Public Policy Questions and Answers

Answer: D

The Implementation Game is by Eugene Bardach.

Published in 1977, the book treats implementation as a set of games played by actors who use the policy process for their own purposes: diverting resources, deflecting goals, resisting control and wasting energy. Bardach used California's mental health reform as his case.

Jeffrey Pressman wrote Implementation (1973) with Aaron Wildavsky, the founding study of the subject, which is why he is the tempting distractor. Daniel Mazmanian (printed 'Mazmanion') wrote Implementation and Public Policy with Paul Sabatier, and Peter Hupe has written on implementation with Michael Hill.

Answer: B

The official policy makers are (1), (2) and (3): legislatures, executives and administrators.

James Anderson and other writers divide participants in policy-making into official and unofficial actors. Official policy makers hold legal authority to make policy: legislatures, the political executive, administrative agencies, and the courts.

Unofficial participants, such as interest groups, political parties, the media, research organisations and individual citizens, influence policy but have no legal authority to make binding decisions. Civil society belongs to this group, so any code including (4) is wrong.

Answer: C

The correct matching is a-1, b-2, c-3, d-4.

• David Easton wrote A Systems Analysis of Political Life (1965) (1).
• Yehezkel Dror wrote Public Policymaking Reexamined (1968) (2).
• Stuart Nagel edited volumes on public policy analysis (3).
• William N. Dunn wrote Public Policy Analysis: An Introduction (4).

Only the third code gives (1), (2), (3), (4). The Dror and Easton titles are the most widely known, and they alone rule out the other three codes.

Answer: B

The answer is that both (A) and (R) are true and (R) is the explanation of (A).

Participatory policy-making involves those affected, citizens, experts, interest groups and implementing officials, in shaping policy. The reason states what such participation does: it brings the views of different stakeholders into consideration. That is exactly why the resulting policies are better informed, since decision-makers learn about local conditions, likely effects and practical problems they would otherwise miss.

So the reason explains the assertion. Option A says only that both are true and leaves out the explanatory link, option D denies it, and option C wrongly treats the reason as false.

Answer: B

The concept was first formulated by Harold Lasswell.

Harold D. Lasswell set out the idea of the 'policy sciences' in 'The Policy Orientation', his essay in The Policy Sciences (1951), edited with Daniel Lerner. He called for an interdisciplinary, problem-oriented and explicitly normative science of the policy process, aimed at the problems of human dignity in a democracy. He is regarded as the founder of policy science.

Thomas Dye later wrote the widely used Understanding Public Policy, Peter Self wrote on administrative theories and politics, and Carl Friedrich on constitutional government; none formulated the concept first.

Answer: A

The key attributes the remark to Thomas Dye.

Thomas R. Dye, who defined public policy as whatever governments choose to do or not to do, uses government spending as a common way of measuring the scope of public policy in Understanding Public Policy: the growth of public expenditure, and its share of the national economy, shows how far government activity reaches into society.

Charles Cochran, James Anderson and Peter deLeon are also writers on public policy, Anderson with his definition of policy as a purposive course of action and deLeon on the policy sciences and policy termination, but the key credits this remark to Dye.

Answer: D

The statement that is not true of ex-ante analysis is that it focuses on analysis of past policies.

Ex ante means 'before the event'. Ex-ante policy analysis is done before a policy is adopted or implemented: the analyst forecasts the likely consequences of the proposed policy and its alternatives, to help choose among them. So options A, B and C describe it correctly.

Analysis of policies already in force, looking back at what they actually achieved, is ex-post (retrospective) analysis, the domain of policy evaluation. Describing ex-ante analysis as a study of past policies confuses the two.

Answer: D

Rational policy analysis is not constrained by scientific diagnosis of policy problems.

The rational model asks the analyst to define the problem precisely, identify all alternatives, predict their consequences and choose the best. Scientific diagnosis of the problem is part of the method itself, its starting point, and so cannot be a constraint on it.

The other three are well-known limits of rational analysis. An option that is best on paper may lack political feasibility; good analysis can be undone by weak implementation; and where values conflict, analysis cannot settle which group's interests should prevail, so it cannot resolve social conflicts.

Answer: D

The individual is the unit of analysis in the Public Choice Approach.

Public choice theory applies the methods of economics to politics. It starts from methodological individualism: voters, politicians and bureaucrats are each treated as rational individuals who pursue their own interests, and collective outcomes are explained as the result of their choices. Downs, Buchanan, Tullock and Niskanen are its leading writers.

The pluralist and group approaches take organised groups competing for influence as their unit of analysis, and corporatism looks at the relations between the state and peak associations of business and labour. None of them begins from the individual.

Answer: A

The normative optimum model was put forward by Yehezkel Dror.

In Public Policymaking Reexamined (1968), Yehezkel Dror proposed an 'optimal model' that combines rational analysis with extra-rational elements such as judgement, intuition and creativity, and adds 'meta-policymaking', or policy-making about how to make policy. He offered it as a normative standard for improving policy-making, between pure rationality and mere muddling through.

Harold Lasswell founded the policy sciences, Charles Lindblom developed incrementalism ('muddling through'), and Thomas Dye is known for his survey of models such as elite and group theory, not for the optimal model.