Wikis > Who are policy designers?
As Thomas’ (2001) account of the different sub-stages and activities involved in policy formulation, different actors are involved in different aspects of policy formulation and policy design. Defining and weighing the merits and risks of various options forms the substance of this second stage of the policy cycle, and more or less formal ‘policy analysis’ is thus a critical component of policy formulation and policy design activity (Gormley 2007; Sidney 2007; Dunn 2008). The manner in which the policy advice system is structured in a particular sector allows us to identify the more or less influential actors involved in design decisions and policy assessments in specific sectoral subsystems or issue networks (James and Jorgensen 2009).

The role of policy advisors and policy advice systems

Given the range of players and sub-stages involved in it, policy formulation is a highly diffuse and often disjointed process whose workings and results are often very difficult to discern and whose nuances in particular instances can be fully understood only through careful empirical case study. Nevertheless, most policy formulation processes do share certain characteristics which are relevant to considerations of policy design. First, and most obviously, formulation is not usually limited to one set of actors (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993). Second, formulation may also proceed without a clear definition of the problem to be addressed (Weber and Khademian 2008) and may occur over a long period of time in ‘rounds’ of formulation and reformulation of policy problems and solutions (Teisman, 2000). And third, while formulators often search for ‘winwin’ solutions, it is often the case that the costs and benefits of different options fall disproportionately on different actors (Wilson 1974). This implies, as Linder and Peters, among others, noted the capability of policy designs to be realized in practice remains subject to many political as well as, unpredictable, technical variables. However, this does not imply that policy design is impossible or an unworthwhile task, simply that it must be recognized that some designs may prove impossible to adopt in practice in given contexts and that the adoption of any design will be a fraught and contingent process as options and various types of policy actors attempt to construct and assess alternative designs (Dryzek 1983).

Politicians situated in authoritative decision-making positions ultimately ‘make’ public policy. However, they do so most often by following the advice provided to them by civil servants and others whom they trust or rely upon to consolidate policy alternatives into more or less coherent designs provide them with expert opinion on the merits and demerits of the proposals (MacRae and Whittington 1997; Heinrichs 2005). As such it is useful to think of policy advisors as being arranged in an overall ‘policy advisory system’ which will differ slightly in every particular issue area but which generally assumes a hierarchical shape.

Recent studies of advice systems in countries such as New Zealand, Israel, Canada and Australia have developed this idea; that government decisionmakers sit at the centre of a complex web of policy advisors which include both ‘traditional’ political advisors in government as well as non-governmental actors in NGOs, think tanks and other similar organizations, and less formal or professional forms of advice from colleagues, friends and relatives and members of the public and political parties, among others (Maley 2000; Peled 2002; Dobuzinskis et al. 2007; Eichbaum and Shaw 2007). As Anderson (1996) noted, ‘a healthy policy-research community outside government can play a vital role in enriching public understanding and debate of policy issues, and it serves as a natural complement to policy capacity within government’ (486).

Understanding the nature of policy formulation and design activities in different analytical contexts involves discerning how the policy advice system is structured and operated in the specific sector of policy activity under examination (Brint 1990; Page 2010). At their most basic, policy advice systems can be thought of as part of the knowledge utilization system of government, itself a kind of marketplace for policy ideas and information, comprising three separate components: a supply of policy advice, its demand on the part of decision-makers, and a set of brokers whose role it is to match supply and demand in any given conjuncture (Brint 1990; Lindquist 1998). That is, these systems can be thought of as arrayed into three general ‘sets’ of analytical activities and participants linked to the positions actors hold in the ‘market’ for policy advice.

