In Chapter 10 of her book A Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making, author Deborah Stone discusses the concepts involved in making rational decisions that will affect the public sector. She introduces the chapter by bringing the concepts of public decision-making into the realm of everyday experience as she defines policy problems as “the need to act and the pressure to decide” (232). While she acknowledges that there are many means by which individuals may attempt to come to a decision on something, she points out that recent trends in policymaking have focused on the concept of rational decision-making. “Problems are cast as a choice between alternative means for achieving a goal, and rationality means simply choosing the best means to attain a given goal” (232). How rational decisions are reached, what components are involved and how the process generally tends to work are the primary foci of the chapter.
In placing this concept within the working world, Stone indicates that such common terminology as cost-benefit analysis, risk-benefit analysis, and decision analysis are all business forms of the rational decision-making process. Essentially, the process has four steps. These include defining the goals to be reached, brainstorming several possible ways in which these goals can be reached, analyzing the potential consequences of each of these alternatives, and then choosing the alternative that seems as if it will come closest to attaining the goal without too many negative consequences. However, to carry these processes out to their absolute greatest rational degree would be to surpass human capability, so most people only consider a limited number of options and generally tend to stop when they feel they have found a viable solution. Official political decision models therefore typically focus on how to analyze a limited number of possible solutions and choosing the one most likely to produce maximum total welfare.
Throughout the remainder of the chapter, Stone provides detailed descriptions of some of the more popular variants of rational decision-making in the political sphere, such as cost-benefit analysis, risk-benefit analysis, and decision analysis. Cost-benefit analysis is generally used to consider the potential tangible benefits of following a particular course of action and is heavily influenced by the addition of numbers in making the plus-minus calculations of consequences. The negative element of this, though, is that intangible elements tend to be ignored, underestimated, or otherwise not considered appropriately. A risk-benefit analysis is described in much the same way with the variable factors being the probability that different scenarios will occur. The option with the least percentage of risk is the winner, but this has the obvious drawback of relying on likelihood. This concept of an expected value is also a component of decision analysis, which adopts the stance of an individual person and weighs the given options from a variety of sources. This method is more amenable to considering decisions in which a large number of intangible elements are involved but remains weakened by the levels of ‘guesswork’ involved in determining the likelihood of occurrence.
Having described the more common means by which rational decisions are reached, Stone then launches into a discussion of why this policy is not as great as it might seem. This begins with the concept that a single, rational decision-maker has been identified and extends to the way in which information and numbers are manipulated as a part of the process in order to control a decision rather than discover a solution. It is complicated by the necessity for political leaders to live in a world of ambiguity so as to provide themselves with the room to negotiate current and future issues in a way that places them in the best possible light. This is further complicated by the inherent ambiguity of the process itself and the constantly shifting goals and objectives of the polis as different people enter and leave office. The remainder of the chapter discusses various ways in which this ambiguity can be manipulated within the polis to control decisions in a specific way that makes the public feel as if the best decision had been rationally reached including Hobson’s Choice, language choice, and manipulation of the possibilities. Stone indicates her hope that this overview of how decisions are reached on the public level will help to create a more informed, and critical, public awareness of the ways in which their decisions are manipulated by the policy-makers and the process itself.
Works Cited
Stone, Deborah A. “Decisions: The Concept of Rational Decision Making and Decisions in the Polis.” A Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002.