Many of the public policies rest on the platforms of ideological terms namely liberal and or conservative. An ideology here means “a set of beliefs about the values and role of government” (Birkland 143). Each of these ideologies has its own fundamental elements to which their proponents subscribe. These elements set out various basic premises or paradigms of liberalism and conservatism.
Liberalism is inclined on the ideas of existence of a compact between government and its people to which people are accorded the rights of revolution in case the compact is breached. The government has limited powers bound by natural laws of human rights with such rights applying to all people.
Ideally, liberalism supports the existence of an organized society in which majority rules with temperations of the rights of the minority. Indeed, liberalization subscribes to ideas of change through a change of administration regime in case governments fail to fulfill and honor their roles of protection of both private rights and the common good of their entire population.
Conservatism is inclined to the idea that human affairs seek the guidance of faith and subscription to ideologies of some supernatural force. It also subscribes to concepts of tradition and customs’ capacity to produce and affect the values of existing institutions. Additionally’ conservatism “remained distrustful of government interventions in the economy and worried that too much would reduce the disciplines of the market place” (Cochran and Malone 143).
Conservatisms subscribe to beliefs of people’s crucial base coupled with irrational nature. Liberalists argue that governments have essential roles in overseeing and regulating the economy by ensuring that people act in a responsible way financially by ensuring that companies exercise the right things, for instance, paying minimum wages.
Conservatisms claim that the government needs to oversee and regulate morality to enhance accountability and transparency. Essentially, from conservatisms’ dimension, the government needs to punish immoral acts by enacting appropriate laws.
Conservatism and liberalism policy topology in analyzing public policy is essentially useless. This is because policy analysis depicts biasness towards conservatism and liberalism. As Birkland reckons, “a nation approaches the democratic ideal to the extent that people have control over the government in what federalists call a dependence in the people” (142). This perhaps well explains the quest of liberal policies to enhance social equality.
However, despite the fact that people endeavor to acquire social equality, as the liberalism and conservatism policy analysis topographies may contend, people do not strike a consensus on the appropriate polices or the policies implementation process to acquire the desired changes.
More often, while conducting an analysis of a problem, people look at the problem from its districts of origin. In many situations, the problem originates from what the government did and failed. This means that during the policy analysis process, people approach the process with biasness (Cochran and Malone 10).
The argument is that policy analysts who believe that government has proactive roles to play to curtail a problem end up blaming the problem on the government. On the other hand, those who believe that the government needed not to take part in the resolution of the problem at hand think that the escalation of the problem relied on the government’s interventions to solve the problem.
This gives rise to conflict of interests between the supporters of either liberal or conservative paradigms of policy analysis. Since it is the interest of the government to consider the opinion of all the stakeholders, the policy cycle- problem identification, policy development and evaluation is impaired by the fact that challenges in problem identification are truncated to other elements of policy cycle (Birkland 138).
Labeling people, ideas, and or organizations as liberal or conservative has both benefits and shortcomings. Both liberalism and conservatism advocate for radicalism rejection coupled with its violent uprooting of various established institutions and practices. They also accept the need for restraint retraining the government power, advocates for existence of a society that is balanced in respect to societal powers and individual powers.
Labeling an individual, idea or even an organization as liberal or conservative means that the ideas to which the individual or even the organization subscribes attributes, both liberalism and conservatism, are healthy for maintaining social order. However, on the other hand, tagging an individual, an organization, or an idea as conservative implies that it is individualistic in nature. This means the idea the person or the organization promotes serves only to benefit the least minority in the society.
A good example of this is the idea of healthcare policies. From the liberalistic approach, healthcare policies need to promote good healthcare for all people within the society-poor and rich (universal public plan). On the other hand, conservatisms promote healthcare insurance.
This means that quality healthcare needs to be accessed by those who can ideally afford it. Additionally, liberalists subscribe to the ideas of allocating minimum wage to all people irrespective of the state of economy. On the other hand, conservatisms believe that market forces need to determine the wages that the employers need to pay their employees.
Categorizing an idea, association or a person as a liberalist mean those ideas, persons or even the organization advocates are inconsistent with the actual nature of economy dynamics. Hence, it promotes ideologies, which are against the advantages of capitalism. This is why perhaps liberalists are stereotyped as “lazy” in America (Birkland 132). However, this is widely a misconception since liberalism is ideally not all about equal distribution of wealth at the disadvantage of the population that works hard.
Other topologies of analyzing public policies opposed to liberalisms and conservatisms that can be productive should focus on helping people (Birkland 113). Such an approach is essentially liberal conservatism. Ideally, this means that the topography needs to integrate the concerns of liberalism and conservatism. Liberalists approaches public policies from one extreme with perceptions of the needs of government to serve and foster policies that confer common good to all people.
On the other hand, conservatism approaches public policies from the extents of individualistic gain. These two topographies provide policy makers, thoughtful citizens, and even the government with differing perspectives while arriving at subtle conclusions on mechanisms of driving economic, social and political issues. Subscribing to a single topography infers that one suffers wholly from its demerits.
Integrating the two then means that more benefit can be conferred to the nation as a whole while mitigating the disadvantages of each of the topographies. Unfortunately, the productivity of liberal conservatism approach is contentious based on the difficulties in selection of the elements of the unit topography to incorporate in the integrated topography following the biasness existing among the topographies’ advocates.
Conclusively, this paper appreciates that approaching public policies from either liberalistic mind or conservatism mind has the effects of introducing both benefits and disadvantages associated with each approach. It proposes an alternative topography embracing integration of elements of both liberalism and conservatism public polices topographies.
The paper holds that, by doing this, more benefit is rendered to the people based on the integrated roles of the government while the shortcomings of the unit topography are reduced. The challenge is, however, on choosing the elements of the unit topography to drop and the ones to include in the integrated approach since, in both topographies, people approach policies with biasness.
Works Cited
Birkland, Thomas. An Introduction to the Policy Process: Theories, Concepts, and Models. New York London, England: Armonk, 2005. Print.
Cochran, Charles, and Eloise Malone. Public policy perspective and choices. London, UK: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005.Print.