Summary
Highlights
Public policy is defined as a set of government actions designed to address societal problems and challenges, leading to the creation of programs and projects. It involves a series of decisions aimed at resolving specific issues for the general public, much like research aims to solve problems through its output.
Public policies are based on various contexts: political (liberal democracy, anti-political dynasty laws), economic (market economy, exchange and trade policies), social (demographics, conditional cash transfers like 4Ps, K-12 education), and cultural (arts and culture laws, flag ceremony acts). These contexts provide the basis for policy analysis and agenda setting.
Public policies are categorized into: regulatory (restricting behavior, like ECQ or traffic rules), distributive (cost of goods/services extended to the public, e.g., education, economic policies), redistributive (allocating wealth from one group to another, like progressive taxation for services), and constituent (rules within government institutions, involving structural and procedural aspects like human resources and procurement).
Key characteristics of public policy include having clear goals and objectives, consisting of patterns of actions as a process (policy cycle), being something the government actually does, being mandated by law or the constitution, and sometimes involving bargaining and compromise due to policymakers' control.
There are two main approaches: the cycle or process-based approach (policy as demand, institutional output, political activity, with models like rational and incremental societal) and the policy actor-based approach (focusing on policymakers and groups, including elite, group, systems, institutional, incremental, rational choice, bounded rationality, garbage can, and multiple streams models).
The elite theory suggests public policy reflects the demands of the elite, not the general public. Group theory posits policy is a product of struggles between various groups, with influence depending on their number and access to decision-makers. Systems theory views policy as an output of the political system, encompassing laws, rules, and judicial decisions.
Institutional theory states policies are formulated by government institutions with formal structures and legal powers. Incremental theory describes policy as variations of past policies with limited changes, while rational choice theory aims to improve the policy-making process by constructing better new policies, contrasting with incrementalism.
Bounded rationality acknowledges policymakers' limited knowledge and information, confining their ability to create ideal policies. The garbage can model represents problems and solutions as 'garbage' to be collected and chosen from for agenda setting. The multiple streams model highlights how various streams (problems, policies, politics) converge to influence policy formulation, especially in agenda setting.