20 Sep PADM 610 Case Study: Planning, Negotiation, & Implementation Assignment In this Case Study, you will apply the Statesmanship model discussed in Module 1: Week 1 to a real, specific pub

PADM 610

Case Study: Planning, Negotiation, & Implementation Assignment Instructions

Overview

In this Case Study, you will apply the Statesmanship model discussed in Module 1: Week 1 to a real, specific public administration context. In other words, choose an organization that is dealing with challenges of planning and implementation of policy and programs. Next, apply the statesmanship model discussed Module 1: Week 1 to this situation. The overarching idea of statesmanship is the call for moral character. In the context of this assignment, how can this model be applied to the situation at hand?

You will apply the Statesmanship model needed to deal with challenges of planning and implementation of policy and programs. Remember to also discuss the importance of the following:

· Program Evaluations

· Policy Analysis

· Conflict resolution and consensus building

· Covenant

· Statecraft

Instructions

· Case Study scenarios must be taken from documented (published) public administration contexts; no hypotheticals are allowed. 

· Students can focus on one public administration organization or may refer to a particular situation (well-documented by the research) that public administrators faced during an actual event(s).

· All ideas shared by student should be supported with sound reason and citations from the required readings and presentations, and additional resources.

· Paper should be 4-5 double-spaced pages of content in length (this does not include title page or reference pages).

· Paper should be in current APA format.

· Headings should be included and must conform to the content categories listed (i.e., Policy Evaluation, Policy Analysis, Conflict Resolution and Consensus Building, etc.).

· 3-5 additional scholarly sources must be used. They need to be scholarly and provide relevant public administration theory and practices.

· All required reading and presentations from the assigned reading must be cited.

· Integrate biblical principles within the analysis of the paper.

· Unacceptable sources (Wikipedia, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and websites).

· Acceptable sources (scholarly articles published within the last eight years).

Note: Your assignment will be checked for originality via the Turnitin plagiarism tool.

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ARTICLE

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Policy Feedback and the Politics of Administration

Donald P. Moynihan , Joe Soss

First published: 16 April 2014

https://doi-org.ezproxy.liberty.edu/10.1111/puar.12200

Citations: 92

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Abstract

This article surveys the policy feedback framework developed in political science and clarifies its implications for public administration. A feedback perspective encourages us to ask how policy implementation transforms the webs of political relations that constitute governance. Administrators play a key role in shaping the political conditions of bureaucratic performance and the organization of power in the broader polity. At the same time, this perspective underscores that policies are more than just objects of administrative action. Policies are political forces in their own right that can alter key components of administration, including phenomena such as organizational capacity, structures, routines, authorities, motivations and cultures. These sorts of administrative themes have received little attention in policy feedback research, just as the political effects of policies have been overlooked in public administration studies. Bridging these perspectives offers a basis for exciting new agendas and advances in public administration research.

What is the relationship between administration and politics? Few questions in the study of bureaucracy are as vexed and enduring. Many scholars sidestep it, opting to remain silent on politics and, thus, drain it from their accounts of administration. Yet it is rare today to find explicit Wilsonian claims that the two exist in separate spheres. Indeed, the dialogue between administrative and political analysis has grown decidedly richer in recent years. Scholars increasingly recognize that bureaucracies must serve many political masters at once (Derthick 1990 ). Political interests design bureaucratic structures to advance political goals (Moe 1989 ). Administrators are politically situated in governing networks (Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill 2001 ) and are often called on to bring stakeholders together in participatory processes (Feldman and Khademian 2007 ).

In this article, we aim to deepen this dialogue by introducing students of administration to the concept of policy feedback and elaborating its implications for the field. Policy is typically studied as an outcome of politics. Feedback research complements this view with its opposite, asking how “new policies create new politics” (Schattschneider 1935 ). Conceiving the relationship between policy and politics as an ongoing interplay, researchers analyze how each shapes the other over time (Soss, Hacker, and Mettler 2007 ).

The administrative significance of the claim that “policies shape politics” depends on how one conceives policies and politics.

As with any effort to import a concept, ours requires some bridging assumptions. The administrative significance of the claim that “policies shape politics” depends on how one conceives policies and politics, respectively.

First, we assume that a policy is more than the letter of the law: it also includes administrative practices of translation and implementation. If one accepts this assumption, then the claim “policy shapes politics” implies the subclaim “administration shapes politics.” This assertion directs scholars to study not just how political forces impinge on administration but also how administrative organizations act on and transform political relations. The political effects of policy implementation, in this view, can matter for a society at least as much as the social and economic impacts that scholars typically study. At the same time, because political forces affect administration, a feedback perspective suggests an evolving transaction of the two: bureaucracies are not only creatures but also creators of the political forces that impinge on them.

