Impacts, Policy

Public Policy and Political Science

Public policies are the mechanisms used by governing authorities to allocate benefits, burdens, and regulations for the society. Public policies are what governments and their agents produce, including statutes, budgets, resolutions, proclamations, programs, and direct contacts with people. Policies must be understood as nested in one another. Thus, the U.S. Constitution is a fundamental public policy. Statutes passed by Congress or state legislatures also are policies, as are the guidelines written by agencies as policy is implemented. Court rulings may change a statute, and thus court rulings also are public policies. A program established by a local government to regulate or provide services is itself a part of the public policy chain. These policies are revealed as texts and also in the actual practices and discourse of those involved in crafting or implementing public policy. Policy as written may not be the way it actually is perceived and may or may not be put in place exactly as written. Policy may have intended as well as unintended consequences: direct effects and indirect ones.

Although the effects of public policy have always been of concern to political science, this field was slow to develop. Part of the reason is the sheer complexity of policy content and the difficulty in finding common elements across different levels and types of policy. Another reason for the slow development of theory about policy impacts is the assumption that policy consequences are guided mainly by policy-specific theory, which often is simply not an accurate understanding of policy effects. So, for example, it is sometimes assumed that the impact of environmental policy depends on what theory of the environment is embedded in the policy rather than on theories of human behavior and values.

During the past 20 years, however, political science has embraced the study of policy consequences to the point that some are advocating a “policy-centric” approach to the study of politics in which two major questions dominate the field. The first is how to explain and understand how and why governments produce the kinds of policy designs that they have, and the second is how to understand the impacts of those designs.

Theories of Policy Consequences

Theodore Lowi is generally credited with being the first to offer a systematic theory of policy impacts. He popularized the phrase policy creates politics, thereby reversing the common causal pattern in political science. Lowi contends that there are characteristics of policy that encourage affected people to mobilize and that without these characteristics, elites will dominate. His typology is based on two dimensions: the probability of coercion and whether the policy identifies specific targets or [Page 1152]consists of general rules that affect the environment of groups. From these dimensions, he posits four types of policy: distributive, regulatory, redistributive, and constituent. Regulatory policy, involving the imposition of costs in the environment, will produce pluralist competition according to Lowi. Policy becomes a temporary compromise between competing groups, but if policy becomes too harsh on some, they are expected to mobilize and change the governing officials or change the policy. Redistributive policy, such as welfare policy, Lowi contends, does not produce pluralist forms of subsequent participation but instead is dominated by elites who lead major segments of society who act to insure social stability. Distributive policy is the classic pork barrel and is inherently elitist, according to Lowi's framework. His fourth type, constituent policy, produces individualistic claims on government.

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