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Abstract
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It is important to distinguish between goals and policies, for policy-making involves an attempt to deal with the fact that any goal that does not conflict with other desirable goals is either so simple as to be insignificant or so broad as to be operationally meaningless. Thus a highway speed limit is a compromise between two conflicting goals: safety of life and property and convenience of travel. Of course the speed limit becomes a goal for the traffic police; but again there are other goals, such as equal treatment of drivers and the granting of benefits of doubt. Hence there will be an informal policy of tolerance for speeds slightly above the stated limit.
Another important distinction relates to the words derived from polis: policy, politics and politician. In its popular usage politics has less in common with policy-making than does administration. In the game of politics contesting parties often prefer to avoid identification with controversial policy issues. Hence the assumption that politics and policy-making are synonymous terms is less defensible than the traditional politics-administration dichotomy.
Because the terms discussed above reflect a confusion of common usage, professional jargon and research oriented premises, it seems advisable to look first at the decision-making system through which government operates. Every organization proceeds through a hierarchy of decisions that range from the establishment of goals and missions to the routine implementation of higher level decisions. Policy-making relates to decisions made at the upper levels of the organizational hierarchy for the purpose of controlling and guiding lower level decisions. Yet it must be remembered that the decision-making process is not a simple hierarchy of decisions within one organization. Governmental decisions are influenced or manipulated by the goals and interests of sub-groups, individual participants, and symbionic organizations such as political parties, professional and business societies and labor unions. The policy-making process in a democratic system, therefore, involves compromise among conflicting goals, conflicting values and conflicting ideas regarding means to the attainment of goals.
Here lie the basic problems of any attempts to use cost-benefit studies or computer technology for purposes of policy analysis. What goals are to be considered valid, and how are they to be weighted? How are the interests of sub-groups and symbionic organizations to be fed into the computation, and how will the views of individuals be measured? The danger is that analyses based upon economic and technical premises alone would be as futile as the classic assumption of economic man. |