Second, we assume that administrative organizations are, in their own right, sites of politics. They are other things as well, of course. But they are political insofar as they entail phenomena such as power relations, authority structures, ideological commitments, rights and obligations, and decisions regarding “who gets what, when, how” (Lasswell 1936 ). If one accepts this idea, then the claim that “policy shapes politics” implies the subclaim “policy shapes administration.” This assertion directs scholars to study not just how administrators transform policy but also how policies shape administrative organizations. Most studies in the field treat administrators as agents who use their discretion to reshape policy objects. Feedback scholarship suggests a more dialogic relationship. As organizations implement a policy, they transform it and are themselves transformed. Administrators shape policy outcomes, but policies also have the power to disrupt and reconfigure administration. They can restructure authorities, alter routines, redistribute resources, and reframe culture, identity, and motivation.

Our article proceeds in four stages. The first defines policy feedback and outlines its implications for political analysis. The second clarifies how administration matters for the broader polity and operates to transform political relations and environments. The third describes how public policies operate as active forces in the ordering of administration. The fourth section presents a more concrete discussion of how policies influence administration by exploring the effects of welfare reform in three areas: organizational culture, worker discretion, and personnel motivation.

What Is Policy Feedback?

Policy feedback denotes the potential for policies to transform politics and, as a result, influence future courses of policy development. Political scientists have long acknowledged that policies can have political repercussions. For example, conventional models of democratic politics—from pluralist models of group grievances (Dahl 1971 ) to rational choice models of retrospective voting (Fiorina 1981 ) to systems models in which citizens respond to policy outputs (Easton 1957 )—entail dynamics of public accountability in some form. Yet policies in these sorts of analyses are rarely studied as more than objects of political approval or disapproval. Political actors respond to policies after enactment just as they would have before passage: they take action or do not, they reward or punish public officials, and so on, because, for reasons that are exogenous to the policy itself, they approve or disapprove of particular governmental actions.

Policy feedback denotes the potential for policies to transform politics and influence future courses of policy development.

In contemporary political science, the concept of policy feedback suggests that policies can transform the political landscape in ways that are far more fundamental and varied. Policies, in this view, are not just political objects; they are political forces that reconfigure the underlying terms of power, reposition actors in political relations, and reshape political actors’ identities, understandings, interests, and preferences. Indeed, to explain policy outcomes, this approach suggests, one must often look to the political dynamics set in motion by policy actions at earlier points in time.

Recent scholarship in this area builds on a variety of intellectual foundations. In an early landmark, Schattschneider ( 1935 ) argued that new policies reconfigure the terms of pressure group conflict. Lowi ( 1964 ) suggested that terms of political interaction depend on whether the policy at issue is distributive, redistributive, or regulatory. Wilson ( 1973 ) theorized that patterns of political engagement depend on the ways that policies distribute costs and benefits. Contemplating the welfare state, Marshall ( 1964 ) argued that policies institutionalize social rights in ways that transform civil and political rights, while Piven and Cloward ( 1971 ) argued that welfare policies function as tools for pacifying political unrest, shoring up political legitimacy, and setting the terms of power relations between labor and capital. Lipsky ( 1980 ) suggested that the experiences of street-level bureaucracy influence citizens’ political beliefs and orientations, and Edelman ( 1977 ) argued that administrative categories and divisions could structure political cognitions in mass publics.

Beginning in the early 1990s, scholars began to connect these themes and develop policy feedback as a distinct approach to political analysis. To understand what emerged, it is helpful to conceptualize the literature along two dimensions. The first distinguishes between effects on political elites and mass publics (Pierson 1993 ). Focusing on elites, institutionalist scholars emphasized how new policies affect the positions, capacities, and beliefs of actors in interest groups and at various levels of the state (Skocpol 1992 ; Pierson 1994 ; Thelen 2004 ). Even minor policy changes, they demonstrated, can set “path-dependent” processes in motion that constrain political possibilities and future policy development (Pierson 2000 ; Mahoney 2006 ). Policies establish templates for governance that officials learn to use reflexively, even when alternatives are available (Heclo 1974 ). They shape institutional capacities in ways that raise or lower the difficulty of pursuing new initiatives (Skocpol 1992 ). As organized interests adapt to new policies, they often grow dependent on them and become invested in their continuation (Hacker 2002 ). In these and other ways, policies can reshape the assumptions, positions, interests, identities, and capacities of elite actors in the state, surrounding issue networks, and interest group systems.

At the mass level, feedback research has explored how policies “make citizens” and influence publics (Mettler and Soss 2004 ). As Campbell summarizes, policies shape patterns of citizen participation by “affecting levels of politically relevant resources, affecting feelings of political engagement such as political efficacy and political interest, and affecting the likelihood of political mobilization by interest groups and other political entrepreneurs” (2012, 336). Policies convey cues to the public about civic standing, group deservingness, and the nature of social problems (Schneider and Ingram 1997 ; Soss and Schram 2007 ). As the GI Bill provided educational benefits to military veterans, for example, it cultivated political beliefs, identities, and skills that bolstered civic engagement (Mettler 2005 ). By contrast, experiences with criminal justice and paternalist welfare policies contribute to negative views of government and political marginalization (Bruch, Ferree, and Soss 2010 ; Weaver and Lerman 2010 ).

