Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

implementation of large-scale government programmes by the Kennedy and
Johnson administrations (deLeon, 1988). The size and complexity of the 1960s
social programmes led to a demand for better analysis. Mathematical techniques
deriving from Rand or the United States Defense Department under
Robert McNamara could conceivably be applied to the public sector. It was an
age of science. It was an age in which any problem was seen as having a possible
solution which could be discovered through the proper application of the
scientific method. Related to the belief in solutions was the availability of
large-scale computers and suitable software for processing statistical data to
levels of great sophistication.
The early period of policy analysis is generally regarded as a failure by being
oversold, that is, by assuming that numbers alone or techniques alone can solve
public policy problems. It is only from 1980 that Putt and Springer see what
they term a ‘third stage’ in which policy analysis is perceived as ‘facilitating
policy decisions, not displacing them’ (1989, p. 16). As they explain:
Third-stage analysts decreasingly serve as producers of solutions guiding decision makers
to the one best way of resolving complex policy concerns. Policy research in the third
stage is not expected to produce solutions, but to provide information and analysis at multiple
points in a complex web of interconnected decisions which shape public policy.
Policy research does not operate separated and aloof from decision makers; it permeates
the policy process itself.
Instead of providing an answer by themselves, empirical methods were to be
used to aid decision-making. While few of the early policy analysts saw themselves
as decision-makers (though it was a charge levelled against them) that
was the extent of the analyses used. Third-stage policy analysis is supposed to
be a supplement to the political process and not a replacement of it. Analysis
assists in the mounting of arguments and is used by the different sides in a particular
debate. All participants in the policy process use statistics as ammunition
to reinforce their arguments. The collection of data has greatly improved
and the ways of processing numbers are better than before. However, whether
or not third-stage policy analysis is so different from early policy analysis will
be considered later.
Empirical methods
Public Policy and Policy Analysis 117
Much has been said in passing of the empirical methods and skills needed by
policy analysis and policy analysts. In one view, two sets of skills are needed.
First, ‘scientific skills’ which have three categories: information-structuring
skills which ‘sharpen the analyst’s ability to clarify policy-related ideas and to
examine their correspondence to real world events’; information-collection
skills which ‘provide the analyst with approaches and tools for making accurate
observations of persons, objects, or events’; and information-analysis skills
which ‘guide the analyst in drawing conclusions from empirical evidence’