s. 597: This essay investigates the range of arguments that lie behind the gen-eral label of policy feedback. Part of my purpose is to indicate the sheer range of existing work, which provides compelling evidence that the analysis of policy feedback constitutes a major research frontier in com-parative politics.
s. 598: POLICIES AS PRODUCERS OF RESOURCES AND INCENTIVES Analyses that stress the ways in which political systems confer resources on individuals and create incentives for them are the bread and butter of contemporary political science. By virtue of their location within a polit-ical system, particular actors may have direct access to significant political assets. These may be material, but an even more important asset may be access to authority-the capacity to issue commands and take other steps with a reasonable expectation that others will accept these actions as le-gitimate. Political systems also create incentives, which do not directly confer resources but help to define the alternatives available to individual actors. Incentive structures influence the probability of particular out-comes and the payoffs attached to those outcomes. Individuals choose, but the conditions that frame their decisions provide strong inducements to make particular choices.
Man kanske kan tillägga att de skapar incitament för kollektivt handlande också. Men skiljer sig dessa incitament för att policyn finns där, snarare än när man kan vinna den? Jo, om den finns där vet man ju att man har något att förlora. Det gör också det gemensamma intresset tydligt, konkret, åskådligt.
s. 600: Exemplet företagsregleringar. Allmänna regleringar mot företagen, och många på en gång, enade och mobiliserade kapitalistklassen i USA på 1960-talet, påstås det.
s. 602: In many cases, one can start with policies themselves and demonstrate the presence or absence of links to specific group activities. Where policies provide tangible re-sources (e.g., formalized access, financing), these connections should be easy to trace. At the same time, research can begin with the interest groups themselves and seek to draw linkages back toward policies. It is probably easier, for example, to first identify the selective incentives that groups are using to overcome collective action problems and then work backward to determine if government policies produced those selective incentives.
s. 603: POLICIES AND THE RESOURCES AND INCENTIVES FOR GOVERNMENT ELITES According to Skocpol, the second major type of policy feedback is the transformation of state capacities. "Because of the official efforts made to implement new policies using new or existing administrative arrange-ments," she writes, "policies transform or expand the capacities of the state. They therefore change the administrative possibilities for official initiatives in the future, and affect later prospects for policy implemen-tation" (p. 58).
Policy feedback in mass publics: s. 606: Esping-Andersen's detailed investigation of social policy and occupa-tional structures in the United States, Sweden, and Germany persua-sively links public policy structures to the socioeconomic circumstances of mass publics. Emerging variations in the rate of growth of service industries, the relative weight of social services as opposed to personal services, the skill and occupational composition of the labor force, and the distribution of jobs by gender and racial or ethnic background can all be traced in part to previous policy choices.
Sedan kommer detta med setup-costs, learning effects, adaptive expectations, coordination effects.
Lock-ins och non-decisions
s. 611: POLICIES AS SOURCES OF INFORMATION AND MEANING Interpretive arguments stress that an exclusive focus on material re-sources and incentives is psychologicallya nemic.29T he process through which individuals choose a course of action does not involve a simple calculation of easily discernible costs and benefits. A viable theory of ac-tion must take into account the fact that all actors have to cope with overwhelming complexity and uncertainty, and that they use a wide range of cognitive shortcuts in order to make sense of the social world.
s. 612: According to Heclo, policymakers have tended to frame new problems in terms that make it possible to draw on already estab-lished policy designs:
Exempel också från en studie av keynesianismens spridning. Detta tema gäller policy som läroprocess - hur organisationer utvecklar sin världsbild.
s. 615: A second difficult issue for policy-learning arguments regards the dy-namics of the learning process. Why does "learning" sometimes produce positive conclusions and incremental policy change and at other times generate negative conclusions and reactive policy shifts?
Förslag på hypoteser om när det finns "learning effects": insulation of decision makers, policy complexity, differences between stages of the policy process (lärande speciellt relevant när det kommer till identifikationen av problem).
På massnivå: s. 619: For the electorate, policies may produce cues that help them develop political identities, goals, and strategies. While policy-learning arguments see policies as the source of models or analogies for policymakers, what is likely to be important for mass publics is the informational content of policies
s. 621: Besides broadening the range of actors considered, this approach has a significant additional ad-vantage over a focus on policy learning. Not only does it acknowledge that all policy-making takes place in a context of information constraints, but it recognizes that the distribution of this information is often highly unequal. The emphasis of these arguments is on how information asym-metries create space for the strategic manipulation of policy design.
s. 621 Yet beyond rather vague formulations, such as the suggestions that some policies are "visible" and others are not or that some policies gen-erate "focusing events" and others do not, there was until recently little systematic discussion of the characteristics of initiatives that produce par-ticular "cues" for social actors. However, political scientists are now making significant progress on several fronts. R. Kent Weaver's work on blame avoidance indicated that policymakers will take steps, includ-ing the redesign of policies, to modify public awareness of their actions, depending on whether or not they expect those actions to be popular.53
s. 625: The impact of policies is likely to occur in interaction with other variables. For both these reasons, it seems doubtful that we can expect to develop sweeping theories that link a few policy "types" to clearly defined political outcomes. Instead, a more promising strategy is to develop middle-range theories that acknowledge both the complexity of feedback and its context-specific qualities. [min kursiv.]
Vilken sorts teorier tänker Pierson på här? Kanske en teori inom varje område, hitta olika faktorer som kan tänkas ge synlighet eller traceability, hur olika politiska aktörer kämpar för att göra policies synliga eller osynliga. Finns det lock-in effects att ta hänsyn till i val? Överskattar politikerna dem? När finns de över huvud taget?
s. 627; It is no accident that both the arguments I have advanced about policy feedback on mass publics (the production of lock-in effects and the pro-vision of information) draw heavily on work in rational-choice theory. While historical institutionalists have studied state structures and social groups, the use of microeconomic theory leads naturally to a focus on individual behavior
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