Policy, Interests, Decisions, Incentives

Stages of the Policy Process

• Initiation
• Estimation
• Selection
• Implementation
• Evaluation
• Termination

E.E. Schattschneider:  "What happens in politics depends on the way in which people are divided into factions, parties, groups, classes, etc. The outcome of the game of politics depends on which of a multitude of conflicts gains the dominant position."

A variation of the table on p. 239 of Stone:

Allison's Three Models:

• I. Rational Actor
• II. Organizational Process
• III.Bureaucratic Politics

Measuring Outcomes

The Los Angeles Times reports on Mayor Eric Garcetti's push for performance measures:

Garcetti's goal is to develop a finely tuned data system that will track key measures of performance for every city agency — how many miles of streets get repaired, how long it takes to pick up bulky items of trash. Starting around Oct. 8, the 100th day of his administration, aides say, results will be posted on the Web. What measures Garcetti will roll out remains to be seen, but the concept would be to allow residents to check such things as whether 911 response times in their neighborhoods are improving or how long it takes to clean up graffiti.

The objective, Garcetti says, is a higher quality of life for the city's 3.8 million residents. Managers who embrace the new ethos of efficiency and accountability will stay, he says. The others will go.

"It's much more than just interviewing winners and losers," Garcetti said. "This is about changing the relationship between mayors and his cabinet, and finding people who share my sense of urgency, working with them to develop a better sense of accountability and metrics, and rewarding their innovation."

But watch out for reactivity:

Mythical Numbers in Healthcare Costs, as told by John Green

I saw John Green's video about the myths surrounding certain healthcare cost statistics, and thought it was extremely relevant to the themes we've been discussing in class. Hope you find it interesting!

Policy Argument and Policy Data

Assembling evidence

• A quick guide
• Scholarly literature and statistics
• Bureaucracy and public policy

Demographics

• Sources
• Counting the undocumented
• 1940 Census:  actual raw data

Manipulation and Misunderstanding

• Lying with graphs
• Lying with statistics

From Mother Jones:

The study, by Yale law professor Dan Kahan and his colleagues, has an ingenious design. At the outset, 1,111 study participants were asked about their political views and also asked a series of questions designed to gauge their "numeracy," that is, their mathematical reasoning ability. Participants were then asked to solve a fairly difficult problem that involved interpreting the results of a (fake) scientific study. But here was the trick: While the fake study data that they were supposed to assess remained the same, sometimes the study was described as measuring the effectiveness of a "new cream for treating skin rashes." But in other cases, the study was described as involving the effectiveness of "a law banning private citizens from carrying concealed handguns in public."

The result? Survey respondents performed wildly differently on what was in essence the same basic problem, simply depending upon whether they had been told that it involved guns or whether they had been told that it involved a new skin cream. What's more, it turns out that highly numerate liberals and conservatives were even more—not less—susceptible to letting politics skew their reasoning than were those with less mathematical ability.

Mythical numbers:

• More on heroin addicts
• Recovery.gov
• Super Bowl & domestic violence
• Other myths

A puzzle whose answer I do not know:

1.  Assume an autism prevalence of one in 150.

2.  Find historical population data here.

3.  Find data on mental hospitals and institutions for the "retarded" here:  United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1975), 84-85. Online: http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/CT1970p1-03.pdf  (pp. 84-85) 

4.  Compare the estimated Number of people with autism and total population of mental hospital and institutions for the "retarded."

            Total Population           Population/150 Total in Institutions

1940    132,164,569                  881,097                     578,222

1950    151,325,798                1,008,839                    705,375

1960    179,323,175                1,195,488                    769,682

1970    203,302,031                1,355,347                    580,956

Symbols and Matthew Shepard

In chapter 7 in Stone she talks about symbols which "are means of influence and control...[whose] meaning isn't isn't intrinsic in it but invested in it by the people who use it" (Stone 161).

A recent book came out which claims Matthew Shepard's death was not a hate crime but instead of a violent meth related death.





In a review of the book Out Editor Aaron Hicklin wrote:

There are valuable reasons for telling certain stories in a certain way at pivotal times, but that doesn’t mean we have to hold on to them once they’ve outlived their usefulness. In his book, Flagrant Conduct, Dale Carpenter, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, similarly unpicks the notorious case of Lawrence v. Texas, in which the arrest of two men for having sex in their own bedroom became a vehicle for affirming the right of gay couples to have consensual sex in private. Except that the two men were not having sex, and were not even a couple. Yet this non-story, carefully edited and taken all the way to the Supreme Court, changed America.

