Public Policy 4

The book by Béland and Cox is about how ideas shape policy. The first chapters focuses on arguments for why ideas matter. Ideas are important in politics because they help define what a person's interests are. You cannot just assume people are like robots who can automatically calculate what their best interests are. Most of the time, people are influenced by the dominant cultural values in which they find themselves, for better or worse. Many times, people do things which are not in their best interest, and this is due to the influence of ideas and culture. For example, Jal Mehta says:

Consider what it would mean to assert that ideas did not matter. (To be precise, I define an idea to “matter” when it (a) shapes people’s actions and (b) is not reducible to some other nonideational force.) At the broadest level, asserting that ideas do not matter would mean that shifting ideals about science, religion, democracy, slavery, colonization, gender, race, and homosexuality, to pick just a few salient examples, either have not appreciably affected how people act or were themselves the product of technological, economic, or other material forces. Shifts of ideas widely considered foundational to Western civilization, such as the spreading of Enlightenment thought, would similarly have to be either irrelevant or reducible to other forces. Entire disciplines, such as intellectual history, would be obsolete. School boards and college committees would stop fighting about the curriculum, and movements to ban books would dry up. The tens of millions of dollars that are spent on think tanks to churn out ideas and public relations firms to market them would be largely wasted. The billions of dollars spent on market research and on advertising would be unnecessary. Consultants of all types, as purveyors of ideas about how to improve practice in different fields, also would be largely out of business. In politics, people would vote exclusively out of material self-interest. There would no longer be anything the matter with Kansas, and limousine liberals in Cambridge and Berkeley would become antitax crusaders. Job seekers would not choose careers because of their meaning; college students would stop trying to find themselves. Terrorists would not blow up buildings out of visions of religious glory or ideological triumph. There would be no such thing as a thought leader or a visionary (p. 24).

The reference to Kansas is actually to the book What's the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank. Published in 2004, the book examines how conservative ideas cause lower income people to support policies that do not benefit them, like tax cuts for the rich, or foreign wars that their children go off to fight and die in. Political scientists have long sought to explain why people vote against their own interests. The obvious answer is because of what is called "ideology" but how does ideology work? Mehta provides many examples of how the beliefs that people have, cause them to act in ways that are not simply explained by economic self-interest. This is not to say that economic interest is rational, and people are irrational when they go against it, but ideas help determine what people consider to be rational (even if it seems irrational from an outside perspective).

Over the last few decades, social scientists are more open to the role of ideas, and the debate has shifted from whether or not ideas actually matter, to specifying how and in what way ideas shape the policy process. Naturally, such an undertaking requires various fields of study as he says:

Of course, specifying how ideas matter is still a considerable task, even if we restrict ourselves to politics, as this book does. Ideas, broadly defined, are central to questions about agenda setting, social movements, revolutions, diffusion, policy choice, the conceptual categories that underlie politics, path dependency and path-shaping change, institution building, institutional stability, institutional change, voter identity formation, interest group formation, and political coalition building. While much previous work in the domain of “ideas and politics” has been conducted by scholars of the welfare state, over the longer term, a thorough discussion of the topic would include more voices from other subfields of political science and sociology and would also incorporate work from cognitive psychology, linguistics, and even neuroscience (p. 25).

This focus on different fields of research is known as an interdisciplinary approach since it combines many different academic fields, or disciplines.

Moving to explaining how ideas impact policy, Mehta argues for three key concepts to understand this process, or looking at policy at three different levels: policy solutions, policy problems, and the dominant cultural ideas of the era, or what he calls "zeitgeist" (German for "spirit of the times," zeit = time and geist = spirit), or as he says in his own words:

Drawing on Kingdon (1984) and others, I consider ideas at three levels of generality: policy solutions, problem definitions, and public philosophies or zeitgeist. While problems and solutions are familiar terms in some parts of the literature, the broader notion of public philosophies or zeitgeist has been less frequently discussed. I also consider interactions between the levels of ideas, with a particular interest in “upward-flowing” interactions, showing that not only does the conception of a problem constrain policy alternatives, but the fate of specific policy solutions also can have an impact on problem definitions or even broader public philosophies (pp. 25-26).

By public philosophy, he means something like a political ideology, or core values that shape how we see politics. Problems and solutions actually makes understanding the policy process fairly simple. Essentially, at its most basic level, policy is problem-solving, only it is dealing with problems that concern society as a whole, and in many cases the world. However, it is important to stress that problem-solving in this way is not a purely rational thing, but is guided by and limited by dominant cultural values.

