PUBLIC POLICY: CHARACTERISTICS AND SCOPE

Dr. Jiwan Devi

Assistant Professor in Political Science

HRMMV Jalandhar

Paper –MA Sem-II

INTRODUCTION

• The lives of the citizens everywhere are formed by public policies, whether we are aware of them or not.
• The dream for improved life while its achievement rest on our own efforts, will probable to contain public policies to aid the result of it.
• Public policy is a subject or field of inquiry has a long past, though the current public policy analysis have a specific American and 20th century fragrance.

• The public policy seeds were sown in 1940s and made a significant influence on the government and academic organizations over these years.
• In the early 1950s public policy has developed as academic search and from then it has been securing new measurements and is stressed tough to attain the position of a discipline in the area of Social science.
• Public policy forms a significant component in many a course and academic programme in various disciplines like political science, public administration, economics and business management.

DEFINITIONS OF PUBLIC POLICY

• According to Thomas Dye, defines public policy as “whatever governments choose to do or not to do”.
• Dimock, said the public policy as “deciding at any time or place what objectives and substantive measures should be chosen in order to deal with a particular problem”.
• According to Chandler and Plano, who define public policy as “the strategic use of resources to alleviate national problems or governmental concerns”.

MEANING OF POLICY

• The meaning of the term policy is varying like other concept of social science.
• David Easton defined policy as the output of the political system and public policy as the authoritative allocation of values for the whole society.
• The measures of this alteration in the methods of the accepted from other definitions progress by the scholars in this field.
• According to Parsons, who stated about it as, “A policy is an attempt to define and structure a rational basis for action or inaction”

CONCEPT OF PUBLIC AND POLICY:

• In the literature of academics, the term „public policy is regularly utilized in our present day life and we regularly refer to the policies which are implanted like, national, education policy, agriculture policy, health policy, wage policy so on.
• In fact this is the area where public are involved.
• The concept of public policy is assumes, that there is domain of life which has totally individual and is not private, which is believed in collective.

THE NOTION OF PUBLIC

• It is very significant to recognize the notion of public for a discussion of public policy.
• We regularly use the words such as public interest, public sector, public opinion, public health, and so on.
• The public policy, has to do with which are labeled as the public, as contrasting to scopes concerning private.

• The measurements of public is usually mentioned as, public ownership or governor for public purpose.
• The term public contains all the measurements of human action observed as needing governmental involvement or social directive.
• Though, there has been battle between what is public and what is private.

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1. Commanding conclusion

2. Principle or value

3. Purposive course of action

4. Method of governance

5. Manifestation of considered judgment

6. Look of political rationality and

7. Declaration of common goals

HOGWOOD AND GUNN SPECIFIED TEN USAGES OF THE WORD POLICY

• In a Machiavellian sense, policy is the base of power. While bureaucracy derived it legitimacy from its claim to “State”, the politician claimed that their authority rested on the approval of their policies by the electorates. Hogwood and Gunn specified ten usages of the word policy as-

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1. A label for the field of activity

2. An expression of desired state of affairs

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3. Specific proposals

4. The decision of governments

5. Formal authorization

6. Programmes

7. Output

8. Outcome

9. A theory or model

10. A process.

NATURE OF PUBLIC POLICY

• It is very much evident that policy might take different procedures like legislation, executive orders or the official acts.
• They actually comprise of a set of intentions or objectives a combination of devices or means for attainment of intensions, a description of governmental and non-governmental units indicted with the accountability of transporting out the intensions, and distribution of resources for the necessary tasks.

• To recognize public policy, it is very much needed to examine the nature. A policy may contain with specific or general, broad or narrow, simple or complex, public or private written or unwritten explicit or implicit, discretionary or detailed and quantitative or qualitative.
• Public policy is in fact a skill because these tasks regularly some information about the social sciences and in this case the stress is on the public policy which is known as government policy selected by a government as a direction for action.

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• From the perspective of public policies, actions of government could be put broadly into two groups and they are-
• Definite or Specific policies
• General, vague and inconsistent policies

In reality a government rarely will have a fixed of supervisory values for all its actions and in fact the significant public policies are frequently made more clear specifically where the issue of law, regulation or strategy is involved.

CHARACTERISTICS OF PUBLIC POLICY

Public Policy Making is a Very Complex Process -

• The public policy making involves many components.
• which are interconnected by communication and feedback loops and which interact in different ways.
• Some parts of the process are explicit and directly observable, but many others proceed through hidden channels that the officials themselves are often only partly aware of.
• These hidden procedures are very difficult and often impossible to observe.

