i

POLITICAL SCIENCE PROJECT

(PUBLIC POLICY PROCESS)

ON

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POLITICS AND PUBLIC POLICY

SUBMITTED BY:

HIMANI CHOUDHARY

Roll no. 180625

2nd Year

MODY UNIVERSITY
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Contents
1. Introduction
2. The Separation of Policy and Politics
3. Policy and Politics: A Combined Approach
4. Models Depicting Relationship between Politics and Public Policy
5. Conclusion
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Introduction

In our ever-changing world, the idea of policy and politics tends to have a powerful and often
times contentious meaning. People see politics as a necessary evil in their day to day lives and
for the most part completely forget the policy behind the politics. In some cases, and more than
most of us would like to think, we combine the world of politics and policy and blur the lines of
what they truly are and represent.

“Politics” is a word that has been derived from the Greek word “politikos” meaning “an official”
which has been modeled on “Affairs of the City” by Aristotle. “Policy” is a term that has been
derived from the Old French word “policie,” from Late Latin “politia” and ancient Greek
“politeia.”

Politics, as many of us know, is the part of our governmental system where men and women vie
for the acceptance and votes of the nation or the constituents in their respective districts. Policy
on the other hand is what the elected politicians, analysts, and administrators are supposed to
accomplish on a day to day basis as part of their jobs. The world of politics and political science
diverges at this point but most people do not and will not see this divergence. The world of
policy is a complex world of research, writing, arguing, and hopefully reaching some kind of
consensus on a given issue. In the most general of terms, the policy world helps to create and
write the legislation that parliaments, congresses, and other elected bodies vote on during the
course of their elected terms. Politics is the part that muddles through the policy and they help
decide what is appropriate for the people and they are a form of check and balance to the policy
created daily. Political scientists study the governmental systems created by man and the
processes that work towards the creation of the policy that will one day become law.
Policy makers constantly struggle to reconcile policy and politics—to square what they want to
do on the merits with what consent requires. Academic research and teaching on public policy,
however, have typically separated policy argument from political analysis. Some authors
recommend solutions to public problems, whereas others examine the politics of actual policies.
In this project, I propose a combined conception of policy research and teaching that joins policy
analysis and political analysis. This approach links elements of economics and political science
to approximate the actual process of statecraft.
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Politics is part of the government system, and a policy can be called a plan. Politics can be
defined as a science or art of governing or government, especially governing a political entity
like a nation. A policy can be defined as an overall plan that embraces the general goals. A
policy can also be said to be a course or action that is proposed by a government, an
individual, business firm, or any party. Politics refers to authority and refers to public life.
Politics generally revolves round government and its activities. Politics is a term that refers to the
organizational process. It also refers to the theory and practice of governance. Political parties
run the government which all adheres to certain policies.

Policy can be termed as a principle. It is not that political parties adhere to certain policies, but
almost all individuals have certain policies. Most companies follow certain policies. A policy can
also be termed as a commitment or statement of intent. It is because of the policy that people, an
organization, or a party is held accountable. A policy is a set of rules or principles that guide
decisions.

The study of public policy has the potential both to improve policy and teach us more about
government itself. Aristotle alluded to both potentials when he treated politics as the master
science—the pursuit by which a community might achieve the good life. Leaders were to use
governance to realize the good society, but to achieve that they must seriously study the
workings of government and politics. In principle, the science of policy and the science of
politics were one and the same.

The Separation of Policy and Politics:

Public policy as an academic field arose in the 1960s because of widespread dissatisfaction with
the performance of government, especially at the national level. As they have developed,
however, these programs seldom teach statecraft as officeholders experience it, with policy and
politics in constant tension. Rather, research and teaching in the two subjects are largely
separate. Policy analysis, or the study of what government should do about public problems, is
done and taught mostly by economists; the subjects here include microeconomics and statistics.
Studies about politics are done and taught largely by political scientists; the subjects here include
the legislative process, implementation, and administration. The first group focuses largely on
policy, the second mostly on politics, and neither says much about the other. Thus, ironically,
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economics tells government what to do while ignoring it, while political science does focus on
government but will not tell it what to do. Neither achieves that union of policy and politics that
Aristotle imagined.

