Public Policy 5

This class will focus on how ideas influence institutions. Institutions are important in understanding public policy as they set the rules for how policy is made. Institutions are basically what hold societies together. There are political institutions, including: the legislatures where laws are made, government bureaucracies, the courts and legal system. Also, the military which is either another type of political institution, or a separate institution altogether. Besides politics, you have large economic institutions like corporations, smaller businesses, and labor unions which represent workers. In traditional societies religion played a major role in social order, but in modern societies this role is now largely played by the mass media, most of which are also privately run corporations like the movie and television industries, publishing, the music industry, etc. Collectively, these institutions all help maintain social order, and serve as conduits for the exercise of power.

Most of these institutions only came into existence with the beginning of industrialization, keeping in mind the pattern of "uneven geographical development" noted by geographers like David Harvey and Neil Smith, meaning some areas of the world industrialized faster than others. As society became more industrialized, and economic productivity grew, it generated immense wealth which took the the form of capital. Economic growth caused massive population growth over the course of centuries. Economic growth is measured in terms of what economists call Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as shown below:

Leading to an explosion in population growth:

Economic growth was due to technological innovations in agriculture leading to increased food production, and innovations changing industry from something done by hand, to something done with giant machines in factories, with workers operating the machines. Along with industrialization, came urbanization, as most of the population migrated to urban centers which were also the centers of industry.

Immense growth of populations over the last two centuries gave rise to an age of large scale organization the world had never seen before.

Vivien Schmidt is one of many theorists who researches how institutions affect public policy. Her approach to studying institutions is different, but builds on past research. On page 49, Schmidt provides a table of different institutional approaches, noting the characteristics of each, as well as their limitations. The most basic is rational choice institutionalism, which is based on the belief that large organizations are created by people to serve their rational interest, or self-interest. This might be true in some cases, but over all this seems to simplify the process by which policy is made. As Schmidt says:

Rational choice institutionalism posits rational actors with fixed preferences who calculate strategically to maximize their preferences and for whom institutions represent the incentive structures that reduce the uncertainties resulting from the multiplicity of individual preferences and issues (Hardin 1982; Ostrom 1990). Critics point to a number of problems with this approach. Although it produces generalizations that might be good at capturing the range of reasons actors would normally have for any action within a given set of institutional incentive structures, the approach cannot explain anomalies if they depart radically from interest-motivated action. It might lead to overgeneralization where there is a push toward universalistic generalizations (Scharpf 1997) (p. 49).

The second historical approach assumes that institutions for the most part are not chosen by people, but that people find themselves in a world of institutions to which they must conform. Institutions have various origins, but once they take shape they become very difficult to change, and change very slowly, and often only at certain critical moments in history, or what theorists call "critical junctures." This approach relies heavily on the idea of "path dependence" which again is the belief that once organizations take shape, they become set on a certain historical path that becomes increasingly difficult to change. Power also plays a much bigger role here than in rational choice theory, since the shape of institutions are again generally assumed to be shaped by powerful groups of people in the past. Schmidt says:

Historical institutionalism focuses on how institutions, understood as sets of regularized practices with rulelike qualities, structure action and outcomes. It emphasizes not just the operation and development of institutions but also the path-dependencies and unintended consequences that result from such histor- ical development (Hall and Taylor 1996, 938; Steinmo, Thelen, and Longstreth 1992; Thelen 1999; Pierson 2000). Critics note that because it tends to emphasize structures and processes much more than the events out of which they are constructed, let alone the individuals whose actions and interests spurred those events, any “micro-foundational logic,” as scholars of rational choice institutionalism put it, is generally missing from this macro-historical work. Change is largely described (rather than explained) from the outside (exogenously), whether by way of “big bang” theories about critical junctures (e.g., Gourevitch 1986; Collier and Collier 1991) or by path-dependencies with lock-in mecha- nisms and positive feedback effects (Mahoney 2000; Pierson 2000). As a result, historical institutionalism can appear historically deterministic or even mechanistic where it focuses exclusively on continuities and path-dependencies (p. 50).

There are many advantages to the historical approach, but there are limitations, especially how we understand how institutions change. The biggest flaw seems to be that this approach is too mechanical, and too rigid, in that the institutional rules seem inflexible and that groups and individuals have almost no role in controlling institutions. This helped give rise to the third more sociological approach. Here, the role of culture in the present, like social norms and customs, are more important than historical paths established in the past. Schmidt says:

Sociological institutionalism instead focuses on the forms and procedures of organizational life stemming from culturally specific practices, with institutions cast as the norms, cognitive frames, and meaning systems that guide human action as well as the cultural scripts and schemata diffused through organizational environments, serving symbolic and ceremonial purposes rather than just utilitarian ones. Rationality for scholars of sociological institutionalism is therefore socially constructed and culturally and historically contingent, defined by cultural institutions that set the context within which purposive, goal-oriented action is deemed acceptable according to a “logic of appropriateness” (Scott 1995; DiMaggio and Powell 1991; March and Olsen 1989) (p. 51).

