Description
Book SynopsisHow do we incorporate analytical thinking into public policy decisions? Stuart Shapiro confronts this issue in
Analysis and Public Policy by looking at various types of analysis, and discussing how they are used in regulatory policy-making in the US. By looking at the successes and failures of incorporating cost-benefit analysis, risk assessment, and environmental impact assessment, he draws broader lessons on its use, focusing on the interactions between analysis and political factors, legal structures and bureaucratic organizations as possible areas for reform.
Utilizing empirical and qualitative research, Shapiro analyzes four different forms of analysis: cost-benefit analysis, risk assessment, environmental impact assessment, and impact analysis. After interviewing nearly fifty individuals who have served in high levels of government, and who have made countless regulatory policy decisions in their careers, Shapiro argues that advocates must become less ambitious and should craft requirements for simpler and clearer analysis. Such analysis, particularly if informed by public participation, can do a great deal to improve government decisions.
As this book details the relationship between analysis and institutional factors such as politics, bureaucracy, and law, it is appropriate for a variety of readers, such as scholars of policy, students, scholars of regulation, and congressional and state legislative staff looking to create new analytical requirements.
Trade ReviewStuart Shapiro is a realist, an incrementalist, and centrist,comfortable with bureaucracy, politics, nuance, and imperfection in the serviceof slow and steady progress inenvironmental policy and economic efficiency. He has earned the right to this position,given his solid scholarship, research, and experience with the American administrative state in the 21stcentury.-- Tracy Mehan, Environmental Forum
In this outstanding book, Stuart Shapiro transcends the long-standing impasse in the academic literature about the value of various analysistools - cost-benefit analysis in particular - and moves the scholarlyconversation in a much more productive and useful direction. -- Wendy Wagner Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis
Table of ContentsContents: 1. Policy Analysis: Roots and Branches 2. Regulation in the United States and Comprehensive-Rational Analysis 3. Cost-Benefit Analysis and the Regulatory Process 4. Risk Assessment and the Regulatory Process 5. Environmental Impact Assessment 6. Impact Analysis and the Regulatory Process 7. The Use of Analysis 8. Using Analysis to Further Democracy, not Technocracy 9. Building Better Branches Index
