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Part IV: Making and Implementing Government Decisions
Chapter 10: Decision Making
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Decision Making and Public Administration
• Herbert Simon (1945): “a theory of administration should be concerned with the processes of decision as well as with the processes of action.”
• Decision making as the quintessential administrative act
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Goals for Each Approach
• Each approach must rectify issues surrounding information and values.
• Both information and values constantly intermingle as administrators seek to make decisions.
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Information
• Information is the basic raw material of decisions.
• Decision makers must acquire, weigh, and act on the data they collect.
• Information is rarely an abstract truth, but rather a matter of interpretation.
• Who has the information? How do they and others look at the information?
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Values
• How do political values affect decisions?
• Decisions depend on judgments: about the nature of the dilemma, the probabilities of events, and the desirability of consequences.
• Decisions require political support from:– The “mass public”– The “attentive publics”: groups that have a
salient interest in the agency
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Decision-Making Approaches
• Rational approach: perhaps the classic approach; builds on the work of microeconomists (who seek to explain the behavior of individuals and firms) and holds efficiency as the highest value
• Bargaining approach: seeks to maximize political support
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Decision-Making Approaches (continued)
• Participative approach: seeks to improve decisions by intimately involving those affected by them
• Public-choice approach: attempts to substitute marketlike forces for other incentives that, its supporters argue, distort decisions
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Rational Approach
• Akin to systems theory, in this approach the decision maker structures the decision-making problem as a system that processes “inputs” to produce “outputs” and seeks to produce the most output for a given level of input.
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Rational Approach (continued)
• Process steps: define goals, identify alternatives, calculate consequences, decide, begin again– Externalities or spillovers: indirect benefits
and costs that relate to other goals that the analyst considers when calculating the consequences
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Example of Rational Approach
• Planning-Programming-Budgeting System (PPBS): 1961, Robert McNamara introduced PPBS in Pentagon– Planning: top-level managers developed five-
year strategies for defense activities.– Programming: strategies were transformed
into detailed descriptions of the department's needs.
– Budgeting: officials transformed the program into year-by-year budget requests.
• Classic case for rational approach
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Appraisal of Rational Approach
• This approach requires an extraordinary amount of information because decision makers must consider all alternatives, yet this is virtually impossible.
• Instead decision makers simplify the process:– They screen out the silly options and restrict
themselves to a few major alternatives.– Satisficing (James G. March and Herbert A. Simon):
They stop searching when they come upon a satisfactory alternative.
• Little may be said about who sets goals.
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Bargaining Approach
• Conduct limited analysis and bargain out a decision that can attract political support.
• Incrementalism (Charles Lindblom): limit analysis to a few alternatives instead of trying to judge them all, to weigh one’s values along with the evidence, and to concentrate on the immediate problems to be solved.
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Example of Bargaining Approach
• Cuban missile crisis (1962): Graham Allison found that the bureaucratic-politics perspective offered the best explanation for decision making during the crisis.– Decisions could be understood as resulting
from various bargaining games among players in the national government.
– Decisions could be understood by examining the perceptions, motivations, positions, power, and maneuvers of the players.
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Example of Bargaining Approach (continued)
• Partisan mutual adjustment: the pulling and hauling among decision makers with different views; offers the best hope for the best decisions.
• Regulatory negotiation sessions: to produce better rules and to forestall litigation, these sessions involve the various interests potentially affected by a new rule.– e.g., Environmental Protection Agency holds
regulatory negotiation sessions.
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Appraisal of Bargaining Approach
• Dangerously incomplete and risks depriving decision makers of important information
• Does not identify most efficient options
• Strong in describing how decisions are made and how decision makers build political support for their judgments
• Difficult to bargain out differences
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Participative Approach
• Participation can be either consultation for advice or sharing decision-making power
• Claims to participation by:– Employees of the organization making the decision– The clientele– Taxpayers– The whole or voting public
• NIMBY phenomenon: strong pressures to keep potentially objectionable programs “not in my back yard”
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Example of Participative Approach
• Federal agencies have used advisory committees of private citizens in the decision-making process.– e.g., Trade associations during the New Deal
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Example of Participative Approach (continued)
• Federal agencies have relied on local committees whose part-time members were intended to be representative of their communities.– e.g., Farmers since 1933 have been elected to serve
on committees in 3,000 counties.– e.g., In the mid-1960s, federal programs required
communities to establish citizen committees in cities to determine money allocation.
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Appraisal of Participative Approach
• Provides wealth of information, sometimes too much
• Narrow clientele or broad, mixed clientele?
• Participation by all clientele or by committee?
• Formal or informal power given to citizens for making government decisions?
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Public-Choice Approach
• Public officials are self-interested, risk avoidant.• Private sector; makes individuals and
corporations competitive and leads to most efficient distribution of resources.
• Government functions should be either turned over to or handled as in the private sector.
• Privatization (Stuart Butler): political guerrilla warfare; directs demand away from government provision of services and reduces demand for budget growth.
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Example of Public-Choice Approach
• Environmental Protection Agency set pollution standards, allowing companies that reduced their pollution below prescribed levels to “bank” their pollution savings for use in future expansion.
• Companies since 1979 have been allowed to establish a "bubble" around all of their facilities in a given area and then find the cheapest way to reduce overall pollution within that area.
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Appraisal of Public-Choice Approach
• Efficiency promoted by marketlike competition
• Naively believes government bureaucrats are driven so hard to maximize their own utility that organizational goals slip away
• Does not explain what government ought to do, just how to do it
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Limits to Approaches
• All approaches share problems:– Uncertainty surrounding complex issues– Bureaucratic pathologies that distort and
block the flow of important information– Recurrent crises that deny the luxury of
lengthy consideration
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Limits to Approaches (continued)
• Weakness: tendency to focus on a single value
• Weakness: failure to understand what is required to make an approach succeed
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Conclusion
• All approaches are expressions of theories and as such have hidden dogmas.
• It is possible to identify which approaches work best on which problems.