Suchergebnisse

Questionnaires were sent to 50 institutes of policy science or closely related fields to elicit responses about various questions regarding the character of that discipline; 34 responses were received. In ratings of disciplines economics was considered clearly most useful, followed by public administration. In rating of analytical techniques, the most favored were program evaluation, benefit/cost analysis, experimental design & analysis of variance, & sampling. Technique & substance were rated as more important than process & academic disciplinary training. Public finance & budgeting, planning, service delivery, & management were rated most important as policy processes. A variety of policy areas were considered important, including public health, transportation, law enforcement, energy, the environment, & manpower as major areas. 5 Tables. W. H. Stoddard.

Twitter, Facebook, and other social media are increasingly touted as platforms not merely for networks of friends and for private diversion, but as vehicles that allow ordinary people to enter and influence the many arenas of public life. On the surface, the disparate and shapeless population of "i‐reporters," policy "tweeters," and anonymous news web site "commentators" would appear to challenge the comparatively well‐defined cast of professional diplomats, journalists, and propagandists that Harold D. Lasswell identified as policy‐oriented communicators. However, to illuminate the roles and impacts of social media in politics and policymaking, insights from Lasswell's "science of communication" must be embedded in Lasswell's broader lessons on value assets and outcomes. A closer look at the so‐called democratizing functions of social media in politics reveals the influence of powerful intermediaries who filter and shape electronic communications. Lasswell's insights on the likelihood of increased collaboration among political elites and skilled, "modernizing intellectuals" anticipates contemporary instances of state actors who recruit skilled creators and users of social media—collaborations that may or may not advance experiments in democracy. Lasswell's decision process concept is deployed to discover social media's strengths and weaknesses for the practicing policy scientist.

The idea of "policy science" is not a new one. In fact, it is organic to the Western tradition. Its first, incomparable formulation is found in Plato's Republic; policy, the Platonic Socrates says, can be reasonable and sound only if it is based upon the fullness of scientific insight and knowledge. According to the Platonic conception, it is not even enough to apply scientific knowledge, gathered by specialists, to practical policy problems which the rulers are to decide. Rather, the rulers themselves must acquire all the scientific knowledge needed to frame reasonable policy. The duality of the "expert adviser" and of the "decision-maker" who merely listens to him is implicitly rejected in the Republic. The ruler himself must be the knower. For the decisive thing is not knowledge in the abstract, knowledge as something impersonally available and ready to be picked up; it is knowledge conceived as the quality of a soul. According to the Platonic (and Aristotelian) view, knowledge is not an alien material "contained" in the mind, but the "form," the ideal essence of the mind itself, so that a mind that knows belongs to a different species than the mind that lacks knowledge. In acquiring knowledge, the mind becomes essentially transformed, it acquires a new form; this is the original meaning of the term "information." In its Platonic sense, then, the idea of "policy science" refers to the soul of the ruler, which must be the highest species of soul.