The tools of governments and policy outcomes

One of the enduring questions that students of public policy like to ask is: what difference does politics make to the outcomes citizens and politicians care about? In other words, do the decisions that governments arrive at have an impact on such desirable states of affairs as good public health, low levels of crime, balanced economic growth and better student performance? This question is important because many people believe that creating or fostering desired outcomes is what political institutions and policy programmes are there for. The point of voting, having political parties, procedures for decisionmaking in legislatures and rules in bureaucracies is to create effective public policies that lead to desirable changes in the conditions of the world. If the results of such public deliberations and the application of expert forms of knowledge are negative or indifferent, the political system can only give the appearance of effective public action, producing symbolic policies, which are of little use to anyone other than the elites and their clients. As Edelman (1964, 1988) highlighted in a series of volumes, these symbolic policies often only appear to solve the problems they address, perpetuating the illusion of action. Without some influence in the real world, the stuff of politics would be largely redundant, mainly about slicing up the public purse to distribute resources between entrenched interest groups. In more sinister fashion, some public choice theorists argue that policies benefit interest groups who aim to persuade politicians and bureaucrats to use the monopoly power of the state to protect their interests (Stigler, 1971). As a result of the lack of competitive pressures, the state expands its activities to reward these groups, but with little net benefit to public welfare. But if politics is able to fulfil its purpose by influencing policy outcomes, it

should be a task of political scientists and policy scholars to find out what key factors are at work within the political realm. In particular, what choices can public decision-makers make to get to a more desired state of affairs? What resources can they deploy and do those choices matter? The privileges of office should give leaders the power to encourage or impose change, applying the legitimacy, authority, power and capacity of the institutions of government to enhance public welfare. This task can be done in different ways, such as engaging in a programme of legal reform, increasing the level of public

funding or reforming political institutions. With some wisdom, leaders might be able to get the best from the limited time, capacity and organisational ability present in the societies they govern by making the right choices about which resources to deploy and by how much. An understanding of the consequences of these choices should be part of

the behavioural agenda in the study of politics – to find out what causes what. But its more typical application stops at the study of voting behaviour, party competition, cabinet composition and legislative decisions. Such an approach would use the same sophisticated methodological tools as contemporary political science to see what is the impact of the state and public decisions on the wider society and economy. For policy-makers want to know what actually works, using the best social science evidence on offer. In this way, the policy-orientated study of politics can serve an underlying

normative mission, which is to make recommendations about which political arrangements, laws, sets of organisations, levels of funding and types of intervention work best, using scientific evidence to weigh up the efficacy of each choice. In that sense the study of policy outcomes is a branch of policy analysis, which seeks out solutions to maximise human welfare. Indeed, this book is inspired by work in the utilitarian tradition, similar in underlying approach to the classic texts of policy analysis, such as Dror’s Public Policymaking Reexamined (1968), which seeks to improve the rational bases upon which public decisions are made, and to assess the quality of public decisionmaking and its ability to provide informed and critical answers to the problems of the day. It is also possible to add the large amount of research in public policy studies about where policy comes from, and what causes variations in public policy across time and place (see John, 1998, 2011 for a review), or the many public policy studies that add knowledge by describing recent reforms, problems of implementation, the relative influence of institutions and the institutional processing of policies, to name just a few topics in recent studies. But this book is mainly interested in what happens down the line, outside the so-called black box of policy-making once a decision to prioritise has been made, seeking to find what particular resources policymakers can best use to realise their and society’s aims. The book suggests that these implementation choices are constrained by institutions and the practice of politics, which limit decision-makers’ room for manoeuvre. This book is concerned as much with the political constraints on government effectiveness as with the practical question of how to improve policy outcomes. In that sense, it seeks to bring together understandings of the effectiveness of policy choices with knowledge about the operation of political systems. The six central chapters of this book aim to assess the current state of the

evidence which shows the impact of how governments choose to implement their policies. It might be thought this task had already been done in other works of social science, especially with such an emphasis on evidence-based policy in recent years. Moreover, there have been research initiatives, such as the Centre for Evidence Based Policy (www.evidencenetwork.org), the

United Kingdom Cabinet Office’s strategy unit (https://www.cabinetoffice.gov. uk/strategy.aspx) dedicated to collecting research-based evidence, publications like the Magenta book (Cabinet Office, 2003), and a series of speeches and exhortations (for example, Davies, 2004). Added to these explicit declarations are swathes of evaluation research across the world on every policy initiative possible. So why have a book summing up the evidence if there is so much already

out there? There are three main reasons. The first is that much of the research is done at the micro-level, say about what surgical procedures work well and how best to implement them, which produces practical knowledge, but it does not tell governments which instruments overall work best, nor does it provide a perspective from the study of politics. Yet even the implementation of a surgical procedure expands to the bigger questions about the right way to achieve the best result (communicating information, regulating, funding the changes, reforming the bureaucracy and so on), which tend not to be discussed so much in evaluation studies. The second reason is that evidencebased research often focuses more on particular initiatives, using examples of what works, and much less on the mechanisms needed to achieve the outcomes. Indeed, a lack of attention to the causal impacts of policy instruments is one reason why many policy innovations tend not to get implemented properly or are implemented too quickly. Policy-makers get surprised that pilot schemes do not turn into effectively implemented policies rather than consider the deeper issues about how the tools governments deploy achieve their objectives. The third reason is that the literature from the study of public policy on the tools of government does not greatly consider the evidence from across a range of disciplines and uses examples rather than reviewing the systematic analysis of quantitative or other data. In short, there is a gap caused by the diverse nature of the research on this topic, which appears in the literature of different disciplines rather than in one place. So much of this book is taken up with discussions of this evidence, which appears right across social science, with the aim of bringing some of it together. One finding comes out almost at the start: how difficult it is to substantiate claims about the impact of what government does. Not that this book is inherently pessimistic, but it does say that finding out about policy effectiveness is sometimes near impossible. Not only is it difficult to carry out a policy change, it is hard to conclude from extant studies about what it was about what government did that worked or not. The book hopes to make some progress in summarising what the knowledge out there says about the effectiveness of government decisions. To do so it uses a range of studies not usually citied in the policy analysis literature. Before launching into a discussion of the evidence for the effectiveness of

the use of different kinds of political resources, the rest of this chapter discusses the nature of policy performance and policy outcomes. It summarises the different kinds of resources and tools open to governments and other public agencies with a view to categorising them and to understanding their

nature. Finally, the chapter reviews the methodological issues that arise from evaluating their impact. In this way some of the key issues and topics of the book are addressed.