Clemons and McBeth - MavDISK

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CHAPTER 2 THE RATIONAL PUBLIC POLICY METHOD Mini-Cases "McNamara's Retrospective: Rational Decision Making?" "The Small Town Health Clinic" ro understand and evaluate the rational model of policy analysis, you need to understand its ~enesis, history, and evolution, including the critical reaction it spurred. After providing you .viththat base we explain the rational model and provide one case (Vietnam) where it is tradiionally blamed, perhaps erroneously, for producing poor policy. Next we offer another case :hatdemonstrates how the rational model can help policy analysis, and we discuss its relevance ,n practice. We then provide you with the tools necessary to evaluate this and other models :>eforeconcluding the chapter. Genesis of the Rational Model The debates over the U.S. Constitution revolved around notions of decentralization versus :entralization and participation versus hierarchy. Alexander Hamilton, who favored a strong ~xecutive and decision making by experts, argued that democratic decision making could not )e made by emotional citizens. Instead, Hamilton envisioned a democracy in which an enjghtened few made policy in the best interests of the masses. Others such as Thomas Jefferson, although he was not in Philadelphia for the Convenjon, expressed the belief that democracy must be about decentralization and empowerment )f the people. In theory, the Constitution created a republican (representative) system of :hecks and balances and separation of powers that would allow for calm deliberation. In pracice, however, the initial reality was that Jefferson's view predominated. For at least the first hundred years, the United States was a country with a relatively small ederal government.' The political philosophy of the country was one of laissez.Caire 'The Constitution was ratified in 1789. Fifty-two years later, in 1841, the total number of civilians working Jr the federal government was barely over 18,000. Fifty years later, in 1891. the total was still less than 160,000ut four years earlier (1887), Congress had created the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC). the first regulalOry ~ency. By 1990. the total number of civilian federal employees had peaked at more than 3.5 million. Today there 'e under 3 million. Of course, it is also true that fewer than one-fifth of all govenunent employees work for the fed. '31government. By far, the largest percentage of employees. work at the ]ocallevel. CHAPTER2 . THE RATIONAL PUBUC POUCy METHOD economics, and the primary role of the government was to protect property and control interstate cornmerce and to control and protect U.S. interests in the realm of international trade. The states had the power to maintain the safety, health, welfare, and morals of the people under the Constitution. Unfortunately, or perhaps inevitably, Jefferson's view of a decentralized government educating citizens in the principles of civic virtue was not realized either. Instead, state and local governments were plagued by patronage, corruption, and generally sloppy decisionmaking practices. At the federal level, government had been transformed by the rnid-1800s from a Government by Gentlemen to a system of patronage and frequent corruption. At the same time, after the Civil War, American society changed fundamentally from an insular agrarian country to an international and urbanized country. For the first time in its history, the country had to deal on a large scale with problems like crime, poverty, pollution, monopolization of industry, economic trade issues, and the growth of technology. These new problems generated the need for complex policy and competent civil servants. The assassination of President Garfield in July 1881 at Union Station in Washington, D.C., by a disgruntled job seeker named Charles Julius Guiteau, helped spur Congress into creating a merit-based civil service by passing the Pendleton Act in 1883. This represented the first attempt to rationalize the bureaucracy and hence to rationalize government decision making. In accordance with Max Weber's dictum of the ideal bureaucracy, the federal bureaucracy was staffed (ideally) by neutral experts who would make decisions not under the influence of the irrationalities of politics but rather through rational, competent, businesslike and scientific methods of analysis.' WoodrowWilson published The Study of Administration (1887), making a complex argument that politics and administration should be separated, largely to protect the administrative sphere from partisanship, exploitation, and corruption. The separation of politics and administration is known as the politics/administration dichotomy. Others followed Wilson's path. Goodnow (1900), more focused on this issue than Wilson, attempted to make clear the distinction between politics (legislation that follows the public will) and administration (the execution of that legislation by experts). Gulick (1937) argued that, over time, the decisions of government would become so complex that only expert bureaucracies could make informed and sound public policies. The Rational Public Policy Method The theories of scientific management-an idea most closely associated with the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor (1911 )-also influenced the interpretation of what the relationship should be between politics and administration.Taylor, who pioneered time and motion 'It is generally acknowledged that Max Weber, a Gennan sociologist, developed the classic exposition of bureaucracies. Weber referred to his model as "ideal" but was not implying that it was ideal in the sense of being perfect. Rather. he was merely laying forth the hypothetically pure. or archetypal. fonn. Clemons thoroughly explains bureaucracy as a principle of organization, considers the power of bureaucracies. and discusses the relevance of bureaucracy to democracy in an essay in Freeman (1997, 175-90). 39
40 PARTJ . THEORY AND PRAClJCE studies, suggested that there was one best way to organize and accomplish tasks. The scientific practice of administration seemed clearly at odds with the idea of politics.' In 1945 Herbert Simon introduced his classic work Administrative Behavior, which sought to overthrow what he termed the proverbs of classic public administration theory found in the work of Gulick, Goodnow, and Wilson. Simon wrote that ultimately public administra. tion is about decision making and that decision making involves some variant of three steps: scanning the environment, developing alternatives, and choosing alternatives. Despite his emphasis on science instead of proverbs, his ideas actually reinforced the politics/administration dichotomy. Denhardt (2008, p. 71) writes, "Actually, Simon's conclu. sions were far less a departure from the mainstream of work in the field than his harsh language implied." Simon replaced the politics/administration dichotomy with the fact/value dichotomy and focused the study of public administration away from ends and on means. Denhardt con. cludes that Simon's major contribution was his emphasis on logical positivism, which separates facts and values, and his implicit endorsement of "generic" administration, which, according to Denhardt, led to a situation in which "more and more concern would be focused on means rather than ends, on administrative techniques rather than political principles." In short, Simon argued that decision making as well as decision administration can follow the scientific method. The rational model of decision making led to a host of rational models that all aimed at eliminating sloppy, uninformed, and "off the top of your head" decision making. Simon believed that we could and should separate "facts" from "values." Furthermore, he believed that decisions could be made scientifically using, among other things, computer modeling and mathematical models.' The social sciences have long envied the more prestigious hard sciences-data based, cloaked in the power of numbers, and supposedly objective and free from the pollution of politics and culture. It is clear that the rational model was an attempt to move human decision making away from the emotional and sometimes corrupt world of politics to what was perceived as the calculated, dispassionate, impartial, and honest world of science. In general, this school of thought is called logical positivism, or, simply, positivism. Logical positivism is a scientific system that recognizes only nonmetaphysical and observable phenomena. The impact of this philosophy in many areas, including public policy analysis, has been extensive. It suggests training analysl~ to be value neutral, to objectively observe facts, and to let these empirical realities tell their own stories. Positivism has dominated policy analysis. Within this still-dominant worldview, the job of the analyst is to specify procedures to gather facts about the world as it is, to present those facts without error or prejudice, to formulate rational policy alternatives, and then to allow the politicians to make purposeful policy that will help solve the policy problem. An ice-cold, impartial review and evaluation of the policy should follow. All of this fits nicely with Gulick's call for informed and sound policy decisions by an expert bureaucracy. Box 2-1 suggests the positivist paradigm is still going strong. 'Scientific management, or Taylorism as it is sometimes called, is a theory of management closely akin to the idea of the a.onf
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