Conclusion: Public Policy Theory and Democracy: The Elephant in the Corner

Lindblom on Limits to Policy Change: The Tragic Dilemma Between Understanding and Shaping the World

“…Whether the process is democratic or not is not particularly important" (italics by RH) (Rauch, 2016). This is why neither incrementalism nor any of the other policy process theories in good standing today (Ingram et al, 2016) provide much analytic support for practitioners: although they now include incremental and nonincremental change in the policymaking repertoire of democracies, these theories have nothing to say on regime change moving away from democracy toward "praetorial," nondemocratic modes of governing, as they have happened in the past (Nazi-Germany, Soviet Russia, many states in Latin America and Africa) and are actually happening now in many post-Communist Eastern European states, Turkey, and possibly event the United States (Foa & Mounk, 2016;Geiselberger, 2017). This leaves political prediction essentially uninformed by dominant theories of long-term policy dynamics; and political and policy practice without advice on how to continue to avoid undemocratic developments.…”

“…In this respect as well, Lindblom and Woodhouse demonstrate full awareness of the structure-agency dialectics in politics and policy-making: policymakers are limited in their agentic scope by bounded rationality and institutional constraints, yet the intended and unintended consequences of exercising reflexive agency does stretch, shrink, or qualitatively change the very institutional boundaries of their policy work. In modern policy process theorizing, the feedback of policy-making through its real-life impacts on societal structures (particularly, social, economic, and cultural inequalities), and democratic attitudes of citizens, is a topic that still needs much more attention than it gets (Ingram et al, 2016).…”

“…Gross social, educational, and income inequalities are responsible for convergent inequalities of information, education, socialization, and thus political participation. If such inequalities last and grow, as they arguably have in the last decades since Lindblom first published his views in the late 1970s (Piketty, 2014;Stiglitz, 2012), they affect the political agenda as they influence permissible problem definitions, and the probability of some privileged people's problem definition compared to underprivileged groups (see also Ingram et al, 2016;Putnam, 2015;Schneider & Ingram, 1997) or even vulnerable parts of the middle classes (Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid, 2017). It will certainly diminish a government's capacity to address and redress inequalities generated by the market system and economic life.…”

“…What is the impact of many years of consistent austerity policies on the political attitudes and practices of political participation among underprivileged and middle-class groups in the so-called "consolidated" democracies? (Engbersen, Snel & Kremer, 2017;Ingram et al, 2016).…”

“…Indeed, incrementalism was dragged through the mud as just "muddling through," as contestable scientific justification of only apparently pluralist democratic politics (Weiss & Woodhouse, 1992), and as indecisive, timid, makeshift, narrow, inconclusive, and procrastinating, even unethical policy-making practice (Boulding, 1964;Dror, 1964;Etzioni, 1967;especially Goodin & Waldner, 1979). In a recent essay, Ingram, deLeon and Schneider (2016) castigate contemporary approaches to policy-making for treating democracy as the elephant in the corner. But they conveniently forget to even briefly mention Lindblom's views on incrementalism as expression of between-election democratic politics and enhancement of democracy's intelligence (Lindblom, 1965).…”