Along a second dimension, feedback scholarship can be seen as encompassing both causal and constructivist approaches to explanation. For many, it represents a causal proposition in efforts to explain political outcomes and policy trajectories. In feedback research, as Pierson ( 1993 ) explains, “effect becomes cause.” Through the political dynamics they set in motion, earlier policy outcomes play a causal role in constraining or promoting later policy developments. They operate as state-crafted institutions that structure political interaction and have both intended and unintended causal effects on political actors (Pierson 2006 ).

A second strand of argument stresses more constructivist and relational themes. Here, feedback scholars build on participatory democratic arguments that citizens—both as individuals and as collectives—are constructed through experiences with political institutions and relations (Dewey 1927 ; Pateman 1970 ). Many also draw on the work of Edelman ( 1964 , 1977 ), who theorized governmental actions as moves in an ongoing political transaction. Policies, Edelman argued, can threaten or reassure, cultivate beliefs, and evoke mass arousal or quiescence—not so much as a causal effect but rather as one statement elicits a response in an ongoing dialogue. Schneider and Ingram's ( 1997 ) theory of “target populations” can be seen as a prominent inheritor of this tradition. Feedback scholarship in this vein analyzes how policies fit into ongoing political transactions and construct objects and subjects of governance.

Across these differences, feedback scholarship offers a coherent prescription for political analysis: public policy must be analyzed as a political outcome and as a force that influences political actors, organizes political understandings, and structures political relations. “The same political process that assembles [public policy] is, in turn, reshaped by its own products” (Soss 1999 , 377).

In political analysis, the concept of policy feedback poses a direct challenge to systems theories that treat citizen demands as inputs and public policies as outputs (Easton 1957 ). In policy analysis, it is equally hard to square with models that envision “the policy process” as a linear series of stages (Bardach 1977 ). In normative political theory, it complicates efforts to use “responsiveness to citizens” as a yardstick for evaluating representative democratic systems (Disch 2013). In the sections that follow, we explore its implications for the study of public administration.

Policy Implementation Matters for the Polity

Implementation is often a pivotal moment in the interplay of politics and policy—a moment with significant consequences for the polity as a whole. Yet students of administration rarely study it from this perspective. In the field today, two conceptions of politics prevail instead.

The first locates administration at the receiving end of politics. Political forces, in this view, create bureaucracies and act on them as they implement policy. “Governance can be delineated as a hierarchy of relationships” that moves from politics to management to administrative performance (Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill 2001 , 239). “Responding to citizen and stakeholder interests,” “enacting coalitions” design bureaucracies to “stack the deck” in their favor (Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill 2001 , 137–38). Political principals impose agendas on administrators at unpredictable intervals, based on limited understandings of bureaucratic capacities, cultures, and operations (Derthick 1990 ; Light 2007 ; Moynihan and Lavertu 2012 ). They strive, often with mixed results, to oversee and control multisided networks of implementing organizations (Meier and O'Toole 2006 ). Principal–agent models provide the most formal rendering of this perspective, but its logic is deployed widely in the field (Waterman and Meier 1998 ).

The second conception identifies politics as a terrain that administrators navigate in their efforts to achieve goals. Thus, agency directors are forced to think about how to serve “multiple masters” at once (Derthick 1990 ). The polity is an “authorizing environment” that public managers must approach creatively if they hope to secure legitimacy and support for their visions of the public good (Moore 1995 ). Active efforts to engage stakeholders and acquire political support are seen today as central to effective public management (Moynihan and Hawes 2012 ). Thus, politics is not only a force that shapes bureaucracy; it is also an obstacle course that administrators must traverse to achieve their goals.

The concept of policy feedback does not deny these insights. It incorporates them in an analysis of how administration fits into, and matters for, the broader interchange of politics and policy in a society. To develop this kind of analysis, scholars must specify, first, how policies shape the political environment for administration and, second, how administration of a policy can transform broader relations in the polity.

Policy implementation can reorganize power relations in a society, redefine terms of political conflict, mobilize or pacify constituencies, and convey cues about group deservingness. Administrative categories can divide one social group from another and frame perceptions of societal problems. As policies are put into practice, they can produce new social identities and political interests or establish new configurations of rights and obligations. Bureaucratic encounters can teach citizens lessons about the state, mark them in politically consequential ways, alter their political capacities, and reposition them in relation to other citizens and dominant institutions. Through these and other processes, bureaucracies shape their own political environments and alter the broader organization and functioning of the polity.

As students of administration have left these dynamics unattended, scholars in other fields have pointed the way toward promising avenues of research. Their efforts provide a foundation for exciting new agendas in the field of public administration.

Feedback research suggests, for example, that more attention should be paid to the political consequences of administrative divisions and categories. Census categories, for instance, have repeatedly redefined racial distinctions in the United States, often with profound consequences for political identities, solidarities, and interests (Hochschild, Weaver, and Burch 2012 ; Yanow 2002 ). Out of the continuous process of aging, the Social Security Administration delineated, and thereby produced, “sen

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