Public Policy Making

Catalog description

This course looks at the policy-making process, broadly construed. This is not a course about specific health policy or specific educational policies. Instead, this course is about developing a toolkit for understanding the policy process or policy development in any substantive area. The course begins by looking at how policy-makers tend to view the world. What are the theoretical and empirical models they tend to use, and why? Next, the course considers different kinds of market failures and how each suggests that a different kind of governmental intrusion would be appropriate, along with how policy-makers test and evaluate policies. Finally, the course looks at how elected officials and other explicitly political forces affect the policy process, and how executives and legislatures control the policy process. This course is the same as