Policy itself has three senses. In one sense it refers to the purposes for which people associate in the polis. A second sense has to do with the review of information and the determination of appropriate action. The third sense concerns the securing and commitment of resources.
Over the last century a distinction has been constructed between policy (in all these senses) and policy making, a dualism which has sundered the inclusive Baconian view of policy as reason of state. In consequence policy making itself has come to be conceived of as one peculiar process, while policy is something else: a symbolic entity ‘out there’ merely uttered, chosen or promised. ‘We have galaxies of policies’ (David Steel, UK General Election 1983).
Two factors determine this dichotomy. One has been the association of the modern state with nationalism, mobilization and elections and therefore with a mandate or platform. The second factor is that the modern state is ‘not an enormous coercive power, but a vast and conscious organization’ (Durkheim). Concomitant institutional developments provided bases for the classic dualistic formulations of Woodrow Wilson, opposing politics and administration, and of J.S.Mill, who contrasted politics and policy arguments from administrative practices, and of Bagehot, who envisaged a political minister who would be above the dirty business of policy making. The dichotomy was completely established between the philosophical radical decade and the mid-Victorian era.
This rationalistic estrangement of policy and policy making has been inescapable, but ultimately pernicious. It is necessarily premised on a non-political and technical model of policy making as an optimalizing search for the best means to realize a given platform. This has fostered in turn a peculiarly influential and dangerous dichotomy, between policy and implementation.
These dichotomies would have been impossible without the development of such social sciences as scientific management and classical public administration, and without the emergence of vocational rather than political social sciences. At the same time, the dichotomous model has provided the conditions for the development of the social sciences, and, in government machines themselves, for a distinction between policy and management, and so for a technologizing of policy making and of social science involvement, for example, in economic and welfare and other policy sectors.
However recent its involvement in policy making may be, these disciplines have managed to suppress any historical consciousness of what has happened, and argue for a favoured role, sector by sector, as though it were unproblematic, scientific and unique. In truth the role of specific social sciences in policy making is a consequence of political accidents. They share, none the less, a common subservience to the privileging of the politics of policy.
The dualistic concept of policy making as policy and implementation has, then, been the breeding ground for a dangerous dichotomizing with consequences for the data, problems and agendas of modern policy, and for the strategies and the highly sectoral constructions of modern policy, each with its dutifully innocent social science enshrined in techniques like social cost-benefit analysis, casework and extensions, and within hived-off devices for sectoral improvements, like planning cells, or separate foundations such as the many imitators of the RAND Corporation.
This splitting up of policy making into policy and implementation also led inevitably to the search for explanations of the unhappy differences between the experience of implementation and the policies which had been promised. Such explications are at once banal and erroneous, since policy is actually about securing and maintaining office, as it always has been. It is also dangerous, since the dichotomy between policy and implementation makes it difficult to determine responsibilty. Decision makers blame implementers, the outside advisers blame insiders, and the policy agencies even blame the poor intended target group members themselves.
The dominant record of the policy-making social sciences thus far has been to participate in the construction and enjoyment of these conveniently escapist dualisms. There have been some institutional descriptions and some survey work on public opinions of familiar policy themes. There has also been an effort to depolitieize the social science of public policy outright by treating policy making as a simulacrum of individual market choice.
Alternative approaches, which are concerned with the whole of policy-making practice, face two difficulties. One is that access to the inner institutional materials often requires acceptance of the fashions and legitimation of the politics of policy. The second difficulty is that an alternative social science of policy making must, at one and the same time, manage to see policy fashions, headlines or technologies for what they are and avoid the apparently harmless policy versus implementation dichotomy.
The alternative policy-making social science would also need to construct a grid for handling all the zones of policy practice. It could then expose the establishment and presentation of policy in terms of objective and unavoidable problems, like deficits and gaps, and in therapeutic and unobjectionable strategies, with heavily disguised favours or exclusions, costs and controls in the actual deliveries.
Such a social science would be a confrontational account of what is involved in policy making, not a co-opted, false or mythologizing discourse. However inconvenient for some social science relationships, it would challenge the unchallengeable, reveal what is hidden, and insist on considering precisely those effects, data, victims and possibilities which are ignored in orthodox social science discourse about policy making.
Bernard Schaffer
formerly, University of Sussex
Further reading
Appleby, P. (1949) Policy and Administration, Alabama.
Ballard, J. (ed.) (1981) Policy Making in a New State, St Lucia, Queensland.
Lindblom, C.E. (1968) The Policy-Making Process, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
Self, P. (1975) The Econocrats and the Policy Process, London.