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POLICY MAKING COMPRISES VARIOUS COMPONENTS

• The complexity of public policy making as we know.
• It is an important characteristic of policy making. Public policy formulation formation involves a great variety of substructures.
• The identity of these substructures and the degree of their involvement in policy making, public policy build different issues, circumstances and societal values.

POLICY STRUCTURE MAKES DIFFERENT CONTRIBUTIONS

• This characteristic suggests that every substructure makes a different, and sometimes unique. contribution to public policy.
• What sort of contribution substructures make, depends in part on their formal and informal characteristics which vary from society to society.
• Policy making is a species of decision-making because it lets us use decision-making models for dealing with policy making.

LAYS DOWN MAJOR GUIDELINES

• Public policy, in most cases, lays down general directives, rather than detailed instructions, on the main lines of action to be followed.
• After main lines of action have been decided on, detailed sub-policies that translate the general theory into more concrete terms are usually needed to execute it.

RESULTS IN ACTION

• Decision-making can result in action. in changes in the decision-making itself, or both or neither.
• The policies of most socially significant decision-making, such as most public policy making are intended to result in action.
• Also policies directed at the policy making apparatus itself such as efficiency drives in government are action oriented.

DIRECTED AT THE FUTURE

• Policy making is directed at the future.
• This is one of its most important characteristics since it introduces the ever-present elements of uncertainty and doubtful prediction that establish the basic tone of nearly all policy making.
• Actual policy making tends to formulate policies in vague and elastic terms; because the future is so uncertain.
• It permits policy makers to adjust their policy according to emerging facts and enables them to guard against unforeseen circumstances

MAINLY FORMULATED BY GOVERNNRENTAL ORGANS

• Public policy is also directed. in part, at private persons and non-governmental structures as when it calls for a law prohibiting a certain type of behavior or appeals to citizens to engage in private saving.
• But public policy, in most cases, is primarily directed at governmental organs, and only intermediately and secondarily at other factors.

SCOPE OF THE PUBLIC POLICY:

• In several developing countries, there is excessive burden on the governments to speed up the growth of the nation, make usage of modern and applicable technological inventions, accept and enable essential institutional alterations, upsurge the production of the nation, make total usage of human and other sources, and advance the level of living standards.
• These tendencies and growths have hence, improved both the magnitude and possibility of the public policy.

• The public policy to provide transport facilities, communicate by the post offices or quasi-public telephone system, drinks his public drinking water, disposes of his garbage through a public removal system, reads his library books, picnics in his public parks, is protected by public police, fire, and health systems.
• Ideological conservatives not withstanding his daily life is inextricably bounds up with government decisions on these various public services.

SUBSTANTIVE POLICY:

• These policies are concerned with the general welfare and development of the society, the programmes like provision of education and employment opportunities, economic stability, law and order enforcement, anti-pollution legislation etc. are the result of substantive policy formulation.
• These policies have vast area of operation affecting the general welfare and development of the society as a whole.
• These do not relate to any particular or privileged segments of the society. Such policies have to be formulated keeping in view the prime character of the constitution socio-economic problems and the level of moral claims of the society

REGULATORY POLICY:

• Regulatory policies are concern with regulation of trade, business, safety measures, public utilities, etc.
• This type of regulation is done by independent organization that work on behalf of the government. In India, we have Life Insurance Corporation, Reserve Bank of India, Hindustan Steel, State Electricity Boards. State Transport Corporations, State Financial Corporations, etc., which are engaged in regulatory activities.
• The policies made by the government, pertaining to these services and organization rendering these services are known as regulatory policies.

DISTRIBUTIVE POLICY:

• Distributive policies are meant for specific segments of society. It can be in the area of grant of goods, public welfare or health services, etc.
• These mainly include all public assistance and welfare programmes. Some more examples of distributive policies are adult education programme, food relief, social insurance, vaccination camps etc...

REDISTRIBUTIVE POLICY:

• Redistributive policies are concerned with the rearrangement of policies which are concerned with bringing about basic social and economic changes.
• Certain public goods and welfare services are disproportionately divide to certain segments of the society, these goods and services are streamlined through redistributive policies.

CAPITALISATION POLICY:

• Under the capitalization policies financial subsidies arc given by the Union government to the state and local governments, such subsidies are also granted to the central and state business undertakings or some other important sphere if necessary.
• Capitalization policies arc different in nature than the substantive, regulatory, distributive and redistributive policies as no provision for public welfare services is made through these

CONCLUSION

• It is evident that the area of public policy has an important role in the public domain, it can upsurge the growing density of the society.
• Public policy is not only worried about the explanation and extension of the reasons and concerns of the government actions.
• It also has the development of scientific information about the services determining public policy.
• These public policies are the main devices for any democratic nation and they improve the social and economic procedures from the present of the future.