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A Note on “Public Policy”*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Robert Vaison
Robert Vaison
Affiliation:
Mount Saint Vincent University
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Extract

Normally in political studies the term public policy is construed to encompass the societally binding directives issued by a society's legitimate government. We usually consider government, and only government, as being able to “authoritatively allocate values.” This common conception pervades the literature on government policy-making, so much so that it is hardly questioned by students and practitioners of political science. As this note attempts to demonstrate, some re-thinking seems to be in order. For purposes of analysis in the social sciences, this conceptualization of public policy tends to obscure important realities of modern corporate society and to restrict unnecessarily the study of policy-making. Public policy is held to be public simply and solely because it originates from a duly legitimated government, which in turn is held to have the authority (within specified limits) of formulating and implementing such policy. Public policy is public then, our usual thinking goes, because it is made by a body defined somewhat arbitrarily as “public”: a government or some branch of government. All other policy-making is seen as private; it is not public (and hence to lie essentially beyond the scope of the disciplines of poliitcal science and public administration) because it is duly arrived at by non-governmental bodies. Thus policy analysts lead us to believe that public policy is made only when a government body acts to consider some subject of concern, and that other organizations are not relevant to the study of public policy.

Type
Notes
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 6 , Issue 4 , December 1973 , pp. 661 - 664
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1973

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References

1 In their recent and seemingly wide-ranging book on public policy-making, Doern and Aucoin, surprisingly at this late date, omit any reference to the dominating influence of multinational corporations in Canadian political economy – surely a key touchstone in areas of public policy ranging from energy to defence, from regional disparity to foreign policy. I refer to The Structures of Policy-Making in Canada (1971).

2 Or whether it is made by an American network. This raises the ticklish issue of extraterritoriality which pervades, in various guises, policies enacted by American government bodies as well as private corporations. For the purposes of this brief essay, this question will be ignored. But its relevance for comprehending a wide spectrum of operative public policy is I think self-evident, and a factor that cannot be shielded by reference to “latent elements” or “unusual circumstances” or “extra-systemic forces.”

3 For instance, a corporation's policy-making process would appear to have an array of input sources: dominant shareholders, an executive management group, perhaps some governmental agencies, representatives of other corporations in the same field, employee associations, and bodies such as consumers’ associations.

4 Some invaluable reading here: Baran, P., The Political Economy of Growth (New York, 1957)Google Scholar, Baran, Paul and Sweezy, Paul, Monopoly Capital (New York, 1966)Google Scholar; Horowitz, David, ed., Corporations and the Cold War (New York, 1969)Google Scholar. Indispensable for the student of Canada is Levitt, K., Silent Surrender (Toronto, 1970).Google Scholar