Posts Tagged Policy Making
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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The Uneasy Public Policy Triangle in Higher Education: Quality, Diversity, and Budgetary Efficiency
This publication takes up the challenge of describing and analyzing the internal and external dynamics of United States higher education policy with regard to three global and often conflicting goals of higher education policy: quality, diversity, and efficiency. The issue of diversity, on the one hand, which covers many others, such as access, participation, equity and opportunity, is indeed the oldest among these goals and was a predominant objective of public policy over the long period of expansion of higher education in the United States after the Second World War. The themes of quality and budgetary efficiency, on the other, have both more recently moved up on the political agenda within a context of increasing globalization of markets and international competition, tightness of public budgets, and changes in the political, social, and economic climates. The book aims at pointing out critical issues in the tensions that exist among these basic policy options and tries to give some direction and recommendations for future priority setting in higher education.
The publication is in fact a collection of discussion papers presented in October 1988 at the College of William and Mary on the interaction of public policy and higher education. Fourteen papers have been grouped together in five sections of which the first one sets the historical scene of higher education policy making in the United States. Changes in the interaction of federal and state involvement in higher education policy are discussed. From a rather limited and haphazard involvement of government in higher education policy in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the federal government has become massively involved in need-based student aid and research subsidization from the seventies onwards without being able, however, to embrace institutional financing. The states on the contrary, traditionally in charge of institutional support, have started to supplement federal student aid over the seventies.
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Morality is The Foundation of Public-Policy Making Say Liberals
If you ask an academic liberal what liberalism is they are bound to give you a dictionary type meaning or a historical one. But this old-thinking or definition of liberalism is nothing like the modern-liberal movement of today. Modern day liberals are much closer to socialists than anything else.
Academic liberals seem to believe that government must speak from a higher moral grounding and thus if they do not have such then they must create it. Such is the thinking of Free Speech, Freedom of the Press, Right to Free Contract and even Freedom of Thought. Unfortunately if you look at the true dynamics of the political left you see something much different in their trend and movement.
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