Public Consultation for Sustainable Development Policy Initiatives

Involving the public in government decision making regarding sustainable development is a complex and difficult problem. This article suggests that weak public consultation, occurring at the operational planning level, is in part responsible for the lack of policy innovation in this realm. A case study technique considers approaches to public consultation in the development of sustainable development policy in the Canadian province of Manitoba. Using document reviews and qualitative interviews, two specific periods of policy development are traced with the outcomes of each being measured against creative consultative approaches established in the literature. It is revealed that using more complex consultative approaches at the normative policy planning level results in a number of positive implications, including mutual education and learning, participant satisfaction, policy innovation that has broad-based support, and results that have lasting implications on consultative proceshes.     

Technology Transfer and Public Policy

This article uses events occurring between 1989 and 1994 at the University of California (UC) as a case study to illustrate the consequences to the university of the collision between two powerful public policy agendas for the university: (a) that it maintain its traditional independence, carrying out its roles of teaching and research untainted by the lures and demands of the marketplace, and (b) that it become more active in economic development activities, including the development and sale of its intellectual property and the establishment of companies to exploit university research. The unsuccessful attempts over these five years by the UC to establish a separate nonprofit foundation to manage its considerable portfolio of intellectual property and to form a for-profit company to fund development and start-up efforts have been plagued with controversy. UC's story offers parallels with the experiences of other universities and illustrates an emerging pattern in the responses of higher education to the new pressures on them to be more economically relevant. The lessons from the UC case are valuable for other universities and for policymakers involved in technology transfer activities.     

Information Technology and Public Policy

Douglas Rushkoff, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyper space
Douglas Rushkoff, Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture
Douglas Rushkoff, Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say     

From Private Consultation to Public Crusade: Assessing Eisenhower's Legislative Strategies on Foreign Policy

Even though nationally televised addresses provide the president the opportunity to speak directly to the American people and are a potentially powerful tool for influencing public opinion, scholars have little understanding of the people the president speaks to when he delivers televised addresses. This study examines the audience for televised presidential addresses. Specifically, it looks at the size of the audience for televised addresses, the differences between people who watch televised addresses and those who do not watch, and explains why some people watch the addresses while others do not. To answer these questions I use a unique set of national opinion surveys conducted by Richard Wirthlin, who served as Ronald Reagan's pollster throughout Reagan's years as president. I find that even though televised addresses are given on network television, the president is not assured a large television audience. Moreover, I find that there is a difference between people who watch televised addresses and those who do not, and that the demographic characteristics, personal concerns, and especially the political participation of a person explain why people watch or do not watch televised addresses.     

Agents of Change: The Role of Public Managers in Public Policy

Our article outlines a number of ways that theories of public management can contribute to the work of public policy scholars. We first outline some of the ways in which public managers have been incorporated into previous work on public policy, and the limitations faced by previous treatments. We then discuss the role that public management plays in the policy process, with a specific focus on managerial quality, networking, and performance evaluation.     

Policy Travels: Exploring Politics, Policy, and Culture from the Ground-Up

Mark Hertsgaard, Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future . New York, NY: Broadway Books, 1998. 372 pp.
Robert D. Kaplan, An Empire Wilderness: Travels Into America's Future . New York, NY: Random House, 1998. 393 pp.     

Rethinking American Public Policy: The Environment, Federalism, States, and Supranational Influences

The politics of American public policy recently have transformed in response to changing power relationships between levels of government in the United States. Certain policy choices now are made in different arenas–for example, state and local government institutions often make policy decisions that previously had been within the jurisdiction of America's national government. At the same time, new policy relationships between states also are altering previous political patterns. This article highlights and explains this phenomenon, and focuses particularly on the changing power relationships between levels of government in the United States–national, state, and local–and the resulting policies and politics. More specifically, it closely examines two 20th century innovations in government and public policymaking within the context of a discrete case study. One of these innovations is institutional–the rise of public authorities or public corporations as highly insulated, governmental entities. The other is procedural–the environmental impact statement process. Together, these innovations, in concert with broader international and global trends, have played a large role in the shifting power structure and politics underlying American public policymaking activities.     

