Chapter Seven

Public Policy

Comparative Politics Today, 9/e

Almond, Powell, Dalton & Strm

Pearson Education, Inc. publishing as Longman 2008

Government and
Policymaking
Public policy consists of all those
authoritative public decisions that
governments make.
The outputs of the political
system

Government and What It

Does
Governments do many things.
Timeless: defense
Production of goods and services
Varies from country to country
How much involvement
And in what sectors

Public Policies
Governments engage in various forms
of public policy
Many are directed at the major
challenges facing contemporary states:
Building community
Fostering development
Securing democracy and rights

Public Policies
Public policies may be summarized and
compared according to outputs
classified into four headings:
Distribution
Extraction
Regulation
Symbolic outputs

From the Night Watchman

State to the Welfare State
Night Watchman State: a Lockean state, which
primarily sought to regulate just enough to preserve
law, order, a good business climate, and the basic
security of its citizens
Police State: regulates much more intrusively and
extracts resources more severely than the night
watchman state
Regulatory State: evolved in all advanced industrial
societies as they face the complexities of modern life
Welfare State: found particularly in more prosperous
and democratic societies, distributes resources
extensively to provide for the health, education,
employment, housing, and income support of its citizens

Welfare State
First modern welfare state programs introduced
in Germany in the 1880s
Bismarck: social insurance programs that protected
workers

1930s to 1970s most industrialized states have

adopted and expanded welfare policies
1980s and 1990s the welfare states in advanced
capitalist countries continued to grow albeit at a
somewhat slower rate
Mixture between social insurance and social
redistribution
In part paternalistic and in part Robin Hood

Welfare State
Welfare benefits can be expensive and governments
often have limited funds.
There are three principles that govern most welfare
state provisions:
Need - help and services are provided to those that need
them most
Contribution - benefits should go to those that have
contributed to the program
Entitlement/Universalism - everyone should have the
benefit, regardless of specific circumstances
Often applied to primary education or to treatment for lifethreatening diseases
U.S. model in education - equality of opportunity

U.S. and charitable organizations/individuals

Challenges to the Welfare

State
Ability of future generations to pay
Growth of senior citizens/dependency ratios

Some welfare states give citizens few

incentives to work.
Norway and Sweden

Distribution
Of money, goods, and services - to citizens,
residents and clients of the state
Laswell - who gets what, when, and how

Distributive policy profiles

Health, education, and national defense
consume the largest proportion of
government spending across the world.
Developed countries: generally allocate
from one half to two thirds of their central
government expenditures to education,
health, and welfare

Extraction
Direct extraction of services
Compulsory military service, jury duty, or compulsory labor
imposed on those convicted of crime

Direct resource extraction

Taxation
Direct taxes
Indirect taxes

Progressive tax structure

Regressive tax structure

The tax profiles of different countries vary both in their

overall tax burdens and in their reliance on different
types of taxes.
Differ in how they collect their revenues

Regulation
Regulation is the exercise of political control
over the behavior of individuals and groups in
society.
Most contemporary governments are both
welfare states and regulatory states.
Government regulate:
By legal means
By offering material or financial inducements
By persuasion or moral exhortation

Regulation
How do we describe and explain the differences
between political systems in the area of
regulation? We ask:
What aspects of human behavior and interaction are
regulated and to what degree?
What social groups are regulated, with what procedural
limitations on enforcement and what rights?
What sanctions are used to compel or induce citizens to
comply?

One aspect of regulation is particularly important

politically: government control over political
participation and communication
Political rights and civil liberties

Community-Building and
Symbolic Policies
Intended to enhance peoples national
identity, civil pride, or trust in
government
Enhance other areas of performance:
Make people pay their taxes more readily
and honestly
Comply with law more faithfully
Accept sacrifice, danger, and hardship

Outcomes: Domestic
Welfare
How do extractive, distributive, regulative, and symbolic
policies affect the lives of citizens?
Sometimes policies have unintended and undesirable
consequences.
To estimate the effectiveness of public policy, we have to
examine actual welfare outcomes as well as governmental
policies and their implementation.
Measures of economic well-being
Nigeria and India - severe problems
Income distribution tends to be most unequal in medium-income
developing societies, such as Brazil, and more equal in advanced
market societies as well as in low-income developing societies, such as
India.
Kuznets Curve

Health outcomes
Education and information technologies

Domestic Security Outcomes

Crime rates have been on the increase in many advanced

industrial societies until recently as well as the developing world.
Russia, Brazil and Mexico- high rates of crimes
England, France (has had an increase), and Germany have a small
fraction of the U.S.s crime numbers
China has low murder rates; Japan even lower.

Much crime found in urban areas.

Causes are complex.
Migration increases diversity and conflict.
Pace of urbanization explosive; severe problems of poverty and
infrastructure
Inequality of income and wealth, unemployment, drug abuse,
hopelessness of big city life

Crime rates have come down in the U.S.

Stronger economy; increased incarceration time; decrease in youth

International Outputs and

Outcomes
International activities: economic, diplomatic, military
and informational
Most common outcome of the interaction among nations
is warfare
Deadly costs of international warfare have gradually
escalated
90 percent of the war deaths since 1700 have occurred in
the 20th century.
In the last decades of the 20th century, more than threequarters of the war deaths were civilian.
People of USSR-Russian have been the greatest victims of
the tormented history of the 20th century.
Germany suffered the second largest number of deaths.
Followed by China and Japan, France and Great Britain

International Outputs and

Outcomes
After WWI the most devastating conflicts have
occurred in the Third World.
Partition of British India into India, Pakistan, and
Bangladesh associated with numerous deadly conflicts.
Conflicts in Africa
Many newly independent from about 1960
Borders drawn by colonial powers
Serious problems of national cohesion/chronic civil war

End of Cold War

Wave of instability and conflict

Uppsala Conflict Data Project

Role of the United Nations
Economic costs of national security

Political Goods and Values

If we are to compare and evaluate public
policy in different political systems, we need to
consider the political goods that motivate
different policies.
System goods: Citizens are most free and most able
to act purposefully when their environment is stable,
transparent, and predictable.
Process goods: citizen participation and free political
participation; democratic procedures and various
rights of due process
Policy goods: economic welfare, quality of life,
freedom and personal security

Political Goods and Values

There are two important criteria that most of
us would agree that government policy should
meet:
Fairness
Promotion and preservation of freedom

Trade-offs and Opportunity

Costs
Hard fact about political goods: We cannot
always have them all simultaneously.
A political system often has to trade off one
value to obtain another.
Opportunity costs are what you lose in one
area by committing your resources to a
different good.
One of the important tasks of social science is
to discover the conditions under which positive
and negative trade-offs occur.