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Chapter Seven
Public Policy
Comparative Politics Today, 9/e
Almond, Powell, Dalton & Strøm
Pearson Education, Inc. publishing as Longman © 2008
Government and Policymaking
 Public policy consists of all those
authoritative public decisions that
governments make.
 The outputs of the political system
Government and What It Does
 Governments do many things.
 Timeless: defense
 Production of goods and services
 Varies from country to country
 How much involvement
 And in what sectors
Public Policies
 Governments engage in various forms of
public policy
 Many are directed at the major challenges
facing contemporary states:
 Building community
 Fostering development
 Securing democracy and rights
Public Policies
 Public policies may be summarized and
compared according to outputs classified into
four headings:
 Distribution
 Extraction
 Regulation
 Symbolic outputs
From the Night Watchman State
to the Welfare State
 Night Watchman State: a Lockean state, which primarily
sought to regulate just enough to preserve law, order, a good
business climate, and the basic security of its citizens
 Police State: regulates much more intrusively and extracts
resources more severely than the night watchman state
 Regulatory State: evolved in all advanced industrial societies
as they face the complexities of modern life
 Welfare State: found particularly in more prosperous and
democratic societies, distributes resources extensively to
provide for the health, education, employment, housing, and
income support of its citizens
Welfare State
 First modern welfare state programs introduced in
Germany in the 1880s
 Bismarck: social insurance programs that protected workers
 1930s to 1970s most industrialized states have
adopted and expanded welfare policies
 1980s and 1990s the welfare states in advanced
capitalist countries continued to grow albeit at a
somewhat slower rate
 Mixture between social insurance and social
redistribution
 In part paternalistic and in part Robin Hood
Welfare State
 Welfare benefits can be expensive and governments
often have limited funds.
 There are three principles that govern most welfare
state provisions:
 Need - help and services are provided to those that need
them most
 Contribution - benefits should go to those that have
contributed to the program
 Entitlement/Universalism - everyone should have the
benefit, regardless of specific circumstances
 Often applied to primary education or to treatment for lifethreatening diseases
 U.S. model in education - equality of opportunity
 U.S. and charitable organizations/individuals
Challenges to the Welfare State
 Ability of future generations to pay
 Growth of senior citizens/dependency ratios
 Some welfare states give citizens few incentives to
work.
 Norway and Sweden
Distribution
 Of money, goods, and services - to citizens, residents
and clients of the state
 Laswell - “who gets what, when, and how”
 Distributive policy profiles
 Health, education, and national defense consume
the largest proportion of government spending
across the world.
 Developed countries: generally allocate from one
half to two thirds of their central government
expenditures to education, health, and welfare
Extraction
 Direct extraction of services
 Compulsory military service, jury duty, or compulsory labor
imposed on those convicted of crime
 Direct resource extraction
 Taxation
 Direct taxes
 Indirect taxes
 Progressive tax structure
 Regressive tax structure
 The tax profiles of different countries vary both in their overall
tax burdens and in their reliance on different types of taxes.
 Differ in how they collect their revenues
Regulation
 Regulation is the exercise of political control over the
behavior of individuals and groups in society.
 Most contemporary governments are both welfare
states and regulatory states.
 Government regulate:
 By legal means
 By offering material or financial inducements
 By persuasion or moral exhortation
Regulation
 How do we describe and explain the differences
between political systems in the area of regulation?
We ask:
 What aspects of human behavior and interaction are
regulated and to what degree?
 What social groups are regulated, with what procedural
limitations on enforcement and what rights?
 What sanctions are used to compel or induce citizens to
comply?
 One aspect of regulation is particularly important
politically: government control over political
participation and communication
 Political rights and civil liberties
Community-Building and
Symbolic Policies
 Intended to enhance people’s national
identity, civil pride, or trust in government
 Enhance other areas of performance:
 Make people pay their taxes more readily and
honestly
 Comply with law more faithfully
 Accept sacrifice, danger, and hardship
Outcomes: Domestic Welfare
 How do extractive, distributive, regulative, and symbolic policies
affect the lives of citizens?
 Sometimes policies have unintended and undesirable
consequences.
 To estimate the effectiveness of public policy, we have to
examine actual welfare outcomes as well as governmental
policies and their implementation.
 Measures of economic well-being
 Nigeria and India - severe problems
 Income distribution tends to be most unequal in medium-income
developing societies, such as Brazil, and more equal in advanced
market societies as well as in low-income developing societies, such as
India.
 Kuznets Curve
 Health outcomes
 Education and information technologies
Domestic Security Outcomes

Crime rates have been on the increase in many advanced industrial
societies until recently as well as the developing world.
 Russia, Brazil and Mexico- high rates of crimes
 England, France (has had an increase), and Germany have a small fraction
of the U.S.’s crime numbers
 China has low murder rates; Japan even lower.

Much crime found in urban areas.
 Causes are complex.
 Migration increases diversity and conflict.
 Pace of urbanization explosive; severe problems of poverty and
infrastructure
 Inequality of income and wealth, unemployment, drug abuse, hopelessness
of big city life

Crime rates have come down in the U.S.
 Stronger economy; increased incarceration time; decrease in youth
International Outputs and
Outcomes
 International activities: economic, diplomatic, military and
informational
 Most common outcome of the interaction among nations is
warfare
 Deadly costs of international warfare have gradually escalated
 90 percent of the war deaths since 1700 have occurred in the 20th
century.
 In the last decades of the 20th century, more than three-quarters
of the war deaths were civilian.
 People of USSR-Russian have been the greatest victims of the
tormented history of the 20th century.
 Germany suffered the second largest number of deaths.
 Followed by China and Japan, France and Great Britain
International Outputs and
Outcomes
 After WWI the most devastating conflicts have
occurred in the Third World.
 Partition of British India into India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh
associated with numerous deadly conflicts.
 Conflicts in Africa
 Many newly independent from about 1960
 Borders drawn by colonial powers
 Serious problems of national cohesion/chronic civil war
 End of Cold War
 Wave of instability and conflict
 Uppsala Conflict Data Project
 Role of the United Nations
 Economic costs of national security
Political Goods and Values
 If we are to compare and evaluate public policy in
different political systems, we need to consider the
political goods that motivate different policies.
 System goods: Citizens are most free and most able to act
purposefully when their environment is stable, transparent,
and predictable.
 Process goods: citizen participation and free political
participation; democratic procedures and various rights of
due process
 Policy goods: economic welfare, quality of life, freedom and
personal security
Political Goods and Values
 There are two important criteria that most of us
would agree that government policy should meet:
 Fairness
 Promotion and preservation of freedom
Trade-offs and Opportunity
Costs
 Hard fact about political goods: We cannot always
have them all simultaneously.
 A political system often has to trade off one value to
obtain another.
 Opportunity costs are what you lose in one area by
committing your resources to a different good.
 One of the important tasks of social science is to
discover the conditions under which positive and
negative trade-offs occur.