Chapter 5. What Does State Transformation Tell Us about the UK Policy Process?

This post introduces chapter 5 of Politics and Policy Making in the UK by Paul Cairney and Sean Kippin.

This chapter relates UK state transformation (Chapter 4) to the Westminster and complex government stories explained in Chapter 3.

We ask four key questions.

Q1. What was the style of policy making during transformation?

Did governments push new policies from the top-down, in line with the Westminster story? Thatcherism stories played up to this idea:

• Using the ‘there is no alternative’ language. Don’t waste time on consultation when you know you need to be radical
• Basing an image of governing competence on making strong decisions from the top-down
• Bashing unions, and brooking no opposition from vested interests.

The complex government story warns against the assumption that this style was ‘normal’ rather than based on high profile examples. In a wider policymaking environment, over which they have limited control, policymakers seek a range of styles. Chapters 2 and 3 use the concept of policy communities to make this point:

• Ministers have to ignore most issues, and delegate most policymaking to civil servants
• Civil servants form relationships with groups
• Civil servants see clear political benefits to consultation, to foster stakeholder ownership and policy legitimacy
• Groups recognize the benefit of insider strategies (following the ‘rules of the game’ to maintain good access).

See: Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: Networks, sub-government and communities 

Still, long-term transformation had an impact on policymaking: the ‘normal’ policy style today is not the same as in the 1970s. Examples include:

• Many groups – such as trade unions – never returned to the status that they enjoyed in previous eras.
• Many policies – such as new public management (NPM) reforms (Chapter 4) – were opposed vociferously in the past, but now taken for granted.
• These reforms changed the role of the civil service, which became less central to policy making (Chapter 4).
• Both governing parties have exploited crises to make ‘tough choices’ backed by the ‘government knows best’ narrative.

Richardson describes a new normal style: making announcements then consulting on delivery. We describe a mix of co-existing styles: (1) high profile imposition, and (2) routine low attention issues and consultation.

We then describe the face value contrast between UK (majoritarian) and devolved (consensus) policy styles, but warn against the assumption of a contrast based on high-profile examples. Instead, ask yourself: what is the mix of styles across the political system (see Boxes 3.2 and 5.1)?

Q2. Did policy change incrementally or in radical bursts?

Chapter 4 describes long periods of policy continuity, but major shifts associated with some periods (the mid-1940s and late-1970s). In some cases, a new government signalled an era-defining shift in direction. In many others, policy slowed down or accelerated. The Westminster story has some value, to describe periods of radical change directed from the centre, but only when situated in a wider context to identify the rarity and effect of these changes.

These dynamics are not summed up well by ‘incrementalism’ (Chapter 2). If we treat incrementalism as a strategy, we exaggerate the coherence of steps towards an endgame. If we treat it as a description of policy change, we struggle to explain key periods that do not fit the pattern. Instead, we need to account for

1. Long periods of policymaking stability followed by a burst of instability (or vice versa).
2. Long periods of policy continuity followed by a shift in policy direction in relation to one problem. Or, the combination of many minor policy changes and a small number of major changes.

Punctuated equilibrium theory helps to explain these dynamics. See the separate blog posts for the general background:

Policy Concepts in 1000 Words:  Punctuated Equilibrium Theory 

Policy in 500 Words: Punctuated Equilibrium Theory

In Chapter 4, we focus on key measures of policy change – to budgets and agendas – that demonstrate many small changes and some huge ones.

Peter Hall also provides an influential account of paradigm change in economic policy. See the separate post on paradigm change Policy in 500 Words: Peter Hall’s policy paradigms 

Here, we focus on the contested idea that policy changed profoundly during Thatcher’s first term. Hall describes ‘third order’ change: rare, radical shifts in policy (1) prompted by failure to explain the problem or address it, (2) prompting the replacement of one paradigm (world view) and approach with another. Oliver and Pemberton argue that policy change was less of a clean break, and more about the accumulation of change.

