PS 571 Public Policy Theory

Course Description

This course examines approaches to the study of public policy rather than the content of public policy. Although there will be discussion of the content of policy, that content will be incidental to the discussion of public policy theory. Some policy courses examine public policy content, for example environmental or economic policy. Among other policy courses there are two basic approaches: One, not used here, is policy analysis, in which the intent is to provide tools to prepare students to formulate, implement, evaluate, or in other ways to be active participants in developing and conducting policy. The other, the focus of this course, examines public policy as an intellectual exercise, to study why and how policy is developed, applied, evaluated, and generally conducted as it is and how policies develop over time. The intent of this approach is to prepare students to be careful and creative observers of policy rather than participants in policy development, though it helps prepare students to participate.

Among the topics to be considered in this course are approaches to the study of the policy process; theoretical orientations toward such policy elements as policy tools (regulation and others, for example) and policy typologies; normative (value) and empirical issues of public policy; the role of information and values in the policy process; and others. As noted, this is not a course in policy analysis; that is, it does not teach such methods as cost-benefit analysis, though it does examine the role of such methods in the policy process.

Student Learning Outcomes

The course seeks to develop in students...

• A sense of alternative approaches to the examination of public policy and of their respective strengths and limits.
• Awareness of the role of interests, ideas, knowledge, uncertainties, and other factors in oneself and in others in relation to the development and consideration of public policy.
• Awareness of factors that affect whether and how topics become “problems” and get on the agendas of government for consideration
• A sense of approaches toward and tools of policy formulation and policy enactment, including the importance of language and other political elements that affect public and elite perceptions and actions.
• Recognition of the importance of policy application (implementation, and its sub-component, budgeting) and awareness of factors that affect the relative success of implementation of policy decisions.
• Awareness of the complexity of policy evaluation in terms of mixes of values, interests, competing orientations, and other factors, and of the ubiquity and effect of the evaluation of policies.
• A sense of overall trends in development of policy in advanced industrial nations, primarily the United States.
• Conceptual clarity in evaluating overall policy development, drawing on various approaches that attempt to account for those developments.
• The ability to synthesize all these to a specific area of public policy development.
• Enhanced ability to explore policy issues and to present the results of those explorations clearly, concisely, and in compelling form in written and oral communication.