Public Policy Making and Public Policy Analysis

This chapter reviews the development and growth of the policy-analytic profession. Historically, government decision makers have often called upon those with expertise to assist them in reaching their decisions. This chapter, however, concerns a new professional class of advisors that began developing during the 1950s in the United States. This new profession assists policy makers in understanding better their alternatives and relevant considerations for choosing among them. From here, the chapter offers some perspective on the research to date that has attempted to assess the effects of the profession—a perspective that emphasizes some important differences across the many types of governmental settings that utilize policy analysis, and the methodological difficulties that assessment efforts confront.

How Effective Is Policy Analysis?

This chapter discusses the effectiveness of policy analysis generally and then focuses on its use in the federal regulatory setting. It emphasizes that there are quite different definitions of policy analysis, ranging from almost any social science that discusses a policy to a tightly focused analysis of alternative policies evaluated and compared by public interest criteria leading to a specific recommendation. Effectiveness can also be defined broadly, from almost any use that is made of the policy research to whether or not the analysis improves the outcome of the policy-making process as judged by public interest criteria. The chapter clarifies these alternative definitions and reviews the sparse literature that has attempted to assess effectiveness by these definitions.

The Complicated and the Complex

This chapter considers the practice of policy analysis for the service-providing agencies of government like schools and assesses how well suited the policy-analytic tools are to being a source of improved policies for these agencies. This assessment draws on some 20-plus years of experience studying and implementing policies to improve schooling. The operating agencies are viewed as being always constrained by their existing base of knowledge and skills, always capable through learning of how to operate better, and always faced with opportunities that will require organizational learning. The central issue here is how to recognize when the capability of the school system must be improved in order to be commensurate with the ideas for educational improvement that it is asked to implement, and how to do so.

Summary and Future Directions

This chapter summarizes the major findings of the previous chapters in considering the development and impact of the policy-analytic profession. The growth in the voluntary employment of analysts not only by governments of all types as well as private sector and nonprofit agencies is a key indicator of the profession's effectiveness and value. However, policy analysts always place a high value on self-improvement. Market tests of employment are good at establishing general value of the analytic inputs (that benefits are greater than costs), and they are also good at demonstrating the broad range of settings in which this occupation has value. But a better understanding of when and how policy-analytic inputs succeed (and fail) at improving policies is important for learning how to improve the profession's effectiveness.

Can Congress Do Policy Analysis?

This chapter addresses the issues of using nonpartisan policy analysis within the current US legislative setting. It criticizes some of the earlier studies that assess congressional use of policy analysis for applying too narrow a conception of how analysis can affect decision making. The chapter conducts an original survey of over 150 policy professionals working in the Washington, DC, area and uses it to assess how well Congress carries out the different tasks or steps of policy analysis. It asks how well a certain institution carries out the policy-analytic mission rather than viewing policy analysis as the task of an individual or a small team focused on one particular issue.