Policy analysis: concepts, methods, and applications

¶ … Pure Policy: The Kantian Inquiry System

The philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote his treatise, A Critique of Pure Reason, as a way of striking a balance between rationalistic and empiricist modalities of acquiring knowledge. It was not possible, Kant stated, to live in the world and to merely understand knowledge through one's mind and preexisting rational cognitive faculties. The mind could have tricks played upon it in terms of its sensory perceptions that affected such faculties. Thus, the mind was not a perfectly receptive organ. However, he also believed that pure empiricism, the idea that there was nothing other than experience of the immediate present, not to be perfectly valid either.

Rather, Kant suggested that we glean information through pre-existing human mental frameworks and sensations, but process such data in unique ways, commensurate and shifting with experience. In other words, one must think one's way as a human being, both inductively and deductively in the world. Not every issue or every day was one ideologically born anew. One had preprogrammed ideologies and systems of knowledge that were valid, and ways of grasping the world, both biological and learned. But nor was everything cerebral and located in the mind or ideological framework one had adopted alone -- sensory data was also necessary to life a more perfect life, morally and politically.

So too, says Ian Mitroff and Pondy in their article, with policy analysis -- one must have an ideological framework coupled with responsiveness to the data one accrues. They propose what they call a Kantian inquiry system. Like Kant himself, the Kantian inquiry system was spawned in reaction two different types of inquiry systems, that of the Lockean and the Lebnitizian. For instance, Ian Mitroff and Louis Pondy note "Leibnizian inquiry says that we haven't understood something until we have a good formal theory of it, Lockean inquiry says we haven't understood something until we have collected some good data on it" (1974:2). But the data must affect the ideology and vice versa.

Thus, a Lockean, empiricist system demands, in terms of policy, a well-structured problem situations, for which there exists a strong communal ideology already on the nature of the problem situation, in contrast to well-structured problem situations that demand the formation of new analytic formulations along the lines of a Leibnizian or radically empiricist systems. Leibnizian systems are closed ideological systems without clear access to the external environments but depend upon theories. Lockean systems tend be problematic when there is an absence of a clear political ideology and a well-defined problem or solution that can be 'treated' with a policy. Waffling is often the result -- if John Kerry were said to be a system, he would be Locke.

But a Lebiniz like system can also fail because having a very closed analytic framework that is purely theoretical and ideological, can ignore the need for variety and complexity of the interpretations that are necessary for deciphering the multiple worldviews of an often technologically uncertain and always politically unpredictable future. (If George Bush's Republican and religious fundamentalism were said to be a system, it would be that of Lebiniz.)

The Kantian inquiry systems strike a balance between the two. These systems attempt to give multiply data and factually-based views a nature that is still complementary to a kind of ideology. These inquiry systems thus are capable of taking in data empirically, but still provide an effective framework by which to structure the data ideologically and cognitively. The Kantian inquiry system is neither purely ideological, but it offers more vision than merely crunching numbers.

Welfare Reform

For instance, one of the problems plaguing welfare reform in this country is the Lebinizian problem that often individuals are judged punitively in terms of why they are on welfare. The goal of welfare is not to encourage people to get married, or to have fewer children from a moral perspective -- it is to engage in such practices if it proves to be in their economic interest, however. Some have proposed the eradication of welfare programs, or forcing welfare participants to work for their checks, even if they do not have the skills to enter the marketplace. Rather than focusing on the data regarding the recipients alone, however, such as their level of education, one must provide an ideological framework of empowerment for the recipients, that still accomplishes the stated data-based and measurable achievements of the recipients gaining adequate job training to move off the welfare roles. Thus, the Kantian system of inquiry asks, what is the goal, and what specific program dollars are needed to allocate in a specific fashion to achieve the goal in a feasible fashion?