Author
Deborah Stone / Author
Deborah Stone
Title: Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making (2002 W.W. Norton & Company, New York)
PART II: GOALS
Ch. 2-Equity / Title: Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making (2002 W.W. Norton & Company, New York)
PART II: GOALS
Ch. 3-Efficiency
Key Concepts
Equity is the goal in distributive conflicts. It is the study of who gets what, when and how or “treating likes alike.” / Key Concepts
Efficiency is a way of judging the merits of different ways of doing things or “getting the most output for a given input.”
Notes
*8 Concepts of Equality: see following page
4 Major divides in thought about equity.
Major divide in equity is whether distributions should be judged by process or rediepients and items.
1. Nozick’s process justice: a distribution is just if it came about by a voluntary and fair process.
2. Nozick’s end-result justice: a just distribution is one in which both the recipients and items are correctly defined and each qualified recipient receives an equal share of of each correctly defined item.
Rawls’s justice as fairess: recipients are all citizens and items are social primary goods (things that are very improtand to people but are created, shaped and affected by social structure and political institutions).
Second major divide is what kind of interfrence with liberty one finds acceptable as a price of distributive justice.
Liberty is freedom from constraints OR liberty is freedom to do what one wants to do.
Process sees liberty as freedom to use and dispose of one’s resources as one wishes without interference. End-result sees liberty as having enough basic resources to choose out of desire rather than necessity.
Third major divide is whether one sees property as an individual creation or a collective creation.
Process sees property as individual. Things of value come into being and derive their value from individual effort. End-result sees property as collective. The whole is greater than sum of parts.
Fourth major divide concerns human motivation.
Process sees people are motivated to work, produce and create primarily by need. End-result sees people have a natural drive to work, produce and create and are inhibited by need.
Conservatism=Process
Liberalism=End-result / Notes
*Concepts of Efficiency: see next page
Efficiency is difficult to define because objectives are constantly changing.
Markets lead to goal of allocative efficiency if
1. exchanges are voluntary
2. people make voluntary exchanges based on objective (price, quality and alternative), and subjective (own needs, desires and abilities aka preferences) info.
Allocative efficiency asserts only individuals can judge welfare, individuals can judge only their own welfare and societal welfare is the aggregate of individual situations.
Distributive justice makes comparisons between people and judgements about the value of items. Defines welfare for society as a whole.
*Problems with Efficiency as a goal: see next page
*Equality-Efficiency Trade-Off: see next page
Similar to / Similar to
Differs from / Differs from
“GOALS”-policy is a rational attempt to reach objectives. May be called values. Goals in the polis are not fixed.
Author
Deborah Stone / Author
Deborah Stone
Title: Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making (2002 W.W. Norton & Company, New York)
PART II: GOALS
Ch. 4-Security / Title: Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making (2002 W.W. Norton & Company, New York)
PART II: GOALS
Ch. 5-Liberty
Key Concepts
Security is “the satisfaction of minimum human needs.”
Dilemma: how to define needs versus wants, desires. Needs are essential, but essential for what? / Key Concepts
Liberty is the ability to “do as you wish as long as you do not harm others.”
Dilemma: sometimes curtailing individual liberty may be necessary to preserve a community in which individuals can thrive and have free choice.
Notes
Simple definition of need: what is necessary for sheer physical survival.
Symbolic concept of need: recognizes and gives weight to human differences such as cultures, histories, social groups, classes and tastes. SO, security means protecting people’s identities as well as existence. This is why definition is political not biological.
Thus, need is relative as well as absolute.
Relative need is the perspective of people in society.
Absolute need is the perspective of people outside society or people continually living in the past alongside the present.
*5 Concepts of Need: see next page
Through politics, a society determines whether needs are real or legitimate.
Public needs are the needs that a community recognizes as legitimate.
*Security-Efficiency Trade-Off: see next page / Notes
Harms are political claims asserted by one set of interests against another.
