Lindblom, Charles E. & Edward J. Woodhouse. The Policy Making Process (Third Edition). Prentice Hall: Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1993

Lindblom & Woodhouse's book, The Policy Making Process, aims to present a level handed critique of the democratic policy making process, particularly as practiced in the United States of America. The book achieves this end masterfully, presenting arguments in such an even-handed way that one can almost leave the book feeling good about the somewhat bleak picture it paints. Perhaps this is because, unlike other books which are written to target some group, personage, or process as the problem that keeps the entire system from working, Lindblom & Woodhouse discuss the inevitable pitfalls and synergies that arise from the very process of trying to run a democratic country. Their conclusion is not that democracy cannot work, but rather that making it work is difficult, requires dedication, and can never achieve abstracted ideals that are divorced from the real world.

The focus of the book goes beyond looking at official policy makers to include not only legislators, but also interest groups, business interests and governmental agencies, and broader influences, such as human limitations, conflict between reasoned judgment and the exercise of power, and issues of inequality. The questions, as they pose them, are:

1. Why are humans not more effective in actually solving social problems? [p.2]
2. Why do avowedly democratic governments so often appear to be unresponsive to many of their citizens?
3. What interferes with intelligence and popular control in attacking social problems? [p.3]

They start their systematic answering of the questions they pose with the premise that policy occurs through a system as much as through policy makers. Policy makers usually focus on an already narrowed down range of options, winnowed down to fit into a broad area of basic agreement. Therefore, focusing on policy makers is not a good way to assess the effectiveness of policy-making process. Politicians and bureaucrats act as lenses through which various sources of ideas refract. Lindblom & Woodhouse, to remove the associations of the term policy maker from the discussion choose instead to term the politician as functionary, a label more suited to their proper role in the democratic process.

Perhaps one of the most important issues they address is the simple fact that problems are often too complex for comprehensive human conception and perception -- the mind simply cannot grasp the complexity of social reality. Unless human limits are taken seriously, it is impossible to assess the magnitude of the task facing a political system. Unless political action accounts for the inability to fully comprehend complex problems, policy making will not fare well. Some of the social limits they feel define cognitive limitations are the existence of arbitrary standards, inadequate schooling, and a lack of competition of ideas in the media.

The other issue they stress is the need for balance between analysis and the exercise of power. Policy making is by definition an exercise of power, in that involves the use of authority. The role of analysis is to keep that power in check, not to replace it. Competition of ideas the best road to truth. Democracy, in opening up the market place of ideas has best chance for informed and reasoned policy making. But competition can produce reason or contention, yielding the question: where is the balance between politics of power and politics of analysis?

Policy studies tend to assume that policy making can be studied as a linear, step-wise process. Lindblom & Woodhouse like to think of the policy process more as a primeval soup, where policy definition does not so much occur as gel. As well as normal channels, policy can arise from compromise, as a byproduct of other actions, emerge gradually, or even come into being through inaction and precedent. These are not policy development paths covered within the normal study of policy. As they put it: "Policy making is a complexly interactive process without beginning or end." [p.11]

Analysis also has it limitations. Most policy makers are overwhelmed by advice and information. Although the quantity of information is extensive, quality is sometimes lacking — especially in relations to alternate points of view. Part of this is simply because it is hard to predict what will be important in the future, which is where the policy will be implemented. Another important limitation is fallibility. This not only includes mistakes, but the very nature of disagreement implicit in the democratic process. To function without any exercise of power, parties would have to agree on the correct action take take merely by individual reasoning about the meaning of the available information. However, not only do people disagree and have different values by which to make their choices, but available information will always be limited to some degree, even if it is only in terms of the time limits available for its collection and compilation. In the case of complex problems, it may be impossible to collect all the relevant data. Therefore, differences will occur and will have to be reconciled by the exercise of power.

With these limitations on the policy process, Lindblom & Woodhouse take the somewhat cynical view that: "To the extent that democratic systems do work, it is largely because they half-wittingly utilize strategies that render complex social problems far more manageable than could be achieved via analysis alone." [p.24]

From this perspective, such things as partisanship come to be seen as beneficial. This ensures that different policy makers are bringing different agendas to the table, which increases the amount of available information, increases the number of interested parties taken into account, and means that policy making has to take place through agreement and compromise, rather that by decree. Partisanship not only fragments analysis to key points of interest of the relevant players, but also makes it more strategic, keeping it close to the status quo and focused on problem resolution in ways meant to optimize the chances of success.

