How useful are policy analysis and political public policy as approaches to the management of the public sector? This study argues that these methods are useful in focusing attention on what governments do, in contrast to public administration’s concern with how governments operate. They are also important for using empirical methods to analyse policy. Nevertheless, new public management is replacing them.
Policy analysis focuses on decision-making and policy formulation, often using statistical methods, whereas political public policy theorists are more interested in the results of public policy. These approaches caused a fundamental rethinking of public administration in the 1970s and early 1980s. Public policy is more ‘political’ than public administration and has emphasised more technical approaches to decision-making. Policy analysis focuses on empirical methods to aid decision-making. These more sophisticated forms of empirical analysis made public administration more professional.
Neverthless, there are some limitations in these approaches. The idea that empirical techniques can improve decision-making methods is limited. Public policy is more complex and has no easy answers. Policy process models can bring benefits in analysing public policy in some circumstances but not all. Models do not guarantee better policymaking, cannot deal with policy change or with prediction of future action. In addition, the public policy approach has further limitations:
- Numbers are useful to policymakers but public policy gives them too much emphasis.
- The creation of a separate public policy discipline was unrealistic and unnecessary.
- There is an overemphasis on decisions. Managers spend little time making decisions amenable to analytical processes.
- There is little evidence that public policy is used in the workplace and it is yet to pass the test of relevance.
- Policy analysis has declined as a framework by being overtaken by an even more rigorous rational model of economics.
- Public policy analysis relies on the old-fashioned theory of science used n political science during the 1960s and 1970s.
- Following the rational model by analysis of facts could produce results that goes against what the target audience or political systems wants, making it undemocratic.
Public policy and policy analysis have been bypassed in the debate over managerialism, which incorporates analytical techniques.
- The public policy literature has been too concerned with policy decisions and broad processes of policy formulation and implementation instead of the roles and practices of managers of organisational entities within those processes.
- Empirical studies such as benefit-cost studies, path-analyses, demographic or other social studies, cannot make actual decisions, which are based on political opinion.
- Public policy and policy analysis are being replaced by economics, allied with modern management (new public management).
- If advocates of the public policy approach accepted that its role is to provide information rather than make decisions, it would be far more useful.
