Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

126 Public Management and Administration
it fails to be disproved. As an example of the difference, consider the traffic
problem mentioned earlier. An inductive approach to traffic congestion would
involve gathering data about traffic conditions, making sense of it and making
conclusions from the data. A deductive or public choice approach would
assume there was a good being maximized by people; in this case probably
time, so predictions could be made about what the behaviour of people might
be in trying to minimize the time taken in traffic. Instead of trying to derive
explanations of behaviour, that is taken as assumed.
Undemocratic
Following the rational model by analysis of the facts, and deriving the best
possible outcome, could be undemocratic unless the solution happened to agree
with what the target audience or the wider political system wanted. This would
only occur by chance. Denhardt argues that policy analysts typically apply
technical solutions to the solution of immediate problems and ‘under such circumstances,
technical concerns would displace political and ethical concerns
as the basis for public decision making, thereby transforming normative issues
into technical problems’ (1981, p. 631). Even a small-scale issue such as the
location of a road can rarely be decided technically as there are people involved
who will not accept a technical solution. Politics, as required by a democracy,
may intervene unless a technical answer is imposed, which would often be
undemocratic. As deLeon notes (1997, p. 100), ‘the analytic priesthood is
doing little to discourage the ebbing of … faith in government and, by extension,
the democratic system, as it carries out its personal preferences, in procedure
if not in specific programs’.
Responses to criticism
Criticisms have been made about policy analysis for some years. In a defence
of the approach, Nagel (1990, p. 429) argued that policy analysis can incorporate
other values than those for which it is criticized and move away from those
things criticized earlier. He refers to the traditional goals under the ‘three Es’
of effectiveness, efficiency, and equity. According to him, effectiveness refers
to the benefits achieved by alternative public policies; efficiency refers to keeping
costs down in achieving benefits, as measured by benefits minus costs or a
maximum level of costs across persons, groups, or places. He says that these
should also be balanced with the ‘three Ps’ as high-level goals, meaning public
participation, predictability, and procedural due process. Public participation
refers to decision-making by the target group, the general public or other relevant
interest groups; predictability refers to making decisions so that a similar
decision would be arrived at by others following the same criteria, while procedural
due process, or procedural fairness, means those who have been