*9 Kinds of Harms: see next page
Harms to others are not objective phenomena to be discovered or documented by science, but rather political claims which are granted more or less legitimacy by government.
The polis is a community with some collective vision of public interest, so the liberty of individuals is also limited by obligations to the community. Some restrictions may be to protect social order itself.
In the polis, liberties are usually assigned to roles instead of individuals. We grant liberties to certain types of people and allow them to cause certain types of harms because we define their duties and obligations according to their roles and believe that different roles require different types of freedoms.
Corporate actors are churches, trade unions, sports franchises, professional associations, business corporations, trade associations, trusts political parties and many voluntary associations. They have great power to impact individuals and the community, the consequences of their actions are magnified and their potential for causing harm is enormous.
*Liberty-Security Trade-Off: see next page
Modern democracies attempt to reconcile security and liberty by creating formal political rights for the dependent.
Similar to / Similar to
Differs from / Differs from
Conventionally, problem definition is a statement of a goal and a discrepancy between it and the status quo.
In the Polis, problem definition is the strategic representation of situations. Problem definition is a matter of representation because every description of a situation is a portrayal from only one of many points of view. Problem definition is strategic because groups, individuals, and government agencies deliberately and consciously fashion portrayal so as to promote their favored course of action. Problems are created in the minds of citizens by other citizens, organizations and groups and are an essential part of political maneuvering.
Author
Deborah Stone / Author
Deborah Stone
Title: Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making (2002 W.W. Norton & Company, New York)
PART III: PROBLEMS
Ch. 6-Symbols / Title: Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making (2002 W.W. Norton & Company, New York)
PART III: PROBLEMS
Ch. 7-Numbers
Key Concepts
Symbols are words and literary devices such as stories. It is anything that stands for something else. The meaning is not intrinsic to it, but is invested in it by the people who use it. / Key Concepts
Numbers is about the language of counting and measurement.
Notes
Four aspects of symbolic representation:
Stories: Narratives with heroes and villains, problems and solutions, tensions and resolutions. The most common are
---Stories of decline, such as story of stymied progress and story of progress-is-only-an-illusion.
---Stories of control, such as the conspiracy story and the blame-the-victim story.
Stories of control offer hope and stores of decline foster anxiety and despair.
Synecdoche: a figure of speech in which a whole is represented by one of its parts.
---Politicians or interest groups may select one horrible incident to represent the universe of cases, and use that example to build support for changing an entire rule or policy that is addressed to the larger universe.
---Good tool because it makes a problem concrete, allows people to identify with someone else, mobilizes anger and reduces the scope of the problem to make it manageable.
Metaphor: a likeness is asserted between one kind of policy problem and another. Common political metaphors include organisms, natural laws, machines, tools, containers, disease and war.
--the assumptions are if a is like b, to solve a you do what you would do with b.
--in all policy discourse, names and labels are created to make associations that lend legitimacy and attract support.
Ambiguity: The ability of statements, events and experiences to have more than one meaning.
---Allows people to agree on laws and policies because they can read different meanings into the word. / Notes
Numbers are the opposite of symbols, they are not ambiguous. Something is either counted or it is not. But ambiguity—the range of choices in what to measure of how to classify—always lies just beneath the surface of any counting scheme.
*The political nature of counting: see next page
*Numerical strategies in problem definition: see next page.
Similar to
neoconservatism—paint a picture of a happy past and show present as a move away from it. / Similar to
Differs from / Differs from
WHY COUNTING IS POLITICAL
2. Measuring any phenomenon implicitly creates norms about how much it too little, too much or just right.
3. Numbers can be ambiguous, and so leave room for political struggles to control their interpretation.
4. Numbers are used to tell stories, such as stories of decline.
5. Numbers can create the illusion that a very complex and ambiguous phenomenon is simple, countable and precisely defined.
