Author: Sean Mackney
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This note is part of Quality testing.

Author: W. Michele Simmons
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791469965
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Takes a firsthand look at a case of public participation in environmental policy.

Author: Timothy J. Conlan
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
ISBN: 1626160392
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
While textbooks often describe an idealized model of "how a bill becomes law" and journalists emphasize special interest lobbying and generous campaign contributions to Congress, these approaches fail to convey -- much less explain -- the tremendous diversity in political processes that shape specific policies in contemporary Washington. Pathways of Power provides a framework that integrates the roles of political interests and policy ideals in the contemporary policy process. This book argues that the policy process can be understood as a set of four distinctive pathways of policymaking -- pluralist, partisan, expert, and symbolic -- that draw upon different political resources, appeal to different political actors, and elicit unique strategies and styles of coalition building. The book's use of a wide universe of major policy decisions provides a useful foundation for students of the policy process as well as for policy practitioners eager to learn more about their craft.

Author: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 039473954X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Michel Foucault has become famous for a series of books that have permanently altered our understanding of many institutions of Western society. He analyzed mental institutions in the remarkable Madness and Civilization; hospitals in The Birth of the Clinic; prisons in Discipline and Punish; and schools and families in The History of Sexuality. But the general reader as well as the specialist is apt to miss the consistent purposes that lay behind these difficult individual studies, thus losing sight of the broad social vision and political aims that unified them. Now, in this superb set of essays and interviews, Foucault has provided a much-needed guide to Foucault. These pieces, ranging over the entire spectrum of his concerns, enabled Foucault, in his most intimate and accessible voice, to interpret the conclusions of his research in each area and to demonstrate the contribution of each to the magnificent -- and terrifying -- portrait of society that he was patiently compiling. For, as Foucault shows, what he was always describing was the nature of power in society; not the conventional treatment of power that concentrates on powerful individuals and repressive institutions, but the much more pervasive and insidious mechanisms by which power "reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives" Foucault's investigations of prisons, schools, barracks, hospitals, factories, cities, lodgings, families, and other organized forms of social life are each a segment of one of the most astonishing intellectual enterprises of all time -- and, as this book proves, one which possesses profound implications for understanding the social control of our bodies and our minds.

Author: Allison L. Palmadessa
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031437063
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Author: Catherine Van Mossel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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The term "evidence-based" is ubiquitous in practice and policy-making settings around the world; it is de rigueur to claim this approach. This dissertation is an inquiry into the work of evidence-based policy-making with a particular focus on the social practices of policy work/ers involved with developing policies relating to chronic disease at the Ministry of Health in British Columbia (B.C.), Canada. I begin with an examination of tensions in the policy-making literature germane to the relationship between knowledge, its production, and policy-making: the environment into which evidence-based policy-making emerged in the 1990s. Drawing on the theorising of knowledge, discourse, and power - particularly from Foucault's work - for the analytic approach, I present the commitment to claims of "evidence-based" practices found in key government policy framework documents and policy workers' accounts of their practices, gathered through interviews. I then show the unravelling of this commitment in those accounts. This research reveals how the policy frameworks construct chronic disease as a financial burden on the health care system and direct policy workers to develop policies with this construction in mind. The discourses associated with evidence-based policy-making narrow how policy workers can think about evidence and its production to positivist, scientific methods and numerical measures that will provide proof of cost cutting. Proponents of evidence-based policy-making laud it as keeping politics and ideology out of the policy-making process. However, the policy workers I interviewed reveal the power relations organising their deeply political work environment. Furthermore, the minutiae constituting policy-making practices produce a "managerialist approach to governance" (Edwards, Gillies, and Horsley, 2015, p. 1) in which people with chronic disease are noticeable by their near-absence. When they do appear, they are responsibilised to decrease the burden on the health/care system and the economy. I argue that as a governing project with an appearance of failure, given the many cracks in the commitment to the claim and the practices of being evidence-based, the discourse of evidence-based policy-making is actually quite successful. It has continuous effects: people are separated (so-called apolitical policy workers into imagined neutral space and decision-makers into political space), knowledge is divided, costs and responsibilities are downloaded to individuals, and evidence-based discourses appear in countless settings. The governing works.