So, to break down ideas in this way: ideas can be a solution to a problem, or it can be stating a problem that needs a solution, but stating problems and solutions also rely on dominant cultural values. Mehta goes on to explain how solutions, problems and zeitgeists are related:

In the narrowest conception, ideas can be policy solutions. Keynesianism is perhaps the most famous policy idea; other obvious examples are smaller class sizes or broken-windows policing. The implicit assumption here is that the problem is given (business cycle is too volatile, test scores are too low, crime is too high), the objectives are given (stabilizing the business cycle, raising test scores, lowering crime), and the idea provides the means for solving the problem and accomplishing those objectives. But as many scholars have pointed out, problems and objectives are not preestablished (Rein and Schön 1977; Schön and Rein 1994). To understand this process, we also need to understand the roles ideas can play as problem definitions. A problem definition is a particular way of understanding a complex reality. Homelessness, for example, can be seen as the product of a housing shortage, high unemployment, or a lack of individual gumption. The way a problem is framed has significant implications for the types of policy solutions that will seem desirable, and hence much of political argument is fought at the level of problem definition. Finally, ideas can function as public philosophies or as zeitgeist. These are broader ideas that cut across substantive areas. A public philosophy is an idea about how to understand the purpose of government or public policy in light of a certain set of assumptions about the society and the market (Heclo 1986). That the local government is more attuned to the needs of the people than the federal government is one such public philosophy. A related idea is the zeitgeist, which is a set of assumptions that are widely shared and not open to criticism in a particular historical moment. The zeitgeist includes a disparate set of cultural, social, and economic assumptions, which might not be as closely related to the purpose of government as a public philosophy. Keynesian economics in the years between the end of World War II and the early 1970s was an idea that had reached the level of the zeitgeist; the idea of holding people accountable has a similar status today. When public philosophies are in open contest, as is usually the case, neither has the status of zeitgeist, but when one emerges as overwhelmingly dominant (as in the New Deal), public philosophies can for a short time become the zeitgeist. These untouchable assumptions obviously have a broad influence on politics (and society) for the period in which they reign (p. 27).

Keynesianism refers to the economic policies that were put in place by many governments during the 1930s, to respond to the economic distress of the Great Depression, named after the economist John Maynard Keynes. These policies continued to be implemented after the 1930s, until the 1990s, and some elements of them still exist to this day. At the time, these policies were considered fairly radical because they broke with the belief in the free market, or that government intervention in the economy should be kept at a minimum, and private economic forces should be given maximum freedom.

In the US this is known as the time of the New Deal, the policies put in place by the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, including programs like Social Security, welfare and unemployment benefits that are still active today. The government also employed many people in infrastructure projects, or what they called "public works" back then, even including the arts. Important movie directors like Orson Welles were helped early on by the Federal Theatre Project.

https://simanaitissays.com/2015/06/28/orson-welles-and-the-federal-theatre-project/

One of the major focuses of public policy research is understanding how policy changed from the New Deal to the current period, known as neoliberalism. During the New Deal era roughly from the 1930s-70s, ideas about taxation and government spending on things like healthcare and education were drastically different than they are now. Since the 1980s, the US has favored lower taxes on the wealthy and lower levels of public spending.

The study of ideas on public policy is still relatively recent. Mehta suggests certain areas where research can be improved on:

Much work also remains to be done in specifying the processes by which some ideas come to be favored over time. One way to see this is as a two-stage process: in the first stage, an old idea comes to be discredited, and in the second stage, a particular new idea comes to be favored (Blyth 2002; Legro 2000; McNamara 1998). Thus far, there has been much more attention to the latter than to the former. To put it another way, Kingdon’s question of what makes an idea’s time come has now been quite thoroughly examined; the complementary question of when an idea’s time is up has received comparatively much less attention. One could imagine that this could happen through an exogenous external event that called the previous consensus into question. Another possibility is that an idea’s time could lapse more gradually, as advocates manipulated indicators, symbols, and ordinary news events to create the political space for a new idea (Campbell 1998). Kingdon talks about the process of “softening up” or paving the road for a new idea; there likely often needs to be a slow and steady “wearing down” of the old idea. At the same time, those who are proponents of the idea will actively try to rebuff such efforts and ward off any attempt at agenda and policy change (Cobb and Ross 1997) (p. 31).