These limitations of knowledge also become apparent in the electoral process. There is a certain looseness of control between the will of the voters and the actions of their elected representatives. Although part of this may be due to issues not being put to voters since voters then might countermand the choice their elected officials prefer, there are also the problems of voter ignorance, the limitations of the electoral mechanism, and the fact that a candidate will most probably be elected for their views on some policies while still disagreeing with most of their constituents on some others.

Some voter ignorance is simply due to the fact that there is too much information for a large group to reach consensus on. Because of this, many aspects of the policy making process are not amenable to action by the mass public. This means that although elected officials are necessary to the democratic process, even if there is the threat of them losing touch with the masses. The balance that keeps elected officials in check is the bureaucratic system, which has to implement the policies that are developed. Bureaucrats are less partisan and less politically motivated than politicians. They also, as a group, have more experience in the actual functioning of policy. Often, bureaucrats end up functioning as policy makers when the elected officials set intentionally vague policies to protect their own interests, leaving it to the bureaucrats to interpret the policies into action. Admittedly, bureaucracy is a ponderously slow mechanism, but it does work amazingly well. And although it limits democratic the accountability of appointed officials, it does, within the limits of collective human cognition, help to coordinate the interaction between complex policies.

Forces external to the dialectic between voters and elected officials also include special interest groups and business. The interest group does have the benefit of being, almost by definition, an exercise in liberty (which is not necessarily compatible with democracy in its realization). The diversity of voices is critical to the democratic process, and interest groups help organize the voices of individual citizen and groups into coherent form targeted directly at effecting policy. The problem being the monetarily driven skew of the weight given to those voices, as well as the need for organization in order to be heard. This means that thoughtful dissidents can often be overlooked, possibly at great cost to society as a whole. It also means that policy decisions are based on the opinions of the interest groups, which, no matter how much they may conflict with each other, represent only segments of the common good, not its entirety. Special interest groups also point out a potential problem with democracy in that they can effectively put pressure on any of the key players in the policy making process to prevent action. However, to effect action, pressure needs to be evenly applied across all actors. Every step of the way provides a potential veto that needs to be overcome.

On the other hand, Lindblom & Woodhouse assert that the most important extra-governmental obstruction to democratic, intelligent steering of society is the business sector's influence over public policy. This is because it is easy to make the argument that policy needs to be developed in a way favorable to business, since what is good for the economy is good for the country. This may not, in the end, be a truism, however, no politician wants to be seen as doing things that are potentially bad for the economy. Part of this conflation may be due to a tradition of considering private enterprise and democracy to be inseparable. A notion which even a cursory review of history will refute. This means that important issues are removed from the debate without consideration. There is no other group that gets the same kind of consideration from government as business interests do.

Another issue of the ineffectiveness of the democratic process is the lack of equality endemic in the current system. This not only includes social inequality, but also participatory equality. For an effective democracy, citizens needs to be responsive and active. Another level of inequality is that people differ in their ability to process and use information. This is perhaps the most insurmountable of the inequalities, and leads to one of the greatest obstacles to the democratic process, which is the limits of inquiry. Limits to inquiry include not only the limits of human cognition, but also the limitations imposed on cognition by social conditioning. Such limitations can be due to the tendency of educational systems to school for control and compliance, the emotional conditioning we have in response to certain issues, and human vulnerability to simplistic thinking and symbolic manipulation.

Educational and social conditioning tends to favor the elite. This means that the masses tend not to question the fundamental underpinnings of society, but rather stick with the comparatively trivial — small, targeted, easy to grasp issues. The level of disagreement on the big issues is so small as to be nonexistent, which is a significant issue to think about. It means that, by and large, people are kept from inquiring into the source of their disadvantage.

So those are the problems. What are the solutions that Lindblom & Woodhouse propose? Perhaps the key element of their consideration of possible solutions is that democratic decision making requires a stronger competition of ideas. They propose that analysis should be heavily partisan, but be done in a way that brings as many partisan voices to the table as possible. Analysis also needs to be amenable to the problem of uncertainty — not risk, which is what analysts like to talk about, but uncertainty. The goal of analysis should be to improve the quality of political interaction, not try to substitute for it. Since analysis does not require conclusiveness, only plausibility, analysis should focus on specific proposals, rather than issues, concentrate on proposals that stand a chance of winning, and function as the additional information source that may determine the success of a given proposal. Another goal of analysis should be to help in avoiding some errors, while making others less damaging through promoting flexibility and responsiveness in the policy process.