Each side makes assumptions that effectively exclude the other subject. When discussing policy
argument, economists often make the “Model 1” assumption, the idea that government consists
of a single decision maker, thus eliminating politics as a constraint. That leader’s problem is then
entirely one of choice rather than power. Political scientists, for their part, usually disclaim any
authority to say what policy should be. To do that would be to second-guess the democratic
political process, which they refuse to do. So rather than reason about policy independent of
politics, they often assume that the outcome of a democratic process is by definition optimal. In
practice, each discipline admits the need for the other. Economists, after dominating the early
curricula of the policy schools, came to accept the need for more courses about politics and
implementation, because these subjects were so important in the real world. But in theory, policy
and politics are still approached differently and usually taught by different scholars.

Some will say that policy analysis and political analysis are not really separate. Don’t texts in
public policy cover both? True, general texts about policy say something about both subjects, but
the relative emphasis differs sharply depending on authorship.2 Texts written by economists
focus mostly on how to optimize policy using such tools as cost-benefit analysis or program
evaluation. The policy process is treated as secondary, to be modeled with other economic
concepts such as rational choice or the Arrow paradox. Conversely, texts written by political
scientists chiefly describe the evolution of policy in areas such as economic management,
education, or social welfare. Policy analysis either gets limited attention or is treated as part of
the policy process. Texts focused on just analysis or just process is, of course, even more
specialized.

The separation of policy and politics weakens the public policy field. Arguments for best policy
that ignore institutional constraints are often stillborn: Congress ignores them, or the bureaucracy
cannot implement them. That, for instance, was the fate of the early proposals for welfare reform
that economists drafted in the 1960s and 1970s. These plans would have guaranteed all poor a
minimum income. However, Congress focused instead on getting welfare recipients to work, and
this was the goal that dominated welfare reform in the 1980s and 1990s. One reason many
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economists opposed enforcing work in welfare was that they did not appreciate how popular this
was, and they knew little about how work programs operate. Work-based reform succeeded
because it cut with the grain of the institutions, as the earlier proposals had not.

Equally, research on the politics of policy lacks a wide audience because it usually makes no
argument for best policy. Few other than academic specialists will be interested in the political
analysis of issues unless it is linked to some serious proposal for change. Only then are policy
and politics joined in the way that successful statecraft requires. Only then does the researcher sit
in the same seat as the policy maker, seeking to reconcile the optimal with the politic.

Policy and Politics: A Combined Approach:

The earlier discussion on politics/administration dichotomy brings out clearly the fact that
politics cannot be divorced from administration. What public policy is or what it is not, it can
still be argued further that public policy is the heart of government which can be manipulated
positively or negatively, depending on the actors involved. This leads us into a discussion on
actors in policy process. These are the executive, the legislature, the judiciary, the bureaucrats,
the interest groups as well as the politicians, among others. What this section is trying to
emphasize is that through the actors, politics interacts with policy process.

Far better would be a combined approach to public policy research and teaching that brings
policy and politics together. Scholars should first argue how to solve a public problem “on the
merits,” that is, on a policy analytic basis and without concessions to politics. They should then
go on to discuss impediments that might arise from the legislative or administrative process, and
how these might be handled. In fact, they should forecast the tension between policy argument
and politics that policy makers would face if they espoused these proposals in office.

But are not policy and politics separate subjects? I think not, and here is why. Policy and politics
each provides a critical perspective on the other. When we talk Teaching Public Policy
Education about any policy issue, we may discuss either the merits or the politics of what to do.
These subjects can seem to be distinct, but they are really different facets of the same problem.

In analyzing policy, one makes an argument for a preferred course of action initially on the
merits, without attention to the politics. But having done that, one should go on to consider
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whether the political system can approve and implement such a policy. Those factors begin as
elements of policy analytic arguments for or against various options, but they also generate a
different perspective. If government cannot “do the right thing,” as is often the case that may
suggest that the political process be changed, so that outcomes improve.

As one example, changes in congressional procedure were essential to the balancing of the
budget that was achieved—all too briefly—in the late 1990s. In the 1980s, partisan
disagreements made it difficult to agree on spending cuts or tax increases to cut the deficit. But
because public pressure to reduce the red ink was strong, the parties finally did agree on
procedures that at least forced spending and revenues into better alignment. Under the Budget
Enforcement Act of 1990, limits were placed on discretionary spending, and changes in
entitlements or taxes required offsets so that the deficit did not expand. Here policy analysis
provides arguments to change politics.