In different ways, the Shepard story we’ve come to embrace was just as necessary for shaping the history of gay rights as Lawrence v. Texas; it galvanized a generation of LGBT youth and stung lawmakers into action. President Obama, who signed the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, named for Shepard and James Byrd Jr., into law on October 28, 2009, credited Judy Shepard for making him “passionate” about LGBT equality.


This argument has attracted strong opposition from groups such as media matters and the Matthew Shepard foundation,

Link of a roundup of responses to the book and an excerpt in the daily beast

How Bad Data Warped Everything We Thought We Knew About the Jobs Recovery

Great article from The Atlantic detailing how Lehman Brothers' collapse had, for 3 years, caused misleadingly optimistic job growth data in winter months.

Parts of the article below:

"Okay, but what are seasonal adjustments, and how do they work? Well, you know the jobs number we obsess over every month? It's cooked, in a way -- but not how Jack Welch thinks. For example, the economy didn't really add 169,000 jobs in August. It added 378,000 jobs. But that 378,000 number doesn't tell us too much. See, the economy pretty predictably adds more jobs during some months more than others. Things like warmer weather (which helps construction), summer break, and holiday shopping create these annual up-and-downs. So to give us an idea of how good or bad each month actually is, the Bureau of Labor Statistics adjusts for how many jobs we would expect at that time of year."

"But there's a problem. The BLS only looks at the past 3 years to figure out what a "typical" September (or October or November, etc.) looks like. So, if there's, say, a once-in-three-generations financial crisis in the fall, it could throw off the seasonal adjustments for quite awhile. Which is, of course, exactly what happened. The BLS's model didn't know about Lehman. It only knew about the calendar. So it saw all the layoffs in late 2008 and early 2009, and interpreted them the only way it knew how: as seasonality, not a shadow banking run."

Policy Argument I

Disability Rights:  Gradual Issue Emergence and the Importance of Precedent



Reactive Effects and Reactivity (p. 198)

Issue Emergence and Numbers -- last week's epigram:

In 1973, children's advocate Marian Wright Edelman launched the Children's Defense Fund with a survey. One US Census figure haunted her. Some 750,000 American children between the ages of seven and thirteen did not attend school ... `Handicapped kids were those seven hundred fifty thousand kids,' Edelman recalls finding to her surprise. `We'd never thought of handicapped kids. but they're out there everywhere.'"

-- Joseph P. Shapiro, No Pity

Counting under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. See Child Find

Colin Powell on working the numbers:

If, for example, you are going to judge me on AWOL rates, I’m going to send a sergeant out by 6:30 a.m. to bloodhound the kid who failed to show up for 6:00 a.m. reveille.  The guy’s not considered AWOL until midnight.  So drag him back before then and keep that AWOL rate down.  I vigorously set out to better every indicator by which my brigade was statistically judged.  And then went on to do the things that I thought counted.

Concealment is a reactivity effect:

 

  The spike in Native Americans 

In episode 42, members of the Soprano crime family meet Chief Doug Smith, a sleazy casino operator.

SIL: No offense, chief, but, uh... you don't look much like an Indian.
SMITH: Frankly I passed most of my life as white, until I had a racial awakening and discovered my Mohonk blood. My grandmother on my father's side, her mother was a quarter Mohonk.
TONY: And all this happened when the casino bill got passed, right?
SMITH: Better late than never.

Psychiatrist Allen Frances:

DSM-IV may have started the autism epidemic, but other powerful engines drove it forward beyond all expectation. Probably most important was the positive feedback loop between spirited patient advocacy and the provision of school and therapeutic programs that require an autism diagnosis. As the population of "autistic" patients grew, they gained the power to push for many additional services— sometimes by initiating successful lawsuits. The additional services then provided further incentive to increased diagnosis. With more people diagnosed, there there was an ever larger constituency to push for more services.

Information disclosure as policy instrument (p. 322) -- a dramatic example right here

The Lobster Surfer-A Devil User?

Laila's article from last week mentioned "the devil user" which is one of the key parts of most issue attention cycles. In the House, the debate over cuts to the farm bill's funding in an effort to prevent misuse of food stamp assistance has potentially been aided by the Lobster Surfer (see video below).