Some Salient Quotes:

There is a deep and persistent unwillingness in Western culture to acknowledge the difficulties arising from the world's complexity and humans' modest cognitive abilities. [p.5]

People want democracy to be informed and well analyzed, perhaps even correct and scientific; yet they also want policy making to be democratic and hence necessarily an exercise of power. [p.7]

Society and government are forever trying to play catch-up, to correct or mitigate the problems introduced by the technological and entrepreneurial ingenuity of the business sector. [p.8]

There runs a deep and wide river of information and opinion fed by many springs, from formal research projects to letters to the editor, some of which makes it way into the thinking of those with direct influence over policy. [p.15]

Many advocates of more analysis and less politics in public policy making have simply taken for granted that analysis should always be placed at the service of some government functionary who has comprehensive responsibilities in a problem area. But there is no such person, because each official deals at any given time with limited problems, within a limited perspective. [p.31]

Designers of political systems did not singularly attend to considerations of efficient and democratic policy making, because another consideration loomed even larger: curbing the power of rulers to engage in arbitrary action. [p.47]

It is impossible unambiguously calculate even how a single complex policy will interact with another, much less how it will interact with all others. [p.67]

If vetoes can stop policy initiatives at many points, groups of citizens can control their government only when they want it to desist. Not even a large majority may be able to systematically and routinely control it when they want it to act. [p.88]

Businesspeople usually exercise control without great expenditure of attention of deliberation. They simply operate under circumstances in which both they and government officials know that continued performance depends on business indulgences, benefits, privileges, and incentives. [p.95]

[...] few are able to consider the possibility that business demands obstruct citizens' demands and that some aspects of the present business system may be an undemocratic element fitting oddly into a society aspiring to be more democratic. [p.98]

People participate if taught to believe it matters, if helped to acquire verbal and other skills of citizenship, if indoctrinated with aspirations and expectations that stimulate rather than paralyze, and if taught to see themselves as members of the political community. Citizens not socialized in these ways are not likely to vote or otherwise participate in politics. [p.109]

Because democratic political interaction is the primary basis for wise policy making, the quality of people's thinking can have a huge influence on whether their interactions result in sensible and fair policy agreements. Extended inquiry into the thinking abilities and inquiry skills of both ordinary citizens and political elites therefore may be among the most consequential investigations students of public policy can make in trying to understand what goes right and wrong in the effort to shape policy. [p.114]

Some ideas thereby come close to silencing others, excluding them from discussion as irrelevant, inappropriate, or even unthinkable. This may not be a problem in traditional cultures; in technological societies, however, excessive conformity fundamentally undermines social problem solving. [p.120]

Who or what has taught hundreds of millions of people to refrain from challenging the fundamentals of existing political and economic processes? [p.121]

That no democracy has put on its agenda a major frontal assault on wealth and its attendant privileges is a historical fact of pivotal importance. [p.122]

Unfortunately for deliberate efforts to accelerate political progress, it is far from obvious how to get more people to have better ideas. [p.126]

As obvious as its seems, in fact policy professionals virtually never discuss the thorny issue of how to figure out what their actual or hypothetical clients actually need. [p.130]

Professional policy analysts tend to end up supporting the existing order and its prevailing distribution of privileges and deprivations. Policy professionals like all social, physical, and biological scientists, become dependent on elite grants, take employment with elites, seek acceptance by elites, identify with elites. [p.135] It is pretty clear that contemporary democracies are actually only feeble imitations of the aspirations embodied in the word democracy. [p.141]

Hence what counts most is whether social processes and power relations are set up to promote intelligent inquiry, debate, and mutual adjustment among those with stakes and insights concerning the broad spectrum of social problems and possibilities. [p.141]

If the political universe is not set up to evoke, receive, negotiate, and act sensibly and fairly on complaints and policy proposals, then potentially good ideas will never have much of a chance to be developed, debated, and acted upon. [p.142]