The Odd Compartmentalization: Public Opinion,Aggregate Data,and Policy Analysis*

This article examines some of the assumptions that underlie the use of aggregate data for policy analysis, In particular, it explores the consequences of the assumption of antagonistic attitudes between “haves” and “have nots” on social welfare policies. Use of public opinion data demonstrates the low salience of regressiveness of taxation and thereby calls into question the validity of a common indice in aggregate analysis. The use of this and related examples is intended to demonstrate the value of supplementing aggregate data analysis of public policy with direct evidence about public attitudes toward those policies.     

Global Public Policy,Transnational Policy Communities,and Their Networks

Public policy has been a prisoner of the word “state.” Yet, the state is reconfigured by globalization. Through “global public–private partnerships” and “transnational executive networks,” new forms of authority are emerging through global and regional policy processes that coexist alongside nation‐state policy processes. Accordingly, this article asks what is “global public policy”? The first part of the article identifies new public spaces where global policies occur. These spaces are multiple in character and variety and will be collectively referred to as the “global agora.” The second section adapts the conventional policy cycle heuristic by conceptually stretching it to the global and regional levels to reveal the higher degree of pluralization of actors and multiple‐authority structures than is the case at national levels. The third section asks: who is involved in the delivery of global public policy? The focus is on transnational policy communities. The global agora is a public space of policymaking and administration, although it is one where authority is more diffuse, decision making is dispersed and sovereignty muddled. Trapped by methodological nationalism and an intellectual agoraphobia of globalization, public policy scholars have yet to examine fully global policy processes and new managerial modes of transnational public administration.     

The Implementation of Public Policy: Still the Missing Link

Although theories of public policy and theories of governance both seek to establish relationships between policymaking and its consequences, they do not complement each other very well. Public policy models tend to de-emphasize that which governance theories tend to emphasize: the influence on government performance of implementation, broadly described as the actions taken by those engaged in administration (including managers at all levels, those engaged in service delivery, and third-party agents) after a policy has been lawfully promulgated by elected officials and interpreted by the courts. A comparison of a recently developed theory of public sector performance with several prominent theories of policymaking suggests that multilevel governance theories can supply what continues to be the missing link in public policy theories. At the same time, governance theories might be enriched by the process modeling of public policy theories.     

Public Spending on the Arts as Morality Policy: The Structure of Public Attitudes

Successfully reframing a political issue as morality policy should strengthen the hand of those charging immorality. However, reframers face a daunting task in shifting public opinion. In 1989, Christian conservatives attempted to reframe the debate over federal funding for the arts from waste to immorality, by attacking grants for "anti-Christian" and "homoerotic" art. Using General Social Survey data from before, during, and after the attempted reframing, this article assesses the reframers' success in heightening the salience of religion, commitment to civil liberties, and attitudes toward sexuality in public thinking about government spending on the arts.     

The Determinants of Public Policy: What Matters and How Much

This article is a research synthesis addressing four questions critical to our understanding of the determinants of public policy. How often and how strongly do hypothetical determinants of policy—public opinion, interest groups, the party balance, and other factors—actually influence policy? Do some hypothetical determinants of policy have more influence than others? Does the way we measure policy affect our ability to explain it? And is there a connection between how strongly particular variables affect policy, and how much effort we devote to studying them? It turns out that variables hypothesized to influence policy more often than not have no effect. When variables do affect policy, researchers very seldom say anything about how much impact they have. Variables that convey the most information to policymakers about what the public wants have a greater impact than other variables, but it is less clear how the measurement of policy affects our findings. Researchers pay much attention to hypothetical determinants of policy unlikely to matter very much, and little attention to those likely to be the most important. Implications for future research are considered.