Challenging Policy Analysis to Serve the Good Society

This symposium is an outgrowth of the continuing struggle within the social sciences over what policy analysis is and what it should be, and thus how to teach it and how to practice it. We sought to bring the peculiar concerns of PEGS, with its focus on the search for practical new visions of the good society, to bear on this struggle. We asked contributors to consider what new and distinctive conceptions of policy analysis might be bet ter suited to the achievement, maintenance, and enhancement of the good society. The essays reveal a remarkable set of intellec tual alignments. First, although few of the authors attempt an explicit charac terization of the good society, a reasonably consistent concep tion is evident across the essays. In contrast to the diversity of good society conceptions that have appeared in the pages of this journal, the contributors to this symposium envision the good society as plainly and simply democratic, most likely with a sys tem of representative government. The contributors do see this good society enjoying a much greater degree and breadth of cit izen participation in governance and engagement in public affairs than is evident in the United States, which is their implicit, and sometimes explicit, reference point. Further, the contributors see this greater level of democracy closely intertwined with a much more bottom-up, community-based system of economic and social management than the centralized, bureaucratized, liberal capitalist system evident among advanced industrial states today. Finally, the good society is not nirvana. It comes with many of the warts, weaknesses, and willfulness of the human spirit, and thus will require continued efforts at repair and improvement. In short, it is the good society, not the perfect society, and it will require something like policy analysis in its service. Second, policy analysis is, and will remain, primarily a prac tical, problem-solving enterprise. To be so, however, it cannot be oriented only or even principally toward addressing discrete problems and finding programmatic solutions. It cannot, fur thermore, only serve the currently powerful and the policy alter natives they prefer, and it cannot just pursue a superficially neu tral evaluation of policy alternatives. Instead, while adhering to certain standards and methods, policy analysts must orient their efforts toward evaluating policy alternatives with the express purpose of maintaining and enhancing democratic governance. For several of the contributors, this means that policy analysis must commit to greater experimentation with types of policies and forms of delivery, that it must broaden its measures of assessment of policy alternatives and policy consequences, and that it must devote greater attention to developing the analyti cal capacities of citizens as well as elites. This broader concep tion of policy analysis, several contributors claim, is true to the vision of reforming democratic governance through better informed decision-making that Harold Lasswell and others artic ulated at the founding of the "policy sciences." It promises to make policies more legitimate while increasing social capital in ways that satisfy both the values of civic capacity-building and efficiency. Third, policy analysis as currently taught and practiced is not merely inconsistent with its founding vision?it is incapable of helping us move closer to our aspirations for the good society. The deficiencies the contributors identify are legion, but several stand out as particularly severe: Policy analysis is insufficiently attentive to significant shifts in the way public affairs are conducted, including