Equally, political analysis can provide perspective on policy. Goals that are sufficiently difficult
to achieve politically may finally call policy argument into question. If there is no way to do
what we want, then we must choose something more feasible. Aaron Wildavsky argued that we
often do not choose ends and then go looking for means, as classical economic policy analysis
supposes. Rather, we first see what things government can do and then choose our ends from
among them.

As one example, welfare reform focused on putting welfare mothers to work because evaluations
showed that this was something government could achieve. Another goal that reform might have
had—restoring marriage so that fewer families became headed by females—was deemphasized
because it was much less popular than enforcing work, and programs able to achieve it had not
appeared. Rhetorically, welfare reformers lauded marriage as the solution to poverty, but they
made no serious attempt to enforce it as they did work. Government could handle the work goal,
whereas marriage was beyond it.

Academically, the study of policy and the study of politics can seem like ships passing in the
night. But in the actual practice of government, they are as closely tied as brothers. It is too
simple to say that a policy argument succeeds or not, or that the politics prefers one option or
another. Either studied in isolation misses the crucial interaction between them. Policy argument
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and actual politics are not separate but merged in a high-level systems analysis. Faced with any
serious problem, policy makers keep trying out various courses of action to see what works but
also what has support. Whatever they do has to be justifiable to them on the merits, but it also
has to be persuasive to other actors. Statecraft requires that policy satisfy both priorities.

Note that the political side of policy reasoning extends beyond the legislative arena to include
implementation. Bureaucracy and federalism are among the constraints on what policy makers
may choose to do. In recent decades, public administration has often been a forgotten subject in
political science. One good effect of linking policy and political analysis more closely is to
restore administration as a central subject of policy research.

The history of any policy area shows a constant jockeying between innovative ideas and a search
for consent, between ends and means. In the welfare area, policy making went through several
stages of controversy, enactment, implementation, and renewed controversy from the 1960s
through the 1990s, each cycle generating the issues for the next. Policy and the politics must be
made consistent, and only when they are does the ferment cease. That is the process that public
policy research and teaching should seek to capture, and only the combined conception can do it.

Another way to put this is that policies are not really chosen in isolation from the institutions, as
orthodox policy analysis assumes. Rather, options and the arrangements for them must be chosen
together. To be effective, programs must have a persuasive rationale and be embedded in a
supportive legislative and administrative setting. In choosing some new policy, one also chooses
a regime for that program, and perhaps others. That is especially true of major structural changes.
Reforms in bureaucratic organization or in intergovernmental relations, for instance, will affect
policies in many areas. Such restructuring amounts to “meta policy making.”

Even where texts in public policy devote attention to both policy analysis and political analysis,
they fail to capture the intimate connection between them. The two subjects appear as separate
worlds, when they are really two sides of the same coin. The texts do not consider that political
constraints should really be part of policy argument or that the policy-making process can
sharply limit what best policy means. And in research on public policy, there is even less sense
of policy and politics shaping and reshaping each other. Typically, the usual division prevails
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where economists recommend best policy while political scientists explain what government
actually does.

The political party is another political actor in policy process. The political party articulates the
demands and preferences of the people especially their members and supporters into the political
process. The party also uses its resources to ensure that the demands of its supporters are enacted
into policies. Political parties, through their members in public office, sometimes wield
considerable influence in the execution of public policies particularly when they are in control of
the government apparatus. They exercise this influence by ensuring that their manifestoes,
policies and their programmes are implemented. Other actors in the policy process include the
bureaucracy, interest groups, the citizenry as well as the experts and the professionals.

Models Depicting Relationship between Politics and Public Policy:

David Easton’s System Analysis:

The term of “political system” is being used increasingly in the study of comparative politics.
Different political scientists have a variety of views upon the definition of political system.
David Easton says that “Political system is authoritative allocation of values but before going
into the elaborated definition of the political system, one must know about “political and
system.” The word political in its literal meanings is that any phenomenon pertains to the study
of politics. So politics in its simplest meaning is, “Practice of government and managing of
public affairs.” The word system, “implies the interdependence of parts and a boundary of some
kind between it and its environment” further he says, “By interdependence we means that when
the properties of one components in a system change all the other components and the system as
a whole is affected.” The boundary of the political system means that every political system has
its circumscribed frame work in which it performs.