6. Numbers can crate political communities out of people who share some trait and can be counted.
7. Counting can aid negotiation and compromise by making intangible qualities seem divisible.
8. Numbers, by seeming to be so precise, help bolster the authority of those who count.
NUMERICAL STRATEGIES IN PROBLEM DEFINITION
1. People react to being counted or measured and try to look good on the measure.2. The process of counting something makes people notice it more and record keeping stimulates reporting.
3. Counting can be used to stimulate public demands for change.
4. When measurement is explicitly used to evaluate performance, the people being evaluated try to manipulate their scores.
5. The power to measure is the power to control. Measurers have a lot of discretion in their choice of what and how to measure.
6. Measuring creates alliances between the measurers and the measured.
7. Numbers don’t speak for themselves, and people try to control how others will interpret numbers.
Author
Deborah Stone / Author
Deborah Stone
Title: Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making (2002 W.W. Norton & Company, New York)
PART III: PROBLEMS
Ch. 8-Causes / Title: Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making (2002 W.W. Norton & Company, New York)
PART III: PROBLEMS
Ch. 9-Interests
Key Concepts
Causes are the language of cause, effect and responsibility. Causes explain how the world works and how to assign responsibility for problems in the polis. / Key Concepts
Interests are the sides in politics, the groups that have a stake in an issue or are affected by it. They are the active side of effects, the result of people experiencing or imagining effects and attempting to influence them. Effects do not become important until they are translated into demands.
Notes
Policy debate is dominated by the notion that to solve a problem one must find its root cause or causes.
Two primary frameworks for interpreting the world: 1) natural world is the realm of fate and accident; 2) the social world is the realm of control and intent.
*Types of causal theories: see next page
Three types of complex social causes that cannot be contained in causal theory table:
1. complex systems: social systems necessary to solve modern problems are inherently complex. Accidents are inevitable and make it impossible to attribute blame.
2. institutional: social problems are caused by a web of large, long-standing organizations with ingrained patterns of behavior.
3. historical: social patterns tend to reproduce themselves.
Key point: one of the biggest tensions between social science and real world politics is that social scientists tend to see complex causes of social problems while in politics people search fro immediate and simple causes.
*Causal strategies in problem definition: see next page
*Uses of causal argument in polis: see next page / Notes
Objective interests: those effects that actually impinge on people, regardless of people’s awareness of them. “Having an interest in.”
Subjective interests: those things that people believe affect them. “Taking an interest in.”
*Concepts of interests: see next page.
Mobilization: the process by which effects and experiences are converted into organized efforts to bring about change.
Free rider problem: seen in market as a major obstacle to interest mobilization. Individuals have little or no incentive to join groups and work for a collective good since they will receive the benefit if others work for it and succeed in obtaining it. Therefore interests that satisfy private and individual wants are more likely to be mobilized.
3 forces that minimize free rider problem in polis:
1. People exist not as isolated, autonomous atoms, but are subject to the influences of many others.
2. Participation in collective efforts tends to follow the laws of passion rather than the laws of matter.
3. Collective action responds to symbols and ambiguity. If a group can portray an issue in a way that emphasizes bads, losses and costs it can more effectively harness individual energies.
James Q. Wilson states that diffusion of effects, whether costs or benefits, inhibits mobilization, whereas concentration fosters it. *See chart next page.* The essential idea is that the distribution of costs and benefits in any program determines the type of political contest it engenders.
A large part of politics consists in trying to influence how other people perceive effects of policies and proposals.
Good weak interests (collective, diffused, broad, long-term, spiritual, social, public, workers) often get squeezed out by strong, bad interests (individualistic, concentrated, narrow, short-term, material, economic, special, capitalists).
Key point: There is no such thing as an apolitical problem definition. An analyst must see how the definition defines interested parties and stakes, how it allocates the roles of bully and underdog, and how a different definition would change power relations.
Similar to / Similar to
Heifetz and LInsky: the experience of change as loss provides an emotional response.
CAUSAL STRATEGIES IN PROBLEM DEFINITION