  • Actors at the top of the hierarchy is composed of the ‘proximate decision-makers’ themselves who act as consumers of policy analysis and advice – that is, those with actual authority to make policy decisions, including cabinets and executives as well as parliaments, legislatures and congresses, and senior administrators and officials delegated decision-making powers by those other bodies.
  • Actors at the bottom, is composed of those ‘knowledge producers’ located in academia, statistical agencies and research institutes who provide the basic scientific, economic and social scientific data upon which analyses are often based and decisions made.
  • Actors in between the first two is composed of those ‘knowledge brokers’ who serve as intermediaries between the knowledge generators and proximate decision-makers, repackaging data and information into usable form (Lindvall 2009; Page 2010). These include, among others, permanent specialized research staff inside government as well as their temporary equivalents in commissions and task forces, and a large group of non-governmental specialists associated with think tanks and interest groups. Although often thought of as ‘knowledge suppliers’, key policy advisors almost by definition exist in the brokerage subsystem, and this is where most professional policy analysts can be found (Lindvall 2009; Verschuere 2009; Howlett and Newman 2010).

In general, four distinct ‘communities’ of policy advisors can be identified within any policy advice system depending on their location inside or outside of government, and by how closely they operate to decision-makers: core actors, public sector insiders, private sector insiders, and outsiders (see Table 3.1).

Along with the less knowledgeable public, these sets of actors can also be thought of as existing on a spectrum moving from the abstract to the more practical, and therefore can also be linked to influence and impact on specific policy elements as set out in Table 3.2 (Page 2010).

The role of policy ideas in policy formulation and policy design

A key aspect of policy design, lies in the kinds of ideas held about the feasibility and optimality of alternative possible arrangements of policy tools. But different kinds of actors hold different kinds of ideas and have different levels of influence or impact on policy formulation activities. Not everyone’s ideas about policy options and instrument choices are as influential as others when it comes to policy appraisal and design (Lindvall 2009; Marriott 2010) and one has to be very specific about what level of policy and which particular element one is referring to when assessing the influence of specific kinds of actors and ideas on the articulation of policy alternatives. These ideas held by central policy actors play a key role in guiding efforts to construct policy options and assess design alternatives (Ingraham 1987; George 1969; Mayntz 1983; Jacobsen 1995; Chadwick 2000; Gormley 2007).

Different types of ideas have different effects on different elements of policy-making and hence upon instrument choices and policy designs. Policy goals, for example, consist of a range of ideas from general philosophical and ethical principles to specific causal logics and sociological constructs. And the same is true of policy means, which can embody some knowledge of past practices and concepts of successful and unsuccessful policy implementation, but also extend beyond this to ideological and other ideational structures informing ‘practical’ choices for goal attainment.

Distinguishing between types of ideas in terms of their level of abstraction and ‘practicality’ is an important first step in discerning their impact on policy designers. John Campbell (1988) has argued that a small number of distinct and distinguishable idea sets go into public policy-making: distinguishing between cognitive and normative ideas and whether these affect the ‘foreground’ or ‘background’ of policy debates and discussions. Or what he calls programme ideas, symbolic frames, policy paradigms, and public sentiments (see Table 3.3).

Ideas such as symbolic frames and public sentiments tend to affect the perception of the legitimacy or ‘correctness’ or ‘appropriateness’ of certain courses of action, while policy paradigms represent a ‘set o  cognitive background assumptions that constrain action by limiting the range of alternatives that policy-making elites are likely to perceive as useful and worth considering’ (Campbell 1998; 2002: 385; also Surel 2000). The term programme ideas represents the selection of specific solutions from among the set designated as acceptable within a particular paradigm. Thus symbolic frames and public sentiments can be expected to largely influence policy goals (Stimson 1991; Suzuki 1992; Durr 1993; Stimson et al. 1995) while more cognitive aspects such as policy paradigms3 and programme ideas, on the other hand, can be expected to more heavily influence choices of policy means (Stone 1989; Hall 1993). This helps to capture the manner in which established beliefs, values, and attitudes lie behind understandings of public problems and emphasizes how paradigm-inspired notions of the feasibility of proposed solutions are significant determinants of policy choices and alternative designs (Hall 1990: 59; also Huitt 1968; Majone 1975; Schneider 1985; Webber 1986; Edelman 1988; Hilgartner and Bosk 1988).

