Public Policy

6 Pages 1552 Words

The process of policymaking, like most other aspects of public policy, cannot simply be understood by examining flow charts and diagrams. Traditional teaching models like How a Bill Becomes a Law fail to take into account other policy-making factors like interest group and constituency influence, agenda setting and the role of the mass media. In the text, Dye illustrates the process that occurs in the enactment of public policy.
Dye’s process of policymaking contains six steps. Each part of the process is essential to understanding public policy, and each part has varying participants. The six parts of Dye’s policymaking process are problem identification, agenda setting, policy formulation, policy legitimation, policy implementation and policy evaluation.
Ideally, individual citizens and groups of individual citizens bring about the problems identified in our system of government. Democratic systems are designed to meet the demands brought about by its citizen. However, it is not possible for the government to meet every demand of every citizen. On top of this, the government rarely hears the demands of ordinary citizens on a regular basis. Thus, agenda setting, or deciding what the government pays attention to, is crucial in the making of public policy.
Dye defines agenda setting as “Deciding what issues will be decided and what problems will be addressed by the government”. Scarcity on the political agenda creates the need for political elites, including but not limited to the president and congress, to draw attention to certain societal problems. In terms of agenda setting, political elites have almost absolute control.
The next step in the policymaking process is policy formulation. Policy formulation is the development of policy alternatives for dealing with problems on the agenda. Once a problem becomes important enough to be on the political agenda, policy alternatives are formulated to fix that pro...