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The making of decisions and reaching of conclusions is usually seen as the key feature of policy making.
General theories of political decision-making:
1.Rational actor models
These models have generally been constructed on the basis of economic theories which have themselves been derived from utilitarism. At the heart of such theories lies the notion of so-called 'economic man'.
Problems with this model:
a) It is more easily applied to individuals, who may have an ordered set of preferences, than to groups.
b) In practice decisions are often made on the basis of inadequate and inaccurate information, and the benefits of various actions may in any case not be comparable.
c) It ignores the role of perception.
2. Incremental models
Incrementalism holds that policy making is a continuous, exploratory process.
Problems with this model:
a) It has been criticised as profoundly conservative, in that in justifies a bias against innovation and in favour of inertia.
b) Incrementalism sheds little light on those political decisions that are radical, even revolutionary, in character.
The idea of 'mixed scanning' was proposed, which attempts to bridge the gap between the rational approach and incrementalism.
3. Bureaucratic and organisation models.
These models try to get inside the 'black box' (structure of the policy making process) by highlighting the degree to which process influences product.
The 'organisational process' model highlights the impact on decisions of the values, assumptions and regular patterns of behaviour that are found in any large organization.
The 'bureucratic politics' model emphasizes the impact on decisions of bargaining between personnel and agencies.
Problems with these models:
a) Organisational process model allows little scope for political leadership to be imposed from above.
b) Bureaucratic politics model discounts personal sympathies and individual goals of political actors.
c) External pressures are disregarded.
4. Belief system models.
According to this model, decision makers have a mechanism to filter information in the form of 'advocacy coalitions' which emerge within subsystems of a policy system. Advocacy coalitions comprise collections of individuals who share broadly similar beliefs and values.
Using this framework, policy change could largely be understood in terms of shifting balance of forces within a policy subsystem.
14) SYSTEM PERFORMANCE and DEMOCRACY PERFORMANCE
SYSTEM PERFORMANCE
Since views about such matters differ fundamentally, the standards against which governments and political systems can be judged also vary. Four widely held such standards can nevertheless be identified.
Stability performance
Stable government must be rooted in consensus and consent. In this view, what ensures the long-term survival of a regime is its responsiveness to popular demands and pressures. In this case, the central dilemma of stable government is that responsiveness must be balanced against effectiveness. Government must be sensitive to external pressures, but it must also be able to impose its will on society.
Conservative thinkers have traditionally linked stability and order not to responsiveness but to authority. Material performance
The central dilemma that arises from the use of material prosperity as a performance indicator is that growth must be balanced against fairness. Two contrasting views of this problem can be identified. The free-market view holds that general prosperity is best achieved by a system of unregulated capitalism.
The rival social-democratic view highlights the moral and economic benefits of equality. The virtue of social justice is that, by taking the distribution of wealth away from the vagaries of'the market, it ensures that all citizens have a stake in society and that each of them has an incentive to contribute.
Citizenship performance
A citizen is a member of a political community or state, endowed with a set of rights and a set of obligations.
There are three sets of rights': civil rights, political rights and social rights.
Civil rights are the rights necessary for 'individual freedom'. These include freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, freedom of conscience, the right to equality before the law and the right to own property. Civil rights are therefore rights that are exercised within civil society; they are 'negative' rights in the sense that they limit or check the exercise of government power. Political rights provide the individual with the opportunity to participate in political life. The central political rights are thus the right to vote, the right to stand for election and the right to hold public office. The provision of political rights clearly requires the development of universal suffrage, political equality, and democratic government. Finally, citizenship implies social rights which guarantee to the individual a minimum social status. These are 'positive' rights.
A major dilemma nevertheless confronts those who employ citizenship as a performance criterion: the need to balance rights against duties and thereby to apportion responsibilities between the individual and the community.
DEMOCRACY PERFORMANCE
Whereas stability, material prosperity and citizenship are all outcomes or products of government, democracy is essentially concerned with the process itself, with how decisions are made. Democracy means popular rule.
From the democratic perspective, the purpose of politics is to empower the individual and enlarge the scope of personal autonomy.
Taken to its logical extreme, the idea of popular self-government implies the abolition of the distinction between the state and civil society through the establishment of some form of direct democracy, for example, Athenian democracy amounted to a form of government by mass meeting,
Modern notions of democracy have shifted away from this Utopian vision. The more familiar machinery of representative democracy includes universal suffrage, the secret ballot, and competitive elections.
However, most political systems fare poorly by the standards of personal autonomy and popular rule. What passes for democracy in the modern world tends to be a limited and indirect form of democracy: liberal democracy. This institutional arrangement has been criticised by radical democrats for reducing popular participation to a near meaningless ritual: casting a vote every few years for politicians who can only be removed by replacing them with another set of politicians. In short, the people never rule.
This perspective is therefore linked to calls for radical, even revolutionary, political and social change. For example, government power should be decentralised so as to bring power 'closer' to the people. This could, for instance, require the break-up of the nation-state, as it is difficult, in practical terms, to see how a community the size of a modern nation could govern itself through direct and continuous participation.
Democracy also poses a set of dilemmas. The most important of them is the need for a balance between a twin goals of the government by the people and for the people.
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