Questions
• What is public policy?
• What are the opportunities and challenges of democratic policymaking?
• Why is public policymaking often inefficient?
• What is an analytic approach to public policy?
• What is a scientific approach to public policy?
• What is the scientific method?
Overview
• Public policy is government decisions (including not deciding) on societal rules.
• Core opportunities in policymaking include preference identification, agenda setting, alternative specification of an issue, implementation, and evaluation.
• Core challenges in policymaking include preference aggregation, delegation dilemmas, credible commitment problems, bargaining problems, cooperation, and coordination.
• This text uses an analytic approach to understanding public policy. An analytic approach uses models, game-theoretic, and political economy to understand how individuals’ choices are shaped by the policy context and rules that characterize their decision-making environment.
• This text uses the scientific method for evaluating public policy.
• The scientific method requires theory construction, research designs that rule out alternative explanations, testing, and replicability.
Introduction
Public policy encompasses a wide range of topics (for example, health care, tax policy, defense policy, environmental policy, and more), and public policy decisions have a wide range of effects. Many policy topics are complex, making them difficult to understand, as well as hard to improve or solve. Is deficit spending by governments desirable? Is it equitable for some citizens to pay a larger percentage of their income in taxes or for some not to pay income taxes at all? Why does the United States spend so much on health care, yet have such poor health outcomes? To enhance the prospects of peace between countries, is it better to focus on a strong defense or international organizations? Does getting tough on crime reduce crime? If Americans prize liberty so much, why do we have the USA Freedom and Protect America Acts? Why do US students lag behind students of other wealthy nations in educational attainment? Each of these questions reflects a salient and complex public policy question.
This book introduces readers to a set of simple tools that are useful for understanding public policy problems. We believe that by the end of this book readers will have a better understanding of how public policy is made, why we observe some of the policies that we do, and why improving or even changing public policy is often very difficult.