It is a matter of common observation
that in Western democracies public administrators and policy analysts in
general do largely limit their analyses to incremental or marginal differences
in policies that are chosen to differ only incrementally. They do not do so,
however, solely because they desperately need some way to simplify their
problems; they also do so in order to be relevant. Democracies change their
policies almost entirely through incremental adjustments. Policy does not move
in leaps and bounds.
The incremental character of political
change in the United States has often been remarked. The two major political
parties agree on fundamentals; they offer alternative policies to the voters
only on relatively small points of difference. Both parties favor full
employment, but they define it somewhat differently; both favor the development
of water power resources, but in slightly different ways; and both favor
unemployment compensation, but not the same level of benefits. Similarly,
shifts of policy within a party take place largely through a series of
relatively small changes, as can be seen in their only gradual acceptance of
the idea of governmental responsibility for support of the unemployed, a change
in party positions beginning in the early thirties and culminating in a sense
in the Employment Act of 1946.
Party behavior is in turn rooted in
public attitudes, and political theorists cannot conceive of democracy's
surviving in the United States, in the absence of fundamental agreement on
potentially disruptive issues, with consequent limitation of policy debates to
relatively small differences in policy.
Since the policies ignored by the
administrator are politically impossible and so irrelevant, the simplification
of analysis achieved by concentrating on policies that differ only
incrementally is not a capricious kind of simplification. In addition, it can
be argued that, given the limits on knowledge within which policy-makers are
confined, simplifying by limiting the focus to small variations from present
policy makes the most of available knowledge. Because policies being considered
are like present and past policies, the administrator can obtain information
and claim some insight. Non-incremental policy proposals are therefore
typically not only politically irrelevant but also unpredictable in their
consequences.
The second method of simplification of
analysis is the practice of ignoring important possible consequences of
possible policies, as well as the values attached to the neglected
consequences. If this appears to disclose a shocking shortcoming of successive
limited comparisons, it can be replied that, even if the exclusions are random,
policies may nevertheless be more intelligently formulated than through futile
attempts to achieve a comprehensiveness beyond human capacity. Actually,
however, the exclusions, seeming arbitrary or random from one point of view,
need be neither.
Achieving a Degree of
Comprehensiveness
Suppose that each value neglected by
one policy-making agency were a major concern of at least one other agency. In
that case, a helpful division of labor would be achieved, and no agency need
find its task beyond its capacities. The shortcomings of such a system would be
that one agency might destroy a value either before another agency could be
activated to safeguard it or in spite of another agency's efforts. But the
possibility that important values may be lost is present in any form of
organization; even where agencies attempt to comprehend in planning more than
is humanly possible.
The virtue of such a hypothetical
division of labor is that every important interest or value has its watchdog.
And these watchdogs can protect the interests in their jurisdiction in two
quite different ways: first, by redressing damages done by other agencies; and,
second, by anticipating and heading off injury before it occurs.
In a society like that of the United
States in which individuals are free to combine to pursue almost any possible
common interest they might have, and in which government agencies are sensitive
to the pressures of these groups, the system described is approximated. Almost
every interest has its watchdog. Without claiming that every interest has a
sufficiently powerful watchdog, it can be argued that our system often can
assure a more comprehensive regard for the values of the whole society than any
attempt at intellectual comprehensiveness.
In the United States, for example, no
part of government attempts a comprehensive overview of policy on income
distribution. A policy nevertheless evolves, and one responding to a wide
variety of interests. A process of mutual adjustment among farm groups, labor
unions, municipalities and school boards, tax authorities, and government
agencies with responsibilities in the fields of housing, health, highways,
national parks, fire, and police accomplishes a distribution of income in which
particular income problems neglected at one point in the decision processes
become central at another point.
Mutual adjustment is more pervasive
than the explicit forms it takes in negotiation between groups; it persists
through the mutual impacts of groups upon each other even where they are not in
communication. For all the imperfections and latent dangers in this ubiquitous
process of mutual adjustment, it will often accomplish an adaptation of
policies to a wider range of interests than could be done by one group
centrally.
Note, too, how the incremental pattern
of policy-making fits with the multiple pressure pattern. For when decisions
are only incremental — closely related to known policies, it is easier for one
group to anticipate the kind of moves another might make and easier too for it
to make correction for injury already accomplished.'
Even partisanship and narrowness, to
use pejorative terms, will sometimes be assets to rational decision-making, for
they can doubly insure that what one agency neglects, another will not; they
specialize personnel to distinct points of view. The claim is valid that
effective rational coordination of the federal administration, if possible to
achieve at all, would require an agreed set of values (7, p. 434) — if
'rational' is defined as the practice of the root method of decision-making.
But a high degree of administrative coordination occurs as each agency adjusts
its policies to the concerns of the other agencies in the process of fragmented
decision-making I have just described.
For all the apparent shortcomings of
the incremental approach to policy alternatives with its arbitrary exclusion
coupled with fragmentation, when compared to the root method, the branch method
often looks far superior. In the root method, the inevitable exclusion of
factors is accidental, unsystematic, and not defensible by any argument so far
developed, while in the branch method the exclusions are deliberate,
systematic, and defensible. Ideally, of course, the root method does not
exclude; in practice it must.
Nor does the branch method necessarily
neglect long-run considerations and objectives. It is clear that important
values must be omitted in considering policy, and sometimes the only way
long-run objectives can be given adequate attention is through the neglect of
short-run considerations. But the values omitted can be either long-run or
short-run.