In this way it has become easier to understand the meaning of a political system “Broadly the
political arrangement of a society, embracing all factors influencing collective decisions, the
political system thus includes processes of recruitment and socialization, parties, voters and
social movements, which is not a formal part government.” In a political system there are some
fundamental units and boundaries that differentiate it from other systems. The political system is
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composed of different structures and functions, structures ensure systems officially and
development functions denote realization of demands and promotion of development since
demands and developments are variables.

The political system is a biological phenomenon in which is a human body work in a mechanized
form. The heart circulates blood to the organs of the whole body. All organs of the body have
their special functions to perform. If any organ of the body does not receive the blood properly or
resists in performing its function, the whole system of the body will be disturbed. In the same
way, the political system has different structures and functions and every structure has its sub
system that is assigned specific functions to do, it may be authoritative assigned function. The
political system exists only in a state, which is the sole entity for the identification of its
credibility. The functions in a political system cater the demands of the people to ensure
development. There are two types of input and output in every political system.

The whole political system is designed for the welfare of the society and emphasize upon the
betterment of the people. The quantum of demand is deeply concerned with the development of
the political system. If the demands are higher as compared to capabilities, the political system
will become dysfunctional and if demands are equal or lesser as compared to capabilities the
political system will show upward change. This process of change is called development. Every
political system is composed of infrastructures (input) and ultra structures (output).

Gabriel Almond’s Structural Functional Analysis:

The students of political science as structural functionalism popularly know almond’s model. It
is so called because Almond has explained his views keeping these structures of political system
in mind. He has, in fact, stressed that every political system has some structures and these
structures perform certain functions meant for it.

In his noted work The Politics of the Developing Areas Almond has drawn our attention to an
interesting issue. He says that though there are differences between developed and developing
countries so far as structures are concerned, the structures perform almost similar functions.
What is structure? Here the word structure is used in a sense different from sociological sense.
Structure means institutions. Every political system has several institutions such as political
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party, legislature, executive, judiciary, etc. Almond claims that all these were previously called
institutions. But he has changed the nomenclature.

The chief objective of Almond was to make a comparative study of the major political systems
and for that purpose what he has done ultimately became the foundation of general systems
theory/analysis. For the purposes of comparison Gabriel Almond has divided the functions of
political system into two broad categories—Input functions and output functions. Easton and
Almond have borrowed the terms—input and output from economics for the purpose of
analyzing the functions and behavior of political systems and their different structures. This
approach helps comparison considerably.

The input functions are:

1. Political socialization and recruitment.

2. Interest articulation
3. Interest aggregation
4. Political communication

The output functions are:

1. Rule making.
2. Rule adjudication.
3. Rule application.

If we focus our attention to these two types of functions performed by political systems we shall
find that the input functions are generally done by the nongovernmental organizations and
agencies, which include pressure groups, interest groups, parties, educational institutions. The
government has very little part to play in the input functions. While performing the input
functions the agencies have little scope to violate the common law and existing legal and
constitutional structure. But if the agencies have in mind the idea of changing the existing
structure, they can do otherwise
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Conclusion:

It should be noted that society is ordered, steered and directed towards desired ends by the state
through policies. Therefore, policy becomes the object, the tool and the means of governance.
Let us remind ourselves again that politics is viewed as the authoritative allocation of values
such as making decision on who gets what, when and how, while policy is defined by Ikelegbe
as governmental actions or course of actions or proposed actions or course of proposed actions
that are directed at achieving certain goals..

At the stage of recognizing that there is a problem to be solved, it is the people – the citizens, a
group of people, the bureaucrats, the legislative body, or, even the executive – that will come up
with policy demands. From the level of problem recognition to that of policy adoption, a lot of
politics is involved. When the demands are made on the government on certain issues, if it is not
translated into political issue, it may not get to be on the agenda. The agenda stage is that stage
where government ruminates over the demands from the environment. This is always a political
process in which groups struggle for power to be in control. It is also at this level that ideological
and interest groups compete to broaden the agenda or include their issues or to narrow it by
excluding issues that they do not want considered. After the adoption of policies, the
implementation stage is very crucial and it involves a lot of politics. Remember, there is no way
a policy can be implemented successfully without adequate funding and availability of
personnel. Allocation of funds, infrastructures, as well as provision of personnel is political. If
the government is not in favour of the policy, it is capable of frustrating it by failing to provide
adequately for its implementation.

When one considers the contributions of each of the actors discussed above – the legislature, the
executive, the judiciary, the political party, even the citizens and the interest groups – politics
will be found at every stage of the policy process from the problem recognition to the policy
evaluation.