There are many phrases that try to sum up this gradual but profound change to policy and institutions. In Chapter 5, we relate that idea to this wider discussion of paradigm coherence (State transformation: trial and error, not a grand plan). Examples include:

• There was no grand privatisation plan. It took off when it proved feasible and popular.
• There was initial reticence over challenging unions under Thatcher (similar moves had failed under Heath).
• Public sector reform was a mish-mash of changes, not a grand New Public Management plan.

In other words, we warn against assuming a grand coherent state transformation plan, and show that it is tricky to know if we witnessed a few radical steps or a collection of less radical measures adding up (eventually) to transformation. The difference might seem ‘academic’, but is actually more important to governments wondering if they can deliver on radical intentions.

Q3. What was the impact of state transformation on central government?

We describe ministers addressing the unmanageability of government, either to reassert central control or jettison the parts of government that defy it.  Have these reforms reduced or exacerbated the limits to central control?

There is a lot of academic uncertainty and contestation on this point.

• One interpretation is consistent with the Westminster story: reforms contributed to a ‘rejuvenated’ and ‘lean’ state, with ministers able to focus on core tasks without having to manage peripheral functions. They can make strategic decisions, create rules and regulations – backed by funding, inspection and performance management – to ensure that their aims are carried out by others, and minimise the powers of other public bodies.
• Another interpretation is that the UK government exacerbated its own ‘governance problem’ (the gap between a story of central control and what central governments can actually do). A collection of reforms fragmented the public landscape and exacerbated a sense that no one is in control. There is a never-ending and dispiriting cycle of such reforms, where a lack of central control prompts futile attempts at centralisation.

Similarly, there is a lot of government uncertainty. Conservative and Labour governments have: bemoaned some aspect of limited central control; reformed to solve the problem; found that many reforms just changed the problem; and had to project the sense of being in control regardless (Chapter 3).

Q4: How do these UK developments relate to the wider world?

‘Globalisation’ suggests that national governments do not simply manage their own affairs. Their high profile aims depend on choices made by other governments, international organisations and non-governmental actors such as multinational corporations.

For example, economic policies relate to:

• international financial markets that influence the value of a country’s currency
• the technology that allows a global trade in goods and services
• the power of multinational corporations, seeking the most favourable taxation, subsidy and regulatory systems from countries competing for their business
• the migration of people seeking work in a country
• the power of international organisations such as the IMF to set strict conditions on a government’s policies – to reduce state intervention and reform public services – in exchange for financial assistance (as with Labour in the late 1970s)

For example, ‘race to the bottom’ describes many countries pursuing ‘neoliberal reforms’ to please corporations by (1) minimising costly regulations, (2) reducing spending to reduce demand for taxation, (3) privatizing.

Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: Context, Events, Structural and Socioeconomic Factors 

Or, terms like policy learning/ transfer/convergence describe the international sharing of ideas and some pressure to keep up with others.

Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: Policy Transfer and Learning 

Conclusion

We describe a UK variant of neoliberal state transformation.

The Westminster story helps to interpret key Labour (1945) and Conservative (1979) governments setting a radical new policy direction. The Thatcher period drew on this story to narrate radical change, and promised a lean state less prone to ungovernability.

The Complex government story helps to narrate an uneven direction of policy, ad hoc reforms with limited impacts, path dependence and policy inheritance, and an incoherent state.

These long-term questions, of what happened and why, are crucial to the analysis of shorter term bursts of activity in chapters 6-11.

Socioeconomic factors and events in British politics #POLU9UK

See also: Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: Context, Events, Structural and Socioeconomic Factors (you can hear my dulcet tones there, so I won’t do an extra podcast).

You get the idea by now. We began the course with a stylised Westminster model of centralised control and each week we use something new to chip away at that image. This week we focus on the sense that the UK government is (a) constantly responding to events rather than setting the political agenda, and (b) dealing with policy conditions and outcomes that seem to be out of its control.

Big E and small e events

You might get two impressions from the word ‘events’:

1. The really big ones that seem to shock half of the population (more or less, or much more). Take your pick from recent Events including Brexit and the Scottish independence referendum, or from economic crises including the global financial crises and shocks to the British Pound. Generally speaking, it is difficult to get a sense from these Events that the UK Government is in control of the agenda or outcome.
2. The day-to-day ones. You now get this other sense of events most strongly from social media: people’s attention lurches from issue to issue very quickly, and governments (or individual policymakers) often seem to struggle to respond effectively or set the agenda.

