3 - Power and Morality in Policy Making

Summary

In this chapter, I will lay the groundwork for a coherent, critical theory of policy making by more deeply describing the explanatory concepts that I introduced in Chapter 1: power and morality. I will explain the different forms of political power and social power that help explain how policy is made. Forms of political power include institutional, legal and coercive. These come from the winning of political power, whether by democratic election or military force. Forms of social power come from relationships between social groups inside and outside the formal government. They include economic, media, epistemic and affective power. In studying the UK drug policy process, I developed a new concept of power to explain what I observed. This is savvy social power.

In studying the influence of morality in policy, it is useful to use a framework that identifies the different positions that people may hold (Lerkkanen and Storbjörk, 2023). The normative bases for human thought and action tend to cluster together. People who hold traditionalist views tend to hold a set of beliefs which include respect for authority, a desire for conformity with the rules of established religion, and belief in moral purity and sanctity. On the other hand, people who believe in progressive social justice tend to be more concerned with fairness in the form of equality of outcome and the avoidance of discrimination on grounds of race, gender, class or other distinctions. Compassion for the suffering of other people is shared across these groups, although it may be directed at different targets. When compassion combines with a belief that the relief of suffering requires the state to control the actions of citizens, this is known as paternalism. When people take the opposite view, that the state should leave it to citizens to make their own decisions, their priority is liberty. Drawing on previous moral typologies and my observation of the drug policy field, I identity the ethico-political bases for UK drug policy making. These combine moral and political beliefs. A supplementary discussion of the usefulness of moral foundations theory and the value of truth is provided in Online Appendix 3.1.