Setting and Firing Policy Triggers

Abstract

Governments increasingly use quantitative policy signals as automatic triggers for policy adjustments rather than simply to inform policy debate. This increased use of policy triggers cannot be explained simply by a technocratic desire to reduce workloads and regularize policy adjustments. Political objectives – notably desires to reduce conflict, bind future policymakers, and avoid blame – play an important role both in decisions to use policy triggers and in the selection of specific triggers. Using policy signals as triggers often leads to the politicization of statistics and to harmful rigidification of policy.

Introduction: Understanding Public Policy through Its Instruments—From the Nature of Instruments to the Sociology of Public Policy Instrumentation

“…The RMS ( raisonnement en masse salariale , a method that measures growth in wages using a calculation based on the overall wage bill) gradually became an unobtrusive strategic instrument of the policy of civil‐service expenditure reduction. Bezès stresses the increasing role of automatic, incremental mechanisms (Weaver 1989). Despite some success, the extensive use of the RMS as a lever for the policy of economic stringency was a quasi‐invisible public policy instrument whose inconveniences and limitations came clearly to light during the 1990s.…”

“…The whole point of focussing on policy instruments is also to make visible some of the invisible—hence depoliticized—dimensions of public policies. It also relates to the search for either invisible instruments or policy triggers (Weaver 1989) with automatic impacts.…”

Policy Instruments and Governance

“…The analysis provided a generic classification to develop comparison over time and sectors. In the public policy literature, the use of policy instruments was also developed to understand the change in the provision of services, the rise of automatic instruments to avoid blame (Weaver, 1989), to improve policy implementation (Bertelmans-Videc, Rist and Vedung, 1998) or to identify public policy change. The creation of a public policy instrument may serve to reveal a more profound change in public policy -in its meaning, in its cognitive and normative framework, and in its results.…”

The Hidden Politics of Administrative Reform: Cutting French Civil Service Wages with a Low‐Profile Instrument

“…The attention paid to the “administrative population,” from the two perspectives of number (the size of the workforce) and—especially—budgeting (the size of the wage bill) requires technical devices to provide knowledge of the number of public employees and a precise measure of their demands on state expenditure. The conditions in which this measuring tool was created and used—and the knowledge issues related to them—illustrate the importance of a technocratic perspective (Weaver 1989) that raises the value of techniques in administrative policy as a way of rationalizing policy making and providing a predictable and “objective” mode of civil service wages calculation. The instrument matters all the more as measurement, once launched and “backed by powerful institutions,” becomes “real, fateful and autonomous” (Espeland and Stevens 1998, 325).…”

“…The second message of this article is to emphasize the important part played in the art of government, since the 1970s, by governing through automatic, unobtrusive, incremental, low‐profile mechanisms at times of economic crisis (Weaver 1986, 1988, 1989). Starting from the late 1970s and continuing until the late 1980s, the RMS gradually became an unobtrusive strategic instrument in the policy of civil service expenditure reduction.…”