Public Knowledge and the Environment: Watch and Weep

People Hate HMOs

On Wednesday, we discussed attitudes toward HMOs.

In 1998, The Washington Post reported:

Just as the managed-care industry gears up to combat a political backlash in Congress, it is taking a tongue-lashing in the nation's movie theaters. The film is "As Good as It Gets," but if you're an HMO lobbyist, it doesn't get much worse than this.

Audiences in the Washington area have been erupting in whoops, whistles and applause when actress Helen Hunt, playing the single mother of a chronically ill child, denounces HMOs with a string of unprintable epithets.

Hunt's character quickly apologizes for the outburst, but actor Harold Ramis, playing a physician, assures her that the apology is unwarranted.

"Actually, I think that's their technical name," he says.

Attitudes have not changed much.

Earlier this year, Gallup asked about confidence in various institutions.  Note which one came in next to last.



In 2010, Gallup summarized a decade of data specifically about HMOs:



Similarly, Harris found that less than 10 percent regarded HMOs as honest and trustworthy.

First Essay Assignment

Pick one:

1. See page 57 of Stone, and undertake the exercise that she suggests in the passage that starts “When you confront a political issue…” and ends with “read between the lines and interpret.” Pick a current policy issue, and identify two figures with different positions. “Read between the lines” and infer their answers to Stone’s questions.

2. Write your own version of “The Vitality of Mythical Numbers” about a current issue. That is, identify a dubious statistic that features prominently in policy debate, carefully explain why it is problematic, and spell out how it has distorted deliberations over the issue. (If you can publish a version of this essay in a newspaper, magazine or edited website, you will get an A for the assignment. Campus publications and personal blogs do not count.)

3. On our Sakai site (under “Resources”), read the case study of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. Since the case’s publication in 2009, Republicans have taken control of the House and made major gains in state legislatures. You may take one of two approaches:

a. Should FAMM change its strategy and tactics? If so, what should it do differently? If not, why will its approach work in the new setting? In your answer, consider how the organization frames the issue and presents data.
b. Identify an interest group or office holder who supports mandatory minimums.Write a memo telling this group or person how to stop or roll back FAMM, either in Congress or a state legislature. How would you use data to re-frame the issue?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Whichever essay you choose, do research to document your claims. Do not write from the top of your head. Essays should be typed, double-spaced, and no more than three pages long. I will not read past the third page.

• Cite your sources with endnotes, which should be in a standard style (e.g., Turabian or Chicago Manual of Style). Endnote pages do not count against the page limit. 
• Watch your spelling, grammar, diction, and punctuation. Errors will count against you. 
• Turn in essays via Sakai by the start of class, Monday, September 30. Late essays will drop a gradepoint for one day’s lateness, a full letter grade after that. I will grant no extensions except for illness or emergency.

A Linear Approach to "Issue Attention"

Downs' article reminded me of an article I read while writing a paper last fall by Rogan Kersh and James Morone. The article is called "The Politics of Obesity: Seven Steps to Government Action," and it identifies seven “triggers to action” that have historically resulted in government prohibition, regulation, and intervention. These triggers include social disapproval that shifts the social norm; establishing danger through evidenced-based research; self-help movements to encourage individuals to live healthier lives; demonizing users; demonizing the industry; interest group action; and finally, mass movement in the general public.

Whereas Downs finds issue attention to be cyclic, Kersh and Morone suggest that issue attention can be more linear, often resulting in extensive government action, as in the cases of vaccines and tobacco. I wonder whether Kersh and Morone provide an alternative to Downs theory: can governments intervene in an effective and extensive way on high-attention issues? Can the public remain highly invested in these issues after government intervention? Or is Kersh and Morone's seventh step the beginning of the cycle Downs describes? 

Narratives and Agendas

"In politics, narrative stories are the principal means for defining and contesting policy problems." -- Stone, p. 158.

