PAF 340 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Hawthorne Effect, Provisional Government Of The Algerian Republic, National Partnership For Reinventing Government
Document Summary
Metaphor policy is like a medical treatment. We can use experiments and trials to evaluate its effectiveness. Policies can and should be empirically tested. Advocate for data collection and pilot programs as a part of the policy design. Take advantage of state-level variation in a federalist system to evaluate policies. Use experiments, natural experiments, and quantitative methods to examine policy impacts on a population. Make policy recommendations based upon the success of the policy at achieving its goals. Also consider and attempt to control for positive and negative unintended consequences and spill-over effects. Goals of the agency/organization/individual v. policy goals. Showing versus doing (fox and miller, 2007) Broad and shallow or targeted and deep. Difficult to measure in a meaningful way. Proceduralism legal requirements for personnel management, budgeting and accountability: red tape, administrative costs. Values have to be assigned to outcomes which are good, better, best etc: change across time and place, unintended effects, individual values.