The sociological theory of institutions seems to suffer from a lot of the same flaws. It finds the dominant, or mainstream, cultural values of a society without looking at how these values formed.

This brings us to Schmidt's approach, what she calls discursive institutionalism. Basically, the idea is that discourse, or political debates, shapes not just institutions but policy as well. Schmidt seems to build off the historical and sociological approach, looking at dominant values, but also looking at them in historical perspective. She argues this approach is distinct from rational choice theory in the following way:

If one takes ideas seriously, as Bo Rothstein argues, institutions need no longer be treated as neutral structures of incentives or (worse) the immutable products of “culture” that lead to inescapable “social traps.” Instead, institutions are better understood as the carriers of ideas or “collective memories,” which make them objects of trust or mistrust and changeable over time as actors’ ideas and discourse about them change in tandem with changes in their performance (Rothstein 2005, ch. 1, 7). Moreover, subjective interests replace the objective ones of rational choice institutionalism, as ideas about interests that bring in a much wider range of strategic ideas and social norms (p. 52). 

She goes on to say:

What defines work that is clearly discursive institutionalist within the historical institutionalist tradition is the focus on ideas as explanatory of change, often with a demonstration that such ideas do not fit predictable “rationalist” interests, are underdetermined by structural factors, and/or represent a break with historical paths (p. 54).

This changes the study of institutions from something static, whether it is historical paths, or mainstream values, into something dynamic by looking at political debates at different points in time, or over a period of time.

To take just a few examples, the political culture of the US shifted to being more liberal in the 1930s-70s, but even during this period of time, there was always a section of the public that was opposed to the New Deal. The New Deal ended with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and the political culture of the country shifted to being more conservative. In the early 19th century, the dominant culture of the US at least tolerated slavery, if not actively supported, however there was a small but influential abolitionist movement to abolish slavery. In the 1840s and 50s these people were considered radicals and unrealistic, but now of course their views are mainstream. The point is that focusing on political debates takes you beyond the surface level of dominant culture to see subcultures that may not be the majority, but are important, and in some cases may be ahead of the times as their values become more mainstream.

Schmidt argues that her approach helps bring out the background, or subconscious ideas, that also motivate actions:

For discursive institutionalism, by contrast, institutions are internal to sentient agents, serving both as structures (of thinking and acting) that constrain action and as constructs (of thinking and acting) created and changed by those actors. This internal capacity to create and maintain institutions derives from agents’ “background ideational abilities” (Schmidt 2008). This is a generic term for what Searle (1995) defines as the “background abilities” that encompass human capacities, dispositions, and know-how related to how the world works and how to cope with it or for what Bourdieu describes as the “habitus” in which humans beings act “following the intuitions of a ‘logic of practice’” (1990, 11). These background ideational abilities underpin agents’ ability to make sense in a given meaning context, that is, to “get it right” in terms of the ideational rules or “rationality” of a given discursive institutional setting (p. 55)

In the next section of the article, Schmidt defines in detail what she means by discourse:

Without discourse, understood as the exchange of ideas, it is very difficult to explain how ideas go from individual thought to collective action. We don’t, after all, know what people are thinking or why they act the way they do until they say it. And we don’t, for the most part, engage in collective action or in collective (re)thinking of our actions without the articulation, discussion, deliberation, and legitimization of our ideas about our actions. This is why, in addition to the background ideational abilities that explain the internal processes by which institutions are created and maintained, we need to identity the “foreground discursive abilities” through which sentient agents may change (or maintain) their institutions following a logic of communication (Schmidt 2008). This is a generic term for what Habermas (1996) calls “communicative action,” and it is at the basis of theories about deliberative and discursive democracy (e.g., Dryzek 2000), about public debate (Art 2006), and about coordinative discourses of policy construction and communicative discourses of political communication (Schmidt 2002a, 2006). These foreground discursive abilities are essential to explaining institutional change because they refer to people’s ability to think outside the institutions in which they continue to act, to critique, communicate, and deliberate about such institutions and to persuade one another to take action to change them, whether by building “discursive coalitions” for reform against entrenched interests in the coordinative policy sphere or by informing, orienting, and deliberating with the public in the communicative political sphere (p. 56).

So, one of the strengths of this approach is looking at ideas at two levels: the foreground, or what people are actually saying, and the background, the deeply embedded or subconscious ideas. Jürgen Habermas is an important political philosopher that we will eventually discuss more.

Schmidt cautions against relying only on political debate without also looking at the more traditional types of statistics on economics and other relevant things. However, most political debates will weigh in on crucial economic and other areas, like for example the debate on worsening inequality in the US and elsewhere, or the increase in drug related deaths and mass shootings.

From now on, we will try to look at policy related issues as a series of ongoing debates, while noting the differences in power between those engaged in these debates.