Policy analysis, then and now

I

I graduated with a master’s in public policy studies from the University of Michigan in the early 1970’s and with a PhD in public policy from the UC Berkeley a little more than halfway through the 1980’s. I still identify as a policy analyst when asked my occupation/profession.

One misconception has been that in its early days policy analysis assumed problems were simpler and could be solved by the best and the brightest. That’s not how I remember my graduate training.

I had the good fortune to have been a student of Pat Crecine, the founding director of the Institute for Public Policy Studies (now the University of Michigan’s Ford School) and Aaron Wildavsky, a founder of the now Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Two different people you can’t imagine, but one insisting to his first-generation students that policymaking and budgeting were complex, while the other was the last person on earth who would say policy implementation was anything close to simple.

Another misconception: I remember a well-known policy academic upbraiding me that the “policy cycle” from policy formulation through policy evaluation/termination was a signal advance over early notions of incrementalism and the budgeting process. You only need implement something you had earlier planned to realize that the stage of “implementation” is itself a lethal critique of anything like a policy cycle.

II

But implementation is more than critique. We are, for example, used to thinking of a creeping crisis, like slow violence, as one that builds up until outright disaster triggers. Yet would one say that, given the inevitable gap between policies-as-stated and policies-as-implemented, implementation is the creeping crisis of policymaking and planning?

I don’t think so. We are just as apt to say implementation is de facto policymaking, and better for it when rendering more realism. In my view, we don’t ask, “Who’s going to adopt the recommendations and, if so, with what modifications?” before asking: “Who would implement the finalized recommendations and what are implementers’ scenarios for failing to do so?”

III

Realism doesn’t equate with intractability. At no point in my graduate training or later career do I remember being told that a policy problem not amenable to our toolkit was intractable. That toolkit, we were told, always had space for new methods and approaches. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to recapture that sense of policy analysis recasting difficult problems more tractably in the same way that policy analysis originally recast the field of public administration in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

One way I think about what has happened is to distinguish between (1) the discipline as taught in graduate schools and the profession that policy analysts think they are joining upon graduation and (2) the profession as it is actually practiced at any one time or place and the varied careers that policy analysts have across time and place.

IV

For example, when I started out, it was said that 90% of a policy analysis was answering the question, “What’s the problem?” Having defined the problem meant you presumably knew what a solution would look like. It’s my experience today that 90% of a policy analysis—indeed of major policy practice and work—are its initial conditions.

In the 1970s, a key indicator of what is now called “a failed state” was its inability to publish an annual government budget that actually operated over the year. That happens all over the place today, and in parts of the US. But the point isn’t whether the “state” has in this way failed. It’s first about how the initial conditions have changed and become more differentiated.

What arises are cases in their own right. When findings do not converge across multiple orthogonal metrics or measures (populations, landscapes, times and scales…), the analytical search becomes one of identifying specific, localized or idiographic factors at work. What you are studying may in reality be non-generalizable–that is, it may be a case it its own right–and failing to triangulate is one way to help confirm that.

V

A singular purpose of the toolkit remains that policy and management be presented from not just one discipline’s perspective (say, economics), but many—including political science, psychology, organization theory, and more.

Yet what frequently gets missed are the implied hyphens, i.e., “from a socio-politico-economic-cultural-historical-psychological. . .perspective”. Consider Polonius in Hamlet: “The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral. . .”

The hyphens there function as the performative demonstration of Polonius’s long-windedness. Interdisciplinary accounts of policy analysis and management, however, insist that analysts take their added wordage as anything but long-windedness.

The irony has been palpable. Over my policy analysis career, I’ve witnessed the 20-page policy brief reduced to the five-page memo into a fifteen-minute PowerPoint presentation into the three-minute elevator speech into this or that graphic and now a tweet or two. What next: Telepathy? The knowing look? This arc has been our very own version of long-windedness.