Why Does Policy Change

Why Does Policy Change? uses detailed case-studies from British transport policy since 1945 to examine and explain the dynamics of major policy change.

Public policy issues directly and indirectly affect many everyday aspects of the lives of all Americans. Yet, most of us don’t fully understand how policy evolves. Why do public policies exist? What different types of policies are there and how controversial have they become over time? How can we better understand the continuity and change in public policies? Expanding upon the first and second editions, the author uses theoretical and historical approaches to answer these questions and highlight changes that have occurred with public policies over the past decade. He explains the complex relationship of political and social theories that explain the modifications and restructuring of public policies that exist today. Through his engaging writing style, Wilson examines a variety of controversial issues and legal cases to deconstruct each aspect of public policy. His explanations provide detailed information in clear, comfortable language that encourages the reader to better understand and appreciate policies and theories. A list of referenced websites after each chapter allows for exploration outside of the text for up-to-date information on the ever-changing world of public policy.

This cutting-edge text offers an introduction to the emerging field of media archaeology and analyses the innovative theoretical and artistic methodology used to excavate current media through its past. Written with a steampunk attitude, What is Media Archaeology? examines the theoretical challenges of studying digital culture and memory and opens up the sedimented layers of contemporary media culture. The author contextualizes media archaeology in relation to other key media studies debates including software studies, German media theory, imaginary media research, new materialism and digital humanities. What is Media Archaeology? advances an innovative theoretical position while also presenting an engaging and accessible overview for students of media, film and cultural studies. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the interdisciplinary ties between art, technology and media.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

During the 2008 election season, politicians from both sides of the aisle promised to rid government of lobbyists’ undue influence. For the authors of Lobbying and Policy Change, the most extensive study ever done on the topic, these promises ring hollow—not because politicians fail to keep them but because lobbies are far less influential than political rhetoric suggests. Based on a comprehensive examination of ninety-eight issues, this volume demonstrates that sixty percent of recent lobbying campaigns failed to change policy despite millions of dollars spent trying. Why? The authors find that resources explain less than five percent of the difference between successful and unsuccessful efforts. Moreover, they show, these attempts must overcome an entrenched Washington system with a tremendous bias in favor of the status quo. Though elected officials and existing policies carry more weight, lobbies have an impact too, and when advocates for a given issue finally succeed, policy tends to change significantly. The authors argue, however, that the lobbying community so strongly reflects elite interests that it will not fundamentally alter the balance of power unless its makeup shifts dramatically in favor of average Americans’ concerns.

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Politics - Methods, Research, grade: 1,7, University of Potsdam (Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät), course: Theories of Public Policy, language: English, abstract: Politics and media announce that we need a major policy change regarding the forthcoming problems and challenges related to climate change. But what is policy change? Policy change in this paper is understood as a major change or reversal in attitude or principle or point of view. But when and how does such changes happen? This work aims to look at policy change from a theoretical point of view by contrasting three different theoretical approaches regarding their explanatory power for policy change. The paper deals with Lindblom's incrementalism (1959; 1979), Kingdon's policy windows (1995), as well as Baumgartner and Jones's theory of punctuated equilibrium (1991). The theories and concepts of agenda setting and policy change are closely related in the literature on policy making. Since Lindblom's "The Science of Muddling Through" (1959), patterns of policy change were analyzed regarding different elements such as policy entrepreneurship (Kingdon 1984; 1995) or issue expansion and venue shopping (Baumgartner and Jones 1991). Roughly spoken there are two competing views on changes in policy making in the literature: the stability in policy making and the incremental nature of policy change as introduced by Lindblom (1959), and episodes of abrupt changes elaborated by Baumgartner and Jones in their punctuated equilibrium theory (1991; 1993). Most studies of agenda setting focus only on a narrow set of theoretical principles, thus producing incomplete and sometimes conflicting explanations for policy change. The theoretical frameworks by Lindblom, Kingdon, and Baumgartner and Jones take different views concerning the type of policy change. The aim of this essay is to take a closer look in order to determine whether these three approaches are c

This book beings with an attempt to clarify the notion of problem definition. The problem-definition task is placed in "policy-making arenas." In this context, problems are (implicitly and explicitly) defined so as to guide future policy, and to make sense out of past action. The second part examines the taken-for-granted complexity of public problems. A problem is rendered "complex" when solutions pursue conflicting or incompatible values. A new direction has to do with placing public organizations in the center of a utilization formula, in line with suggestions in the sociology of knowledge that view utilization as an organizational phenomenon.