Author: Frank Fischer
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822381818
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Public policy is made of language. Whether in written or oral form, argument is central to all parts of the policy process. As simple as this insight appears, its implications for policy analysis and planning are profound. Drawing from recent work on language and argumentation and referring to such theorists as Wittgenstein, Habermas, Toulmin, and Foucault, these essays explore the interplay of language, action, and power in both the practice and the theory of policy-making. The contributors, scholars of international renown who range across the theoretical spectrum, emphasize the political nature of the policy planner's work and stress the role of persuasive arguments in practical decision making. Recognizing the rhetorical, communicative character of policy and planning deliberations, they show that policy arguments are necessarily selective, both shaping and being shaped by relations of power. These essays reveal the practices of policy analysts and planners in powerful new ways--as matters of practical argumentation in complex, highly political environments. They also make an important contribution to contemporary debates over postempiricism in the social and policy sciences. Contributors. John S. Dryzek, William N. Dunn, Frank Fischer, John Forester, Maarten Hajer, Patsy Healey, Robert Hoppe, Bruce Jennings, Thomas J. Kaplan, Duncan MacRae, Jr., Martin Rein, Donald Schon, J. A. Throgmorton

Author: Greg Marston
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Despite the fact that policy is increasingly led by the mass media, social policy research has so far focused on variables and quantitative measurement rather than cultural meanings and moral welfare debates. Taking a critical examination of social policy on public housing by way of illustration, this book demonstrates how critical discourse theory can be used in applied research. It shows how the theory and method of critical discourse analysis can be worked together in an intricate and accessible way.

Author: Thomas A. Birkland
Publisher: East Gate Book
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
An Introduction to the Policy Process is intended for students in either traditional academic or professional programs at the undergraduate level. The author's direct writing style and extensive use of examples will also appeal to practitioners. The book offers an extensive overview of the best current thinking on the policy process, with emphasis on accessibility and synthesis rather than novelty or abstraction. It includes many features that make it equally useful as a ready reference: -- An extensive glossary of terms keyed to the chapters in which each term is most thoroughly discussed; -- An annotated bibliography; -- An introduction to Web-based research, with a guide to the most important and reliable public policy research sites. A book that can be read on many levels, this is one that students and instructors will want to keep long after the course is over. CONTENTS 1. The Study and Practice of Public Policy 2. The Historical and Structural Context of Public Policy Making 3. Official Actors and Their Roles in Public Policy 4. Unofficial Actors and Their Roles in Public Policy 5. Agenda Setting, Power, and Interest Groups 6. Policies and Policy Types 7. Policy Design and Policy Tools 8. Policy Implementation and Policy Failure 9. Putting It All Together: Models of the Policy Process Appendix: Public Policy Research on the Web

Author: Louis M. Imbeau
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387896724
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
George Bush’s 1988 campaign pledge, "Read my lips: no new taxes," has become a mantra for those who distrust politicians and bureaucrats. The gulf between what political leaders say and do seems to be widening, and in democratic societies around the world, contributing to an atmosphere of cynicism and apathy among the citizenry. Understanding the characteristics and functions of speech in policy processes is a requirement for trying to overcome this problem; indeed, politicians and bureaucrats spend a good proportion of their time and resources discoursing, i.e., writing, speaking, and publishing. However, there has been scant analysis of political discourse; the aim of this book is to fill this analytical gap, by exploring political speech from a variety of perspectives, including normative, epistemological, and empirical. Incorporating insights from economics, political science, philosophy, and law, and evidence from the United States, Canada, France, Italy, Turkey, and the EU, the book addresses a wide variety of timely issues, including:. Fiscal discipline in speeches vs budget balance: Is an improvement (deterioration) of the budget balance preceded by a more (less) fiscally disciplined discourse? Revenues and spending forecasted in budget speeches vs realised budget outcomes: Is there a systematic bias? If so, how can we explain it? Electoral pledges vs actual realisations: Do governments follow up on their electoral pledges? Ideological stance in party publications vs spending and revenues of party governments: Do parties of the right and the left speak different languages? How can we validly classify a government as of the left or of the right? Is there a systematic difference between governments of the right and of the left in terms of their policy? Speeches by central bank officers vs monetary policy: Can changes in monetary policy be predicted by official speeches? The political business cycle: How can taking into consideration the speech-action relationship strengthen (or threaten) our knowledge about electoral and partisan cycles in public spending? Other questions explored include: Should policy makers always tell the truth and all the truth? What are the benefits and the costs of transparency? How can we resolve the apparent contradiction between the democratic demand for transparency and the efficiency requirement of secrecy in many policy areas (budget preparation, monetary policy, foreign policy, security, etc.)? Under which conditions is secrecy acceptable in a democratic society? To what extent may deception and lies lead to a breach of trust or to power abuse? What are the most efficient institutional mechanisms to prevent such abuse? Collectively, the authors present new insights for understanding political process and government activity, and suggest avenues for further research.