So, as we discussed in week 2, policymakers will often settle for the chance to portray themselves as decisive in responding and adapting to such events rather than controlling them (perhaps particularly in an age in which they struggle more and more to control the flow of information within populations).

Policy conditions: from funnels of causality to globalisation

A reference to policy ‘conditions’ or ‘environments’ is broader. It refers to the context in which policymakers make choices, including:

• Literally, the environment in which people live and the spread of populations in urban and rural areas.
• The demographic profile and trends in birth and ageing.
• Levels of economic activity.
• Social behaviour and attitudes.
• Technological changes which prompt social change, from mass road transit to information technology.
• Governing institutions with rules that constrain and facilitate behaviour.

One main connection between conditions and events is that the former often shape the latter: environmental crises prompt new forms of behaviour, ageing populations prompt a sense of crisis in health and social care, economic downturns panic governments, and so on. You get the idea: this is a far cry from our initial starting point in which we focus on what governments do. If we focus on what surrounds governments we get more of a sense of the limits to what governments can do, and a limited sense of their control of policymaking processes and outcomes.

As the language of ‘structure and agency’ suggests, we need to find a convincing way to describe this sense of limited choice. We (or, at least, I) want to maintain the sense that policymakers are actors making choices but that some choices are far more attractive or possible than others.

So, we have a choice about how to portray these choices. On the one hand, we have accounts which focus on the limits to choice:

• The classic (but now little-discussed) way of thinking about wider conditions is Hofferbert’s ‘funnel of causality’. Its usefulness is to expand our horizons to think about the wider (literal or metaphorical) environment of policymaking in which, for example, geographical conditions influence population concentrations and public behaviour and attitudes influence elite behaviour.
• The concept of ‘globalisation’ prompts us to think about the pressures on domestic governments to respond to global factors often outside of their control. In such cases, their choices about how to respond to external factors are not particularly attractive, such as when they are deciding how to set interest rates to deal with external fluctuations in demand for their currency (who do I mean by ‘they’ these days?), or how willing they are to reduce taxes and offer subsidies to attract foreign direct investment.

On the other hand is the sense that actors mediate such conditions and events: to a large extent they decide how to interpret events, the importance to attach to policy conditions, and which conditions produce events that seem the most urgent or important. In other words, many governments have shown an impressive ability to completely ignore events that other governments would treat as urgent crises.

The latter point is a nice segue to one of the recommended articles for this week, by Hindmoor and McConnell, in which they discuss the UK Government’s response to financial crisis. They remind us that we should understand the processing of events as they occurred, rather than via hindsight. This approach allows us to see that governments have highly imperfect ways to gather information and detect ‘warning signals’ effectively: what seems obvious now would not be obvious then. What now seems like a crisis to which governments inevitably had to respond would then seem very different.

Group exercises

In our groups we can identify and discuss key examples: how have UK governments dealt with demographic change or economic crisis? What kinds of factors are most likely to get their attention (and why?) and how are they likely to deal with them? What are the big events or conditions in UK politics that seem impossible to ignore? And what does our discussion tell us about the idea of a UK political system characterised by central government control and a centralisation of power.

Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: Context, Events, Structural and Socioeconomic Factors

(podcast download)

We need a way to describe the things that policymakers take into account when they make decisions. We also need a way to categorise these things in order of importance, from factors that simply catch their eye, to factors that seem to be out of their control and/ or force them into making particular choices.

For example, ‘policy context’ or ‘structural factors’ may be used to describe the extent to which a policymaker’s ‘environment’ is in her control. It can refer to the policy conditions that policymakers take into account when identifying problems and deciding how to address them, such as a political system’s: geography, demographic profile, economy, and mass social attitudes and behaviour.

Or, we might refer to‘events’, which can be: routine, such as the elections, or unanticipated incidents, including social or natural crises, major scientific breakthroughs and technological change (see Weible).

