Estimated 10 minute read (By: Ashley Longman)
Public policy influences nearly every aspect of our daily life. Four-year degrees are dedicated to it and people spend their professional lives creating it. In this post, I’m going to try and explain everything that the average citizen should know about how policy is made.
In (about) 10 minutes…maybe 11.
What is Public Policy?
Public Policy is most simply defined as “whatever governments choose to do or not to do” (Dye, 1976: 1). The focus is not private or individual actions, but what governmental actors do in the name (and with the resources) of the citizens. Policy includes laws (legislation), regulation, court decisions, policies, and – in the USA from 2016 until recently – tweets.
Governments have several tools to implement policy. They are known as “the carrot”, “the stick”, and “the sermon” (Bekkers, Fenger, and Scholten, 2017: 145).
The carrot: Economic tools to reward (or punish) specific behaviour. An example of economic tools being used is a subsidy to make a particular decision more appealing. Think ‘cash for ash‘, but better.
The stick: legal instruments which define norms of expected behaviour and have a consequence to not following them. For example, getting paid to do some work and then not doing it is a breach of contract which leads to damages being owed.
The sermon: Communicative instruments which try to influence certain behaviour through informing citizens. For example, in the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic government messaging focused on the benefits of increased handwashing, sneezing in elbows, and keeping 1.5-meter (or 2 meters, or 6 feet) distance.
The carrot, the stick, and the sermon are used to alleviate a problem; climate change, breaches of contract, and a health pandemic, respectively. Public policies are a strategy to solve a problem affecting a large portion of the population, or at least a sizeable group. They don’t focus on helping only an individual or a small group. What counts as a problem can be loosely defined, and what one person views as a problem another might not. This is why we elect politicians who have a similar understanding of world problems as we do to implement strategies we agree with.
So, governments have a problem they want a solution to, and that solution acts as their goal. How they get to that goal is public policy. It’s the strategy to reach that goal. It’s something deliberate and deliberated. Policy is a statement of intent of what should be done, where resources should be diverted to, and what the tasks of the civil service should be.
The main features of public policy are:
- Public policy is what governments do, opposed to individual or corporate actions.
- Policies are solutions to a societal problem.
- A policy is the strategy to achieve a determined goal.
- Policies can take different forms.
For example, a societal problem could be the housing crises that many countries are facing where there are too many people looking to buy a house and not enough houses available. This leads to house prices increasing and pricing young people and low earners out of the housing market. The government chooses to take action to alleviate this crisis. They decide to loosen the restrictions regarding building on parts of the green belt and pass legislation to do so.
Types of Public Policy
Above I explained how governments can use a carrot, a stick, or a sermon to achieve their goal. But what are the different types of policy goals?
Any element of public life is a type of policy. Anything and everything the government does (or doesn’t). The different policy areas can also be defined by the minister/cabinet position who is in charge. For example: Foreign Affairs, Trade, Education, or Health. So, we can firstly define the type of policy by the policy area it covers.
Think about your first few hours awake in the morning. You wake up on a mattress, fire retardant because of safety regulations. Then you go drink coffee which has had an import tax placed on it as it entered the country as part of the national trade policy. It’s your day off, which you booked off using annual leave which is part of your contract thanks to employment policy. You go for a run on the tax funded road next to a disused train track (transport policy). Everything we do or don’t do is influenced by policy.
Secondly, we can think about what the policy aims to do. The intended goal of the policy defines the type. A government aiming to encourage new houses to have solar panels can implement a stimulating policy by offering a subsidy to those who install solar panels within 5 years of a house being built. The other types of policies are (re-)distributive policies, regulatory policies, constitutional policies, and provisional policies.
How is policy made?
Policy doesn’t just happen by accident. Often the process takes a long time and must deal with all types of institutional processes. Policy is also the subject of long debate, compromise, and changes over time. The policymaking process has 5 phases.
Firstly, a problem is identified either by policy makers or wider society (1. “Agenda Setting”). A solution or different solutions are determined by policymakers and policy experts (2. “Policy Development”) one of which decision-makers will choose (3. “Policy decision-making”). This policy is then implemented by the related government bodies/offices (4. “Policy Implementation”). Finally, by researching if the policy worked, it is evaluated (5. “Policy Evaluation”).
With the evaluation at the end of the process, the topic gets put on the agenda again. Hence this being a cyclical process know as the policy cycle.
Who makes policy? The role of actors
At each stage there are different actors involved. They can be divided into ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ actors.
Official actors are for example the government and the three branches of government: the executive (the government made up of the head of government, cabinet, and the civil service), the legislature (parliaments/congress who vote laws into being), and the judiciary (the courts who adjudicates if the laws are acceptable). This three-bodied separation of power – known as the trias politica – ensures checks-and-balances in modern democracies.
This separation of powers happens at different levels of (inter)national, regional, and local governments. For example, in the Netherlands each administrative/governance layer has different bodies involved.
The government will make policy and if it’s an act of legislation the parliament/congress will vote it in. It will then be scrutinised by the courts. Civil servants (those who work for the government) will act as policy makers and implementers, meaning they draw up the technical details (based on the instructions of the government) and are then in charge of implementing it. This process is all under the watchful eye of the non-official actors, especially the media, who influence.
The unofficial actors include:
- Citizens
- Interest Groups (including lobbyists and charities)
- Political Parties
- Think Tanks and Academics
- The Media
Their role is in influencing the politics of a policy by either creating enough momentum around a problem (see: Marcus Rashford) that it gets put on the policy and political agenda, as well as influencing and shaping the strategy chosen (see: lobbyists). Think Tanks, Academics, and Interest Groups are also important in the evaluation of policy where it’s decided whether a policy should be continued (see: image below).
So, ten minutes later, you know what policy is, what the different types of policy are, and who’s involved in making public policy.
References:
Bekkers. V., Fenger, M., and Scholten, P. (2017) Public Policy in Action: Perspectives on the Policy Process. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK,
Dye, T.R. 1976. Policy Analysis: What Governments Do, Why They Do it, and What Difference it Makes. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.
***The original article from Ashley Longman is available at: https://thegoodinformationproject.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-public-policy/
Policy Crossroads 