Similarly, in their work on the influence of ideas in foreign policy-making situations, Goldstein and Keohane (1993) and their colleagues noted at least three types of ideas that combined normative and cognitive elements but at different levels of generality: world views, principled beliefs, and causal ideas (see also Campbell 1998; Braun 1999). World views or ideologies have long been recognized as helping people make sense of complex realities by identifying general policy problems and the motivations of actors involved in politics and policy. These sets of ideas, however, tend to be very diffuse and do not easily translate into specific views on particular policy problems. Principled beliefs and causal stories, on the other hand, can exercise a much more direct influence on the recognition of policy problems and on policy content. These ideas can influence policy-making by serving as ‘road maps’ for action, defining problems, affecting the strategic interactions between policy actors, and constraining the range of policy options that are proposed (Carstensen 2010; Stone 1988; 1989). At the micro-level, ‘causal stories’ and beliefs about the behaviour patterns of target groups heavily influence choices of policy settings or calibrations (Stone 1989; Schneider and Ingram 1993 and 1994).

Different kinds of policy ideas pitched at different levels of generality and abstraction correlate quite closely with the different elements of policy set out above. The policy ideas found in public sentiments, for example, are generally too broad and normative in nature to have much of a direct impact on programme design. However they serve to set the context within which that design activity occurs. Conversely, policy paradigms have a much greater cognitive component, allowing them to significantly influence the nature of policy means at the policy regime level. These general relationships between idea types and policy elements are set out in Table 3.4 below.

Such a multi-level analysis of policy ideas helps explain some of the real complexity and difficulties involved in policy formulation and policy design (Bobrow and Dryzek 1987; Bobrow 2006). As Table 3.5 shows, different sets of actors, with different sets of ideas are active at different levels of policy formulation and policy design.

This implies that in a typical design situation the impact of the public and outsiders on formulation is significant but diffused and filtered when it comes to the articulation of causal stories and the design of specific tool selections and calibrations (Lindvall 2009; Page 2010). It also suggests that while very significant in such processes, core actors specifying policy targets and tool calibrations act within a greatly circumscribed landscape of existing world view and ideologies and policy paradigms (Braun 1999; Maley 2000; Haas 2001; Eichbaum and Shaw 2008; Dunlop 2009; Lindvall 2009).

Policy design as constrained expert discourse

It is common to find statements such as Halligan’s (1995) assertion that a good advice system should consist of:

at least three basic elements within government: a stable and reliable inhouse advisory service provided by professional public servants; political advice for the minister from a specialized political unit (generally the minister’s office); and the availability of at least one third-opinion option from a specialized or central policy unit, which might be one of the main central agencies.

And in all cases a major role in policy formulation and policy design is played by these kinds of core actors, such as professional policy analysts, central agency officials and others (Page 2010; Renn 1995). However, it is also important to note that their influence becomes more direct, although also more constrained, as the formulation process becomes focused on particular and more precise design dimensions (Meltsner 1976). That is, in a typical policy design situation, not all elements of a policy are at play and the range of choices left to designers at the micro-level of concrete targeted policy tool calibrations is restricted by general policy aims and implementation preferences which, in turn, inform meso-level considerations about alternative policy objectives and policy tool combinations.

Thus in many design situations, general abstract policy aims and implementation preferences can often be taken as given, establishing the context in which design decisions relating to programme-level and on-the ground specifications are made by policy insiders and core actors. And in many cases, even the goal components of these last two levels of policy may be already established, leaving the designer only the task of establishing specific policy tool calibrations which cohere with these already existing or well established policy elements. How the macro, meso and micro elements of a policy process fit together, then, is a critical determinant of how key actors view and articulate the range of policy alternatives available to them, and thus a critical component of policy formulation and policy design (Walker 2000; Walker, Rahman and Cave 2001).