Public Policy and Program

Implementation
Introduction to Public Administration
• The management of public programs affected by all the :
• Expertise
• Leadership
• Organizational structure
• Personnel
• Politics
• Law (courts)
• Budget
• Individual programs are what is being used to implement public policy – Organizing framework of purposes and rationales
for government programs that deal with specified societal problems (who gets what)
• Foreign Policy
• Trade Policy
• Economic Policy
• Health Policy
• Civil Rights Policy
• Environmental Policy
• Defense Policy

Introduction
• Obviously public policy is highly shaped by politics and the political process
• Policies often not rational
• Often not well planned
• Intent doesn’t match outcomes
• Can originate from many sources
• President
• Congress
• Interest groups
• State/local government
• Policy best described as incremental
• Some policies are nothing more than symbolic actions

Introduction
• Distributive policies – deliver large scale services or benefits to certain individuals or groups in the population
who do not bear the costs.
• Examples:
• Tax breaks
• Subsidy
• Loans for college students
• Redistributive policies – effort by government to shift the allocation of valued goods from one group to
another.
• Examples:
• Affirmative action
• Medicare
• Temporary Assistance to Needy Families
• Lottery
• Regulatory policies – promote restrictions on the freedom to act of those subject to regulation.
• Sherman Antitrust Act (policy)  program
• Usually targeted at businesses
• Self-regulatory policies – policy change sought by those being regulated as a means of protecting or promoting
their own economic interests.
• Licensing of professions – law, medicine, hair stylists

Typology of Policies
• Legislative stage (Congress/President)
• Administrative stage
• Create rules
• Implement
• Review stage (courts or Congress)
• Policies broken down into programs and projects, these are the focus of management
(example: Don’t Mess with Texas)
• Thus we must recognize that administrators play a vital role with respect to public
policy
• Discretion

The Policymaking Process

• Planning and analysis
• Implementation
• Evaluation
• Productivity and measurement of results
• Rewarding employee participation and quality management
• Meeting customer service standards

Six Policy Concepts Discuss

• Systematic evaluation of government policies, projects, or programs to determine their success or failure
• Three steps:
• Specification
• Collect data
• Analysis
• Purposes
• Gain knowledge about program impacts
• Establish accountability
• Help with determinations of continuation/termination
• Help with planning/analysis for future projects
• All related to tailoring evaluations:
• Formative – improve the program
• Summative – summary judgment about the program
• Used to report to funders
• Does it work?
• Knowledge generation
• Most scientific
• Learn about a specific concept
• Food stamps vs. cash vs. debit
• General findings
• Political
• Justify an action that will be taken either way

Program Evaluation
• Broad:
• Site visit
• Hearings
• Citizens
• More specific
• Before versus after studies – evaluation and comparison of results before and after program to determine what results were
achieved.
• Time-trend projection – focus on more data points
• Comparison
• Compare with other jurisdictions with and without the program and compare differences
• Compare with professional programs
• Controlled Experimentation – comparisons of two groups of similar people, one served by the program and the other not served
• Not served called the control group
• Most expensive and least used
• Can be combined with other methods
• Methods try to establish causality – or that intervention A causes result B
• But in order to demonstrate causality we have to eliminate changes caused by extraneous confounding factors
• In order to conduct these evaluations we need data and thus the initial operationalization of goals becomes important

Program Evaluation: How Government

Evaluates
• Make a determination of whether or not the program/policy/project works
• Errors:
• Type I Error (false positive) – say it works when it does not
• Type II Error (false negative) – say it does not work when it does
• Problems
• Uncertainty about performance indicators
• Data can be manipulated to produce different results
• Goal differences between the official and that of implementers
• Correct time frame in which to evaluate?
• Too early
• Too late
• Justifying a program (internal evaluation, always good, external evaluation, always bad)
• Seldom Terminate a Program
• Legislator and bureaucrat have a vested interest
• Recipients lobby
• Part of another program/policy
• Success if:
• Program goals are well defined
• Program goals are plausible
• Intended use of info well defined (tailoring)

We Have Results, Now What?

• With limited resources/funding/use of tax dollars we want to ensure that we are producing maximum results
• Productivity – measurable relationship between the results produced and the resources required for production
• Hard to measure in the public sector
• Not purely economic results
• Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA)
• Shift from inputs to outputs
• Requires managers to find new ways to measure results
• Set targets/define goals
• Report actual performance
• Required for all federal agencies
• Focus on productivity grows as resources become more limited, public expects results
• Benchmarking – compare your performance to the performance of organizations considered the best at
performing the process/program and test it against your own performance

Government Productivity
• Increased focus on business values/customer service focus
• Privatization

Other Issues