ve noticed there’s not a lot of time ’til Christmas”

This dual use is most problematic insofar as it causes it’s/its errors. People are naturally used to seeing the apostrophe as a marker for possession, so “The dog is vexed by it’s fleas” seems intuitive.

A simple solution would be to use two different marks for the two different purposes. Since possession seems to be the use that is most intuitive for people, I would suggest using the new mark for contractions. A superscript dagger wouldn†t change the look of printed text too much. Furthermore, the character is already included in nearly all typefaces, and isn†t widely used for any purpose that isn†t equally well served by a numbered footnote. People who chose to make the change wouldn†t confuse people excessively, and English’s reputation as an incoherent hodgepodge of a language might be somewhat mitigated.

The problems with apostrophes also connect to the awkward issues involved in indicating plurality and possession for words the always end in ‘s’, over which there is no agreement even among pedantic language experts. Using two punctuation marks wouldn†t settle that, but it may help reduce the odds of error.