Aaron Wildavsky - Speaking Truth to Power: Art and Craft of Policy Analysis

Speaking Truth
to Power

The Art and Craft
of Policy Analysis

Aaron Wildavsky

With a new Introduction by the Author

First published 1987 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge

Published 2017 by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

New material second edition copyright 1987 by Taylor & Francis
Original edition copyright 1979 by Aaron Wildavsky.

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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 87-10749

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wildavsky, Aaron
Speaking truth to power.

Originally published: Boston: Little, Brown.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Policy sciences. 2. Political planningUnited States. I. Title.

ISBN 0-88738-697-0

ISBN 13: 978-0-88738-697-8 (pbk)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book recites lessons I have learned from my teachers: the students, staff, and faculty at the Graduate School of Public Policy of the University of California at Berkeley. Two chapters have been coauthored with students at the school: David Good on A Tax by Any Other Name, and Bob Gamble, Presley Pang, Fritzie Reisner, and Glen Shor on Coordination without a Coordinator. Presley Pang used his incisive understanding to help me tease out the craft aspects of policy analysis. The chapter Distribution of Urban Services originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Urban Outcomes: Schools, Streets, and Libraries, with Frank S. Levy, and Arnold J. Meltsner, co-authors who are also colleagues. My collaborators on two other chapters Jack Knott on Jimmy Carter's Theory of Governing, and Bruce Wallen on Opportunity Costs and Merit Wants were then students in the Political Science Department. No one knows enough about the broad sweep of public policy to do it alone and I have not tried.

Like everyone else I have benefitted by reading classics in the field Yehezkel Dror's Public Policy Making Reexamined (San Francisco: Chandler, 1968), Charles Hitch and Rowland McKean's The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960 for the Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, California), E. S. Quade's Analysis for Military Decisions (New York: Elsevier, 1970), Sir Geoffrey Vickers' The Art of Judgment: A Study of Policy Making (New York: Basic Books, 1965). Critical commentary has proved invaluable. Robert Merton has provided the best (and toughest) comments it has ever been my good fortune to receive. Gordon Wasserman helped me cut out as well as include in. Herman van Gunsteren, Elaine Spitz, and Paul Sneiderman improved the sections on citizenship and trust. Leroy Graymer and several commentators for Little, Brown gave me a useful teaching perspective. Harvard Williamson helped improve my expression. I mean this book to be widely accessible, so that special thanks are due to my citizen critics Juliette Diller and Judith Polisar. William Siffin labored long for Little, Brown (but more for me) to bring out the potential of this volume. I alone am irresponsible.

CONTENTS

PREFACE
TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION

INTRODUCTION TO
THE TRANSACTION EDITION:

INTRODUCTION
Analysis as Art

PART 1
Resources versus Objectives

CHAPTER 1
Policy Analysis Is What Information Systems Are Not

CHAPTER 2
Strategic Retreat on Objectives: Learning from Failure in American Public Policy

CHAPTER 3
Policy as Its Own Cause

CHAPTER 4
Coordination without a Coordinator

PART 2
Social Interaction versus Intellectual Cogitation

CHAPTER 5
Between Planning and Politics: Intellect vs. Interaction as Analysis

CHAPTER 6
A Bias Toward Federalism

CHAPTER 7
Opportunity Costs and Merit Wants

CHAPTER 8
Economy and Environment/Rationality and Ritual

PART 3
Dogma versus Skepticism

CHAPTER 9
The Self-Evaluating Organization

CHAPTER 10
Skepticism and Dogma in the White House: Jimmy Carter's Theory of Governing

CHAPTER 11
Citizens as Analysts

PART 4
Policy Analysis

CHAPTER 12
Doing Better and Feeling Worse: The Political Pathology of Health Policy

CHAPTER 13
Learning from Education: If We're Still Stuck on the Problems, Maybe We're Taking the Wrong Exam

CHAPTER 14
A Tax by Any Other Name: The Donor-Directed Automatic Percentage-Contribution Bonus, A Budget Alternative for Financing Governmental Support of Charity

What Difference Does a Government Subsidy Make?
A Sensitivity Analysis

How Much of Which Problems Are We Prepared to Live with?
An Analysis of Criteria

CHAPTER 15
Distribution of Urban Services

CHAPTER 16
Analysis as Craft

The introduction to this edition of Speaking Truth to Power entitled The Once and Future School of Public Policy, contains my reflections on what policy analysis is becoming. Here I would like to amplify and extend these remarks. In this introduction, I claim that there is a growing polarization of political elites, a polarization that must affect the ways in which analysis is done and analysts work. Let us consider this hypothesis, in competition with others, as directed toward the continuing inability of Congress and the president to agree on an annual budget. What is contested? Only the level of taxing and spending, and their division: Who pays and receives how much.

Three theories compete for attention, one focusing on personality, another on institutions, and a third on ideological polarization. The two elderly Irishmen theory, held by most experts on congressional budgeting and not a few legislators, holds that when President Reagan and Speaker O'Neill retire, dissensus over the budget will retire with them. At that time (O'Neill left the House of Representatives in 1986, Reagan must leave the presidency at the end of his second term in 1988), the underlying consensus these personality theorists believe has been kept from bubbling up to the surface by these obstreperous oldsters (carrying on outdated quarrels of yesteryear) will assert itself. Considerably higher taxes, considerably lower defense spending, and moderately rising domestic expenditure (the presumed consensus) will carry the day.

Adherents of the institutional hypothesis believe otherwise. Following Pendleton Herring's classic The Politics of Democracy, they believe that the potential for divisive conflict has long existed in these United States. Faced with a restless and immoderate people, it is the essential task of politicians to support compromise. And this, by and large, is what our politicians have done since the Civil War. Along the way, these consensus politicians evolved devices for keeping divisive issues out of politics while doing what was necessary. For instance, they never directly decided the level of taxing or spending. Following the passage of the Budget Act of 1974, however, and its (in their view) unfortunate budget resolutions, Congress now has to decide directly and at once what had heretofore been decided indirectly on a piecemeal basis. The strain put on Congress by the necessity of deciding all budget questions simultaneously (the synoptic choice, Lindblom warned, might overload the system) has proven too much. Hence Congress has been later and later in making up its mind, allowed a huge deficit to occur, and has otherwise, in their opinion, acted irresponsibly. Abolishing the requirement for an annual resolution and going back to the traditional practices that served the country so well, these institutional critics believe, would enable legislators to make deals on an ad hoc basis that would add up to more responsible, i.e., timely and balanced government.