Posts Tagged Policy Analysis
The Politics of Sin: Drugs, Alcohol and Public Policy.
America’s most recent moral crusade, the war on drugs, has been pronounced a failure by critics from the left, right, and center and now is favored almost exclusively by politicians, law enforcement agencies, and other groups with a stake in its continuation and a seeming imperviousness to information. In The Politics of Sin: Drugs, Alcohol, and Public Policy, Kenneth Meier provides evidence that the war on drugs has been a failure in the states but also demonstrates that this most recent attempt to expunge sin is akin to earlier failed attempts to regulate personal behavior. The analyses presented in the book underline the irrationality of many U.S. anti-drug policies but also demonstrate that forces in the policy environment make it difficult for us to learn from our policy mistakes. The book’s ultimate substantive contribution is a sophisticated, balanced, and well-reasoned analysis of the forces underlying the adoption, implementation, and effects of policies to regulate drugs and alcohol. Antidrug policies are exposed clearly as good politics but bad public policy. The frustrating fact, though, is that the results suggest that we seem unable to stop ourselves from embarking on Quixotic anti-sin campaigns despite our history of failure in the arena. Americans may be doomed to a future of badly designed and implemented policies intended to regulate sin.
Aside from this substantive contribution, Meier’s book represents an important addition to the study of public policy through his careful application of three approaches to policy analysis: cross-sectional quantitative analysis, quantitative historical analysis, and qualitative historical analysis. Meier applies each approach in this research, and the results are impressive. The study is contextually rich and empirically rigorous; rather than pursuing one line of inquiry and accepting its limitations, Meier acknowledges the weaknesses and strengths of each and uses them in complementary fashion. The volume of quantitative and qualitative data used for the analysis is enormous, and the overall effect of the blending of three forms of analysis is to provide a study that takes advantage of the best aspects of each approach while accounting for the weaknesses of each through the use of the others. This is not to say that one cannot find places to quibble with measures, model specification, and the like, but the breadth of evidence Meier brings to bear, and its consistency, renders such criticisms trivial.
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Evaluating Public Policy
Policy studies has been one of the most dynamic parts of the social sciences over the past several decades. There has been substantial growth in the literature, the number of courses, the number of professionals who identify themselves with the field, and, arguably, in the impact on public sector policy and programs. The policy studies field is an eclectic one, claimed by public administrators, political scientists, economists, sociologists, psychologists, educators, environmental scientists, and many others.
The policy studies enterprise, which I define here to include both “policy analysis” and “program evaluation,” (more about this later) has struggled with its identity and with its image of itself. Ever self-critical, the field is as willing to hold up its failures as it is its successes. The assessment of the field in these books (as well as others) raises a number of issues: Does the field have an adequate and appropriate impact on decision making? Does it have credibility with both the academic community and policy decision makers? Is it overly vulnerable to political pressure? Or, alternately, unresponsive to decision maker needs? Does the policy studies field enhance the democratic process or undermine it? Can the field usefully address normative issues? Does it have adequate methodological power to answer key questions? Is it focusing on the key questions? Is the field appropriately organized and integrated or is it just a hodge-podge of sub-fields in the social sciences? How effectively do we convey the knowledge and skill in the field to new practitioners and students?
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