مقاله انگلیسی هفت اشتباه مرگبار در تحلیل سیاست گذاری

Policy analysts are an established part of our political system. Along with other advisers and policymakers, they work within a prevailing climate of suspicion about advising and government, and are not immune to a number of recurring problems of our policy process.
Well trained technicians still come to Washington expecting that their knowledge will prevail until they meet willful clients and the dynamics of politics. The organizational context, whether in an agency, the White House, or Congress, still provides routines and schedules that govern the character and production of analysis. Analysts, particularly the entrepreneurs, still try to anticipate problems, issues, and decisions. They still try to influence the agenda for analysis.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Policy Analysis

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is a good example of this continuity in the behavior of analysts. Established as part of a new budgetary process, an offspring of the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, The CBO took hold in 1975 under the leadership of Alice M. Rivlin, a respected economist and policy analyst. The office began producing budget projections, estimates, and studies just about the time that the first edition of Policy Analysts in the Bureaucracy was in the publishing process. As is the case with other analytical shops, Rivlin and her staff faced , the problem of allocating their own scarce resources to influence the formulation of public policy, but at the same time to promote political support for the office itself. The analysts had to select problems so that their work could be part of the congressional debate.

If a congressional committee was intending to consider, for example, food stamp legislation, then CBO’s policy analyst had to anticipate the food stamp debate and be ready to provide information and studies. Moreover, one function of policy analysis is to point out problems thatmight otherwise be neglected, by providing early warning on emerging issues. In such a situation, the bureaucratic policy analyst tries to find a sponsor, a client for the required work, and CBO’s analysts followed the same tactic. Rivlin, reflecting on her experiences as the former director of CBO to my class, recalled that when an analyst wanted to raise an issue, it was always possible to have a friendly member of Congress pose a question and ask for assistance on it.

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