Simulations, like many games of sport and politics, are capable of producing complex, entertaining and, often, instructive behavior on the basis of a simple format and small set of rules which structure the activity. Although the real congressional budget process is highly complex, the simple simulation materials presented here reproduced an authentic process and set of outcomes for the students involved in it. In our “run” of this simulation last fall, these results came as quite a surprise to the student participants, who began the exercise skeptical both of Congress' efforts to reduce the deficit and of the power of simulations to capture real, complex phenomena. After the simulation, the shared experience provided a basis for several discussions of the merits of different explanations of policy outcomes: those achieved in the simulation, in the current Congress, and by policy makers more generally.

This simulation was developed for use in an introductory course in public policy, but it is equally well-suited for any course involving legislative policy making or national taxing and spending policy. The simulation materials themselves are provided in the last section of this presentation. The next sections describe the context of the simulation in the course, how it worked when we used it, and the character of the discussion which resulted from it.

The purposes of this introductory course in public policy are first, to introduce students to the substance of public policies, for example, to what defense policy or tax policy actually consists of, and second, and more important, to develop in students a capacity to think critically about why particular policy outcomes evolve as they do. We use texts, such as Dye's Understanding Public Policy (1987), which combine substantive material with different theoretical approaches. The simulation comes at the point in the course where we are shifting from political explanations of policy choices to structural and environmental theories; that is, from explanations which reference the interests and intentions of policy makers, to theories which explain choice in terms of constraints, such as the amount of resources available, which cannot easily be manipulated by decision makers.