Or, we might refer to policymaker ‘inheritance’ – of laws, rules, and programs (Rose, 1990). The first thing that a new government does is accept responsibility for the decisions made in its name in the past. New policymakers also realise that they are engaging in governing organisations which often have well-established rules, to which they either have to adapt or expend energy to challenge.

Structure and agency

Our challenge is to find a way to incorporate these factors into a convincing account of policymaking. The policy sciences face the same problem as the social sciences: how to conceptualise the relationship between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’. Or, how much do policymakers shape, and how much of their behaviour is shaped by, their policy environment?

The term ‘structure’ refers vaguely to a set of parts put together to form a whole. In social science, we attribute two key properties to structures: they are relatively fixed and difficult but not impossible to break down; and, they influence the decisions that actors (‘agents’) make. For example, it is common to describe the structure of the economy, rules within institutions, government, and even some ideas.

From this starting point, we can identify agency-heavy and structural-heavy explanations. For the latter, one common solution is to focus on how actors interpret and respond to context and events. If so, we might consider if an event is only significant if actors within political systems pay attention to it.

This approach may contrast with socioeconomic-driven accounts which suggest that demographic, economic and other factors determine: which issues reach the policymaking agenda; which solutions seem feasible; the actors that policymakers try most to please; and, the likely success of any action.

For example, some studies from the 1960s examined the extent to which variations in policies across US states were explained by the socio-economic composition of each state. Similarly, Hofferbert’s (1974) ‘funnel of causality’ gives the impression that historic-geographic conditions contribute to the socio-economic composition of a region, which contributes to mass political behavior which determines the fortunes of parties – and all three combine with government institutions to influence elite behaviour.

Perhaps the most recent exposition of a structure-heavy account is summed up in the phrase ‘globalisation’ which describes the diminished ability of governments to control their own economic and monetary policies. Governments appear to be forced to ‘race to the bottom’; to compete economically, react to widespread shifts and crises in international financial conditions and change to attract business from multi-national corporations (often by reducing corporation taxes and labour regulations).

Structural versus comprehensive rationality based explanations?

This discussion prompts us to consider a different perspective to comprehensively rational decision making, or the idea that the policy process begins with the decision by a policymaker to identify a problem to solve. Instead, we may envisage a world in which policies are already in place and the ability of policymakers to replace them are limited. This decision-making process takes place within the context of existing government policy and a huge infrastructure devoted to carrying it out. Further, policymakers often define problems after events have taken place; those events may be out of the control of policymakers and often appear to give them very little choice about how, if it is possible, to solve them.

One way to describe this process is to suggest that policymakers represent one small part of a large complex system. Complexity theory suggests that we shift our analysis from individual parts of a political system to the system as a whole; as a network of elements that interact and combine to produce systemic behaviour that cannot be broken down into the actions of its constituent parts. This idea of a system captures the difficulty of policymaking and serves as a corrective to accounts that focus too much on the importance of individual policymakers and which exaggerate their ability to single-handedly change policy.

A structure-agency mix

Of course, we do not want to go too far; to suggest that people don’t matter. So, a sensible approach is to think in terms of a structure–agency mix:

• An ageing population may give governments little choice but to plan for the consequences, but they can do so in a variety of ways.
• Technology-driven healthcare is not irresistible, particularly if expenditure is limited and cost-effective public health policies are available.
• Coastal conditions may force us to build protective barriers, but policymakers have shown that they can ignore the issue for some time, until the environmental conditions cause a human crisis.
• The appearance of globalisation, crises and economically-driven policies may be convenient for policymakers attempting to introduce unpopular policies or avoid responsibility for poor results. Yet, the ‘race to the bottom’ has also been resisted by many governments, often with reference to competing structural factors such as historical legacies and national values.

A final sensible solution is to not worry too much about what we call the solution. In my day, there was a lot of humming and hawing about Gidden’s ‘two sides of the same coin’ description of actors and structures, but I don’t remember anything being resolved.

See also: https://paulcairney.wordpress.com/1000-words/