Part IV: Making and Implementing
Government Decisions
Chapter 10: Decision Making
Decision Making and Public
Administration
• Herbert Simon (1945): “a theory of
administration should be concerned with
the processes of decision as well as with
the processes of action.”
• Decision making as the quintessential
administrative act
Goals for Each Approach
• Each approach must rectify issues
surrounding information and values.
• Both information and values constantly
intermingle as administrators seek to
make decisions.
Information
• Information is the basic raw material of
decisions.
• Decision makers must acquire, weigh, and
act on the data they collect.
• Information is rarely an abstract truth, but
rather a matter of interpretation.
• Who has the information? How do they
and others look at the information?
Values
• How do political values affect decisions?
• Decisions depend on judgments: about the
nature of the dilemma, the probabilities of
events, and the desirability of
consequences.
• Decisions require political support from:
– The “mass public”
– The “attentive publics”: groups that have a
salient interest in the agency
Decision-Making Approaches
• Rational approach: perhaps the classic
approach; builds on the work of
microeconomists (who seek to explain the
behavior of individuals and firms) and
holds efficiency as the highest value
• Bargaining approach: seeks to maximize
political support
Decision-Making Approaches
(continued)
• Participative approach: seeks to improve
decisions by intimately involving those
affected by them
• Public-choice approach: attempts to
substitute marketlike forces for other
incentives that, its supporters argue,
distort decisions
Rational Approach
• Akin to systems theory, in this approach
the decision maker structures the
decision-making problem as a system that
processes “inputs” to produce “outputs”
and seeks to produce the most output for
a given level of input.
Rational Approach (continued)
• Process steps: define goals, identify
alternatives, calculate consequences,
decide, begin again
– Externalities or spillovers: indirect benefits
and costs that relate to other goals that the
analyst considers when calculating the
consequences
Example of Rational Approach
• Planning-Programming-Budgeting
System (PPBS): 1961, Robert McNamara
introduced PPBS in Pentagon
– Planning: top-level managers developed fiveyear strategies for defense activities.
– Programming: strategies were transformed
into detailed descriptions of the department's
needs.
– Budgeting: officials transformed the program
into year-by-year budget requests.
• Classic case for rational approach
Appraisal of Rational Approach
• This approach requires an extraordinary amount
of information because decision makers must
consider all alternatives, yet this is virtually
impossible.
• Instead decision makers simplify the process:
– They screen out the silly options and restrict
themselves to a few major alternatives.
– Satisficing (James G. March and Herbert A. Simon):
They stop searching when they come upon a
satisfactory alternative.
• Little may be said about who sets goals.
Bargaining Approach
• Conduct limited analysis and bargain out a
decision that can attract political support.
• Incrementalism (Charles Lindblom): limit
analysis to a few alternatives instead of
trying to judge them all, to weigh one’s
values along with the evidence, and to
concentrate on the immediate problems to
be solved.
Example of Bargaining Approach
• Cuban missile crisis (1962): Graham
Allison found that the bureaucratic-politics
perspective offered the best explanation
for decision making during the crisis.
– Decisions could be understood as resulting
from various bargaining games among
players in the national government.
– Decisions could be understood by examining
the perceptions, motivations, positions,
power, and maneuvers of the players.
Example of Bargaining Approach
(continued)
• Partisan mutual adjustment: the pulling and
hauling among decision makers with different
views; offers the best hope for the best
decisions.
• Regulatory negotiation sessions: to produce
better rules and to forestall litigation, these
sessions involve the various interests potentially
affected by a new rule.
– e.g., Environmental Protection Agency holds
regulatory negotiation sessions.
Appraisal of Bargaining Approach
• Dangerously incomplete and risks
depriving decision makers of important
information
• Does not identify most efficient options
• Strong in describing how decisions are
made and how decision makers build
political support for their judgments
• Difficult to bargain out differences
Participative Approach
• Participation can be either consultation for
advice or sharing decision-making power
• Claims to participation by:
–
–
–
–
Employees of the organization making the decision
The clientele
Taxpayers
The whole or voting public
• NIMBY phenomenon: strong pressures to keep
potentially objectionable programs “not in my
back yard”
Example of Participative Approach
• Federal agencies have used advisory
committees of private citizens in the
decision-making process.
– e.g., Trade associations during the New Deal
Example of Participative
Approach (continued)
• Federal agencies have relied on local
committees whose part-time members were
intended to be representative of their
communities.
– e.g., Farmers since 1933 have been elected to serve
on committees in 3,000 counties.
– e.g., In the mid-1960s, federal programs required
communities to establish citizen committees in cities
to determine money allocation.
Appraisal of Participative Approach
• Provides wealth of information, sometimes
too much
• Narrow clientele or broad, mixed clientele?
• Participation by all clientele or by
committee?
• Formal or informal power given to citizens
for making government decisions?
Public-Choice Approach
• Public officials are self-interested, risk avoidant.
• Private sector; makes individuals and
corporations competitive and leads to most
efficient distribution of resources.
• Government functions should be either turned
over to or handled as in the private sector.
• Privatization (Stuart Butler): political guerrilla
warfare; directs demand away from government
provision of services and reduces demand for
budget growth.
Example of Public-Choice Approach
• Environmental Protection Agency set pollution
standards, allowing companies that reduced
their pollution below prescribed levels to “bank”
their pollution savings for use in future
expansion.
• Companies since 1979 have been allowed to
establish a "bubble" around all of their facilities
in a given area and then find the cheapest way
to reduce overall pollution within that area.
Appraisal of Public-Choice Approach
• Efficiency promoted by marketlike
competition
• Naively believes government bureaucrats
are driven so hard to maximize their own
utility that organizational goals slip away
• Does not explain what government ought
to do, just how to do it
Limits to Approaches
• All approaches share problems:
– Uncertainty surrounding complex issues
– Bureaucratic pathologies that distort and
block the flow of important information
– Recurrent crises that deny the luxury of
lengthy consideration
Limits to Approaches (continued)
• Weakness: tendency to focus on a single
value
• Weakness: failure to understand what is
required to make an approach succeed
Conclusion
• All approaches are expressions of theories
and as such have hidden dogmas.
• It is possible to identify which approaches
work best on which problems.