Set Up: The System

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Set Up The System
PS 202 -- American Political Institutions and
Processes
Fall 2001
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The Context Policy Making as a Decision Problem
Four General Models of Collective Decision Making

• Rational or Comprehensive Model
• Bargaining or Incremental Model
• Political or Dominance Model
• Garbage-Can Model of Organizational Choice

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The Rational Model of Decision Making
Might call it the Ross Perot Model -- Look
under the hood and fix it
Attributes
Problems

• Understand goals - Maximize their attainment
• Clean Air
• Problem identified - Goals not being fulfilled or
  simply can do better
• Smog in urban areas
• Identify range of possible solutions
• Methods for limiting sources
• Gather necessary information
• Scientific, technical analysis
• Select best alternative - one that maximizes
  goals
• Apollo Moon Mission

• Conflict over goals, what trying to achieve
• Lack of time to canvass all possible solutions
• Lack of information to judge all solutions and
  uncertainty about preferences
• Therefore, cant agree on best or optimal
  approach
• Just Not the Way Things Are Done Most of the Time

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The Bargaining Model of Decision Making
Might call it the Inside-the-Beltway Model --
Negotiated incrementalism
Attributes
Problems

• Multiple, competing goals
• Equity, efficiency, justice, interests
• Adaptive rationality
• Problemistic search when problem emerges that
  is troublesome enough
• Sequential search for alternatives
• Those in the neighborhood
• Choose alternatives that help resolve conflict
• Look at one at a time based on on-going
  relationships
• Satisficing - no one gets everything, all get
  something
• The Budget

• Conflict over goals is too severe to negotiate
• Health care reform
• No ongoing relationships, or they are not valued
• Incremental or small policy changes are not
  sufficient
• Threshold effects (Florida)
• There are distinct winners and losers
• Just Not the Way Things Are Done Much of the Time

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The Dominance Model of Decision Making
Might call it the Common Cause Model --
Powerful interests dominate
Attributes
Problems

• Preferred goals are not usually mutually
  exclusive
• Policy making involves many multiple
  interactions, so relationships can rarely be
  ignored
• The policy-making system is too fragmented to be
  routinely dominated by one set of participants
• Just Not the Way Things Are Done Most of the Time

• Overt goal conflict
• Focus on the immediate decision -- get what you
  can now
• Relationships are valued less than policy
  outcomes
• Alternatives are identified by competing
  interests
• The alternative preferred by the most powerful
  participants is chosen
• Elections, 1995 Budget Battle

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The Garbage-Can Model of Decision Making
Accommodates all types of decisions under
different conditions rational, bargaining,
dominance, or both large-scale and incremental
Organizational Setting Organized Anarchies

• Low compatability among goals or little
  understanding of what the goals mean
• Universities providing education -- what does
  that mean?
• The technology -- the way to accomplish tasks
  -- is not well understood
• Universities and teaching methods -- lectures,
  labs, discussion sections
• Very loosely structured system for making
  choices, with fluid participation
• Unclear hierarchies, people come and go, all
  kinds of people can participate in decision
  making -- administrators, faculty, students

Michael Cohen, James March, and Johann Olsen
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The Garbage-Can Model of Decision Making
The Mechanism for Making Choices
Three primary streams -- not in any particular
order and relatively independent on one another

• Problems
• Solutions (not necessary created in response to
  the problems)
• Participants

Streams come together at choice opportunities
-- times when the organization is scheduled to
act or has to act
The Garbage Cans
Michael Cohen, James March, and Johann Olsen
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Kingdon Apply Garbage-Can Decision Making to
the Federal Government
Frequent conflict or competition among goals
Goals
Difficult to know the meaning of goals
Preamble to the U.S. Constitution We the people
of the United States, in order to form a more
perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic
Tranquility, provide for the common defense,
promote the general Welfare, and secure the
Blessings of Liberty in ourselves and our
Posterity, do ordain and establish this
Constitution for the United States of American.
Technology
May not know what it means, or how to do it, and
then no clear performance measures to see whether
it has been done
Participants
Fluid -- President, EOP, executive branch,
members of Congress, courts, interest groups,
experts, media, multiple participants in state
and local governments, nonprofits, everyone