PPA 691

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PPA 691 Seminar in Public Policy Analysis

• Lecture 1a Introduction to Public Policy
  Analysis

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Introduction

• Policy analysis is a social and political
  activity.
• The subject matter concerns the lives and
  well-being of large numbers of our fellow
  citizens.
• The process and results of policy analysis
  usually involve other professionals and
  interested parties.
• Done in teams and office-wide settings.
• Immediate consumer is a client, who may be a
  hierarchical superior.
• Ultimate audience includes diverse subgroups of
  politically attuned supporters and opponents.

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Introduction

• Policy analysis More art than science.
• Draws on intuition as much as method.
• Eightfold path.
• Steps.
• Define the problem.
• Assemble some evidence.
• Construct the alternatives.
• Select the criteria.
• Project the outcomes.
• Confront the tradeoffs.
• Decide!
• Tell your story.

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Introduction

• Eightfold path (contd.)
• Steps not necessarily taken in precisely this
  order, and not all may be significant for each
  problem. But serves as a starting point.
• Iteration is continual.
• The problem-solving process being the product
  of trial and error is iterative, so that you
  usually must repeat each of these steps,
  sometimes more than once.

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Introduction

• Iteration is continual (contd.)
• The spirit in which you take any of these steps,
  especially the earliest phases of your project,
  should be highly tentative.
• Some of the guidelines are practical, but most
  are conceptual.
• Most concepts are obvious, but some are technical
  and some are common terms used in special ways
• All concepts become intelligible through
  experience and practice.

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Introduction

• The concepts come embedded in concrete
  particulars.
• In real life, policy problems appear as a
  confusing welter of details.
• Concepts are formulated in the abstract.
• Analyst must learn to see the analytic concepts
  in the concrete manifestations.

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Introduction

• Your final product.
• Coherent narrative style.
• Steps.
• Describe problem.
• Lay out alternatives.
• Each course of action has projected outcomes,
  supported by evidence.
• If no alternative dominates, discuss nature and
  magnitude of trade-offs.
• State recommendation.

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The Eightfold Path

• Define the Problem.
• Think of deficits and excesses.
• The definition should be evaluative.
• Quantify if possible.
• Conditions that cause problems are also problems.
• Missing an opportunity is a problem.
• Common pitfalls in problem definition.
• Defining the solution in the problem.
• Be skeptical about the causal claims implicit in
  diagnostic problem definitions.

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The Eightfold Path

• Assemble Some Evidence.
• Think before you collect.
• The value of evidence.
• Self-control.
• Do a literature review.
• Survey best practice.
• Use analogies.
• Start early.
• Touching base, gaining credibility, brokering
  consensus.
• Freeing the captive mind.

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The Eightfold Path

• Construct the alternatives.
• Start comprehensive, end up focused.
• Model the system in which the problem is located.
• Reduce and simply the list of alternatives.
• Design problems.
• A linguistic pitfall.

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The Eightfold Path

• Select the criteria.
• Apply evaluative criteria to judging outcomes,
  not alternatives.
• Criteria selection builds on problem definitions
  and continues.
• Evaluative criteria commonly used in policy
  analysis
• Efficiency.
• Equality, equity, fairness, justice.
• Freedom, community, and other ideas.

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The Eightfold Path

• Select the criteria (contd.)
• Weight conflicting evaluative criteria.
• The political process takes care of it.
• The analyst imposes a solution.
• Practical criteria.
• Legality.
• Political acceptability.
• Robustness and improvability.
• Criteria in optimization models.
• Linear programming.
• Improving linguistic clarity.

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The Eightfold Path

• Project the Outcomes.
• Projection Model Evidence.
• Attach magnitude estimates.
• Break-even estimates.
• The optimism problem.
• Scenario writing.
• The other guys shoes heuristic.
• Undesirable side effects.
• The ethical costs of optimism.

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The Eightfold Path

• Project the outcomes (contd.)
• The outcomes matrix.
• Linguistic pitfalls.
• Confront the trade-offs.
• Commensurability
• Break-even analysis revisited.
• Without projecting outcomes, there is nothing to
  trade-off.
• Simplify the comparison process.

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The Eightfold Path

• Decide!
• The twenty-dollar-bill test.
• Tell your story.
• The New York taxi driver test.
• You, your client, and your audiences
• What medium to use?
• Your story should have a logical narrative flow.
• Some common pitfalls.
• Following the eightfold path.
• Compulsive qualifying.
• Showing your work.
• Listing without explaining.
• Style.

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The Eightfold Path

• Tell your story (contd.)
• Report format.
• Table format.
• References and sources.
• Memo format.
• The sound bite and the press release.

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Problem-Centered Policy Analysis