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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A provocative and rewarding examination of policy making, June 15, 2007
This review is from: Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making, Revised Edition (Paperback)
Deborah Stone's "Policy Paradox" is an important work in the field of policy analysis. The subtitle is illuminating: "The Art of Political Decision Making." Her takeoff point is the following statement (pages x-xi): "This new field of policy analysis supposedly devoted to improving governance, was based on a profound disgust for the ambiguities and paradoxes of politics. . . . In rational analysis, everything has one and only one meaning." In her own words, she (page xi) ". . .wrote this book to critique the field and to capture, I hope, a more inspiring and humane kind of policy analysis."
Her basic point is that the rational models drawn from economics do not explain very well how policy analysis works. Nor, in her view, should it be the actual model for decision making. She contends that economic rationality often gives way to political reality, to accommodation to conflicting interests, to compromise, to values other than economic efficiency (such as liberty, fairness, and so on).
The introduction opens the book strongly, with Stone noting policy paradoxes, where the economic rational model does not prevail and explain how things work. She argues (page 13) that "each type of policy instrument [e.g., inducements, rules, rights, for example] is a kind of sports arena, each with its peculiar ground rules, within which political conflicts are continued." The first chapter continues the theme, by speaking of the market (economics) and the polis (politics), with a nice table summarizing key points on page 33). She concludes that (page 34) "Problems in the polis are never `solved' in the way that economic needs are met in the market model." Two different realms, and what works in the market may or may not work in the polis.
The book proceeds in three major sections: Part II focuses on broad goals (e.g., equity, efficiency, security, liberty); Part III examines problems (with chapters labeled as follows: symbols, numbers, causes, interests, decisions); Part IV focuses on solutions (or tools or instruments, such as inducements, rules, facts).
In the end, the book examines nicely the tensions between economic rational analysis of policy ideas and the messier but inescapable political process as it addresses policy issues. The reader will be provoked to think about important issues upon encountering Stone's perspective. A very useful work on the bigger picture of policy analysis.
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43 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A profound and deceptively easy read, February 24, 2002
Stone writes this book for people who are interested in implementing public policy, not merely studying it as an academic exercise. She takes us beyond the methodological self-satisfaction of too many academics and points out how applied policy arenas, from the simplest of settings like the school yard to the most complex of arenas such as national defense or social welfare policies, are characterized by the phenomenon of policy paradox. It's not easy to find a find a profound book in the area of policy analysis. The typical book, as a rule, is analytically sharp, but isn't usually notable for the insight it yields. Stone argues that it is wholly inadequate to ground decision-making for a wide range of policy issues and contexts, characterized by policy paradox, in conventional rationalist terms. Like Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, Stone finds what she calls the "rationality project" or "calculative rationality" at once typically characteristic of the discipline of policy analysis and inadequate as means/method for analyzing a broad range of contemporary public policy issues. Her analysis suggests that this inadequacy becomes increasingly transparent, the closer one gets to the concrete challenges of implementation. While in some ways she doesn't go as far as Ramos in analyzing and articulating alternative political theoretical grounds for policy analysis, she is notably clear and remarkably articulate as far as she goes, revealing among other things, how the very movement from policy analysis at large toward implementation analysis in particular is likely to bring to the surface, what may otherwise remain hidden paradoxes of public policy. In the face of the phenomenon of policy paradox, Stone grounds the enlargered policy analytic framework she offers in the specifically interactive context of political theory. Politics may unfold in higher or lower forms (differentiated by Ramos and others) and which Raghavan Iyer portrays diagramatically through interlocking ascending and descending triangles in his book Parapolitics. While Stone doesn't make this differentiation explicit, nevertheless, she compactly interweaves this kind of political understanding with an understanding of literary theory, drawing upon a deep understanding of the often covert role of metaphor in language. Throughout her text, she brings this kind of fundamental rhetorical insight to the surface and reveals the use of metaphor in processes of reasoning, notably including "calculative rationality." Stone's interweaving of insights from political theory and rhetorical theory in turn, suggests an analytic means for penetrating the obscurantist or covert "cognitive politics" that she, like Ramos, appears to believe, too often masquerade in semi-imperial fashion, as "rational" solutions to policy problems. At bottom, Stone contrasts the "calculative rationality" which she finds characteristic of much of the policy analysis field with a broader notion of political reason that she grounds in the reciprocal interplay between facts and values within each individual and in such deliberation across communities of persons within the "polis." For Stone, the dignity amidst the messiness of politics and its creative import lies in the extent to which people may, through meaningful deliberation, constructively engage the pursuit of common and diverse ends and means in ways that constructively and concretely address particular problems of social significance. The deliberation Stone conceives and observes accounts at once for individual notions of self-interest and some notion of a common good through which persons are bound into a larger community or political whole. For Stone, this whole is neither merely the laissiz-faire sum of its individual parts, nor some super-whole lording over individual parts, but rather -- as it was for Mary Parker Follett -- a creative "whole-a-making;" Stone takes her notion of community seriously as the foundational notion of political association, just as the exchange of individual self-interest constitutes for her the foundation of economic assocation. A reductive interpretation of human association in either this fundamental economic or this fundamental political direction is for Stone, inadmissable. Real social problems are confronted and political economic life is lived between these tensions. For Stone, it is through interactive processes of deliberation within and across communities that means are employed/discovered to reconcile or otherwise engage the phenomena of "policy paradox." Policy Paradox is one of those handful of texts that is a particularly good investment in that it is worth reading and re-reading. It is a text in which you are likely to find something more with each re-read as you progress in your studies and/or professional work. Stone's book contains insightful material throughout, written simply. Highly recommended for anyone concerned with reciprocally bridging theory and practice in the policy analytic field and/or for those reflective practitioners concerned with more effectually addressing critical issues in the practical art and challenge of policy implementation.
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15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stone is Enlightened, August 18, 2000
This scholar not only shares her understanding of complex patterns and interconnections of policy decision-making but also writes so readably! She captures what used to be in my mind as a very messy business. After I completed the book, I have much clearer concept of how and why political decision-making happens. I thought James G. March was the father of decision-making theory. Deborah Stone has become the dominant mother.
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