From Preventing Gun Violence Through Effective Messaging:

• "The debate over gun violence in America is periodically punctuated by high-profile gun violence incidents, including Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson, the Trayvon Martin killing, Aurora, and Oak Creek. When an incident such as these attracts sustained media attention, it creates a unique climate for our communications efforts."
• "There can be a tendency to adopt a quiet “wait and see” attitude when a high-profile gun violence incident happens. The truth is, the most powerful time to communicate is when concern and emotions are running at their peak. While we always want to be respectful of the situation, a self-imposed period of silence is never necessary."
• "Our first task is to draw a vivid portrait and make an emotional connection. We should rely on emotionally powerful language, feelings and images to bring home the terrible impact of gun violence. Compelling facts should be used to back up that emotional narrative, not as a substitute for it."

But have violent crimes in general (and gun crimes in particular) gone up?

The Issue-Attention Cycle

1. The pre-problem stage

• DDT
• Oil & oysters

2. Alarmed discovery and euphoric enthusiasm

• Silent Spring
• The Cuyahoga River catches fire

3. Realizing the cost of significant progress

• Historical tables

4. Gradual decline of intense public interest

5. The post-problem stage

• EPA organization 
• State agencies
• Organizations
• Companies

An alternative view (Laila's post).  The seven triggers:

1.             Social disapproval.
2.             Medical science.
3.             Self-help.
4.             The demon user.
5.             Demon industry.
6.             Mass movement.
7.             Interest-group action.

Latent Motives, Harms, Risks, Uncertainties

Outputs v. outcomes

Expressed v. Ulterior Motives

Corporate philanthropy -- what other goals might corporations have?





Harms:  in the 1950s, TV considered domestic violence to be a joke:


And smoking was something to encourage:



Positive liberty:




Security:  unknown unknowns and black swans

Larry Summers

Larry Summers has withdrawn himself from being considered for Fed chairman. It is likely that Janet Yellen will instead be nominated to chair the monetary-policymaking body,  although Obama has not announced any decision yet. Yellen has thus far been the favorite of Democrats, although Summers seemed to be the White House favorite.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/09/15/summers-fed-bernanke/2816927/

Nonprofit failure?

Activist Dan Pallotta critiques the current attitude towards the nonprofit industry.

Another interesting example of nonmarket failure:

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong.html

Transplant Data

In response to Eric's question, below are data on transplants. Click here for more extensive statistics.

		To Date	2013	2012	2011	2010	2009	2008	2007
All Donor Types		284,339	6,961	14,009	14,146	14,503	14,631	14,207	14,400
Deceased Donor		159,334	4,072	8,143	8,125	7,943	8,022	7,989	8,085
Living Donor		125,005	2,889	5,866	6,021	6,560	6,609	6,218	6,315

Tragic Choices, Equity, and Nonmarket Failure

"Ignorance or innocence is lost and we are now faced with the fact that, no matter how we choose, some living people will be killed as a result of our choice." -- Guido Calebresi and Philip Bobbitt, Tragic Choices, p. 47

• Transplant Allocation
• The Judge's Order

Disability and the Dilemma of Difference
Hate Crime Laws

Markets and Non-Markets

• Externalities and public goods v. "internalities" and private goods
• Increasing returns v. redundant and rising costs
• Market imperfections v. derived externalities
• Inequity of income & weath v. inequity of influence & power

In Iowa, Blind People Can Carry Guns in Public; Not Everyone's a Fan

Here's an interesting article on NPR highlighting a policy issue that isn't frequently debated but is igniting people's passions none-the-less. Excerpt below:

A debate is taking place in Iowa over the ability of people who are legally or completely blind to carry guns in public. The issue stems from a 2011 change in the state's gun permit rules, allowing visually impaired people to carry firearms in public.

"State law does not allow sheriffs to deny an Iowan the right to carry a weapon based on physical ability," The Des Moines Register reported Sunday, in a feature that included several videos (we've posted one above).

The paper added, "Advocates for the disabled and Iowa law enforcement officers disagree over whether it's a good idea for visually disabled Iowans to have weapons." 

Policy, Market and Polis

Where do you find policy?

• Statutes: US Code or state law
• Other legislative documents
• Regulations: Code of Federal Regulations or state codes
• Presidential executive orders, signing statements; Gubernatorial executive orders;"bill jackets" (New York)
• Court decisions: US Supreme Court; lower federal courts; state courts

Stone: Information "is ambiguous, incomplete, often strategically shaded, and sometimes deliberately withheld."

The case of unemployment.

Framing:

 

Equity

Transplants


  The judge's order

A First Look at Public Policy

Truman Foundation: Policy Proposals