Mehta claims that focusing on problem definitions is preferable to other terms like paradigm and framing that have become popular in analyzing policy. Paradigm is a term used by Thomas Kuhn in the book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962. Kuhn argues science has never developed through a pure process of understanding the world, but developed a variety of different methods that eventually settled into a specific way of doing research, influenced by prior research, and other concerns, that define the major scientific problems to be investigated (and which problems are excluded). Framing is a term used by George Lakoff in his book, Don't Think of an Elephant, published in 2004. A common theme in both Lakoff and What's the Matter with Kansas, is trying to make sense of how conservative Republicans are able to appeal to working class voters. Lakoff argues that since the 1980s, with the Reagan administration, conservatives have been able to define, or frame the debate, on most issues, from the war on drugs (Just Say NO), to foreign policy, taxes, welfare, etc.:

There are three definitional issues that I should mention upfront, in order to situate this discussion in the existing literature. First, problem definitions are at the same analytical level as what Peter Hall calls “paradigms,” in that they describe “not only the goals of policy...but also the very nature of the problems they are meant to be addressing” (1993, 279). I prefer to use the term problem definition in this context, however, because while paradigms tend to evoke the notion of a single dominant idea that governs an area, problem definitions evoke the fluid nature of constantly competing ideas that highlight different aspects of a given situation. Second, the process of defining problems is different from framing as the latter term has been used in the literature. A problem definition is similar to a frame in that it bounds a complicated situation by emphasizing some elements to the neglect of others, but framing has been mostly employed as a term to describe how to package a preexisting set of ideas to win more adherents to one’s position (Béland 2005; Campbell 1998). Consistent with this usage, framing is one element in a broader battle over problem definition. Third, while some scholars have insisted on the analytic separation of normative and empirical or causal ideas (Campbell 1998; Goldstein and Keohane 1993), I follow Putnam (2002) in arguing against the fact/value dichotomy. Problem definitions generally evoke both normative and empirical descriptions in ways that are usually mutually reinforcing (p. 33).

Mehta argues, how policy problems are defined is itself a political struggle, not just something imposed by elites, or reflecting the will of the people:

In contrast to approaches that see political problems as either (a) imposed by hegemonic elites or (b) a reflection of the “social psyche” of the public (Gamson 1990), I argue instead that (c) problem definition is a contested process among players with varying levels of power and persuasiveness. This view remedies many of the drawbacks of the other two. In comparison with the social psyche view, it specifies a role for active agents, allows for a diversity of views within the population, and explains how some of the many social problems become political problems. In comparison with the hegemony view, it allows for a wider range of groups and forces to influence debate, while not ignoring the role of power differentials among the claimants (p. 34).

For example, conservatives were able to define drugs as a major problem that required a tough law enforcement approach (as opposed to defining it as a medical issue).

Explaining how dominant ideas, or zeitgeist affect policy choices is even more difficult, since it is difficult to see how they relate. For example, during the late 1960s and 70s the zeitgeist of American culture had shifted more to the influence of the counter-culture and political radicals, even forcing conservative politicians to enact progressive legislation and policy:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/zeitgeist

To be sure, there are similarities that run across policy areas within a given period. It is no coincidence that, for example, the indexing of Social Security benefits, proposals for an income floor, the Environmental Protection Act, and the Occupational Safety and Health Act all happened during the first Nixon term. This bunching occurs because meta-ideas affect the policy process in at least three ways. First, the prevailing public philosophies or zeitgeist can significantly affect who gets elected, which, in turn, affects what is considered and passed on the legislative docket. Second, a public philosophy can serve as a kind of meta-problem definition for political actors, providing a way of seeing the public issues that are on their docket. When a new issue arises, these meta-ideas provide a heuristic that tells political actors what aspects of the issue to emphasize and what side to take. Third, meta-ideas can function as a kind of changing cultural touchstone to which actors can appeal in their efforts to advocate for a particular policy or symbol. Similarly to central values such as liberty or equality, these meta-ideas (such as that markets are more efficient than government programs) provide a way for political actors to gain legitimacy on specific topics that for the audience (public or media) might be unfamiliar terrain. Overall, while this conceptualization suggests that the balance of power among public philosophies or the prevailing zeitgeist can have an important effect on (a) who is at the table, (b) how those actors think, and (c) the types of actions that will be seen as desirable or legitimate, it also leaves room for various other inputs into the policy process and for the emergence of ideas that run counter to the prevailing winds (p. 42).

In concluding his chapter, Mehta tries to connect the three concepts together. Still, much more needs to be said about how ideas influence policy, particularly how the contest between different ideas plays out in the policy process.

Next class, we will go over the chapter by Vivien Schmidt. For the assignment choose a quote from Schmidt.