4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Policy design and target groups: the making of bad policy?, November 22, 2007
This review is from: Policy Design for Democracy (Paperback)
This is an important and challenging book, with some distressing implications. First, a couple basic definitions. Policy design, according to the authors, is (page 2): ". . the content or substance of public policy--the blueprints, architecture, discourses, and aesthetics of policy in both its instrumental and symbolic forms." There are several components of any policy design, including target populations (on which, more in just a bit), goals or problems to be solved, rules of engagement for the policy, rationales to legitimate the policy, and assumptions about the components of the design and how they work together to solve problems. With these points in mind, the authors state what is at stake in this book (page 5): "The central contention of this book is that policy designs. . .are strongly implicated in the current crisis of democracy." In short, policy designs are poorly structured to actually address problems.
Why would they say this? A handful of notions and assumptions are critical to their argument. Target populations are those people on whom policy focuses. If we're talking about the need to ensure continued healthy crops from farms, the target population for policy would likely be farmers. In their detailed discussion of target populations, Schneider and Ingram make a nice contribution to political analysis. They note that any population can be defined in terms of two characteristics--social construction (are groups viewed as deserving of government support or undeserving by the public) and power (does a group have power or not). From these two characteristics, they can define four different groups--the "advantaged," who have power and are viewed positively (e.g., the middle class, senior citizens, scientists); "contenders," who are powerful but not seen as so deserving (e.g., the rich, CEOs, heads of savings and loan banks); "dependents," who are deserving but rather weak (e.g., mothers, children, the poor); "deviants" (not a lot of power and undeserving, such as gangs, criminals, persons with AIDS).
Based on this, they infer, then, that government has great motivation to pass laws and create policies that are supportive of those who are viewed positively and who have power. So, quite a bit of policy is designed to help those who are already advantaged. And, conversely, the deviants are "beat up on" by policy makers. Criminals? Punish them as hard as you can--even if the results may not work. Why? Good politics. Decision-makers get credit for being tough on bad guys; the bad guys have no power. What a winner! The problem, according to the authors, is that such policy designs may not work. It may be that being tough is not the best way of dealing with those whom Ingram and Schneider label deviants.
A very interesting argument. If true, it means that many of the policies made by government are doomed to fail, because much emphasis will be delivering goodies to the powerful and well regarded (what social problems does that solve?) and beating up on the undeserving and powerless. The bottom line, though, needs to be established. Does their perspective work? Aye, there's the rub. Research results are rather mixed (including one piece that I wrote on AIDS policy and target populations). So, it is too soon to say that the authors have come upon a major contribution to policy studies. But their argument is, at the very least, provocative and makes one think, not a bad payoff for a book.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Challenging..Need to simplify message, January 6, 2011
This review is from: Policy Design for Democracy (Paperback)
Overall, this was a good book in that it provides new ideas. But I found it very difficult to follow. This book was difficult to follow without writing out pretty explicit notes throughout about what exactly their finding(s)/message(S) were/are. If I could provide any recommendations to the authors it would be to simplify their message. It's a small book. But don't let the size of the book or the font fool you. The concepts introduced are complex and must really be understood in order to grasp the support for their arguments/findings.
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