PUBLIC POLICY ADMINISTRATION

Public Policy Administration

Public Policy Administration

Introduction

Public policy administration is a practice of government, an academic study, and a political reform movement. While public policy is the study of the process of making laws and government programs, public administration implements these policies and studies and seeks to improve this implementation. This chapter discusses a variety of approaches to the study of public policy and shows how the public administration and public policy subfields are closely related and at times intertwined. At the time of Easton's call for relevance, the public administration subfield had declined as a prominent subfield in the discipline. The behavioral movement had prevailed in expectations for quantitative research, and public administration had not moved toward a grand theory or wed itself to quantitative methods. However, it had gravitated toward more policy-relevant theories and concepts that were important foundations for the emerging field of public policy. (Weiss, 2009)

Agenda Setting Theory

Studies of agenda setting have tried to discern why some issues are given serious attention by government and others are not. Even among those that do receive serious attention, the question arises as to why some issues move quickly to reach agenda status and others take much longer. Thus, policy scholars sought to delineate the circumstances that make it more or less likely for a problem to be recognized and attended to by public officials. This theory is related to identifying the different theories that are used to study the importance of agenda setting in public policy administration theory. (White, 2006)

It is observed that the variation in the ability of groups to gain access to public officials and argued that this access influenced whether an issue was elevated to the formal agenda of a governmental entity. By the time public policy became a serious subfield, the importance of differential access to public officials had already been explored by the work of the author. His work drew attention to the uneven participation in governmental decisions. His findings, that business interests and upper classes dominated public policy participation, flew in the face of the traditional pluralists' claims of policy openness. It also elevated examination of how governmental leaders moved some issues onto the agenda and blocked others. Two years later, another pivotal study added to this point by developing the concept of “non-decisions” and arguing that the blocking of certain issues from advancing onto the agenda is an important type of policy power that needs to be studied even if it is difficult to observe. (Weiss, 2009)

How a problem is defined affects whether and how public officials address it. Schattschneider (1960) was a very early voice in discussing this dimension of the policy process in his delineation of public versus private problems. To gain legitimacy and thereby earn a spot on the agenda, issues needed to be defined as public problems. When issues were judged to be inappropriate for governmental attention, there was little chance that the issue would move beyond a private issue. Problem-definition research also placed perception and belief systems ...