I name my answer to question as "Idea and Deborah Stone", I'd like go through her publication and describe why ideas are so important. Corresponding to Deborah Rock, ideas can help people to define alliance, strategic factors also ideas can help people to find the legitimacy and get policy restrictions. (Deborah, P 34). Relating to Deborah Rock, ideas will determine "who will be infected", "how will they be infected" and "will they be damaged legitimately" (Natural stone, P. 34).
In the first Section, Stone starts her research at the city-state (the Greek term polis) level. The public policy is recognized as an attempt to achieve a certain community goals (Deborah, P 21). However, due to the fact that everyone has his own knowledge of ideas, therefore the political community has turned into a place for inner debates over "who'll be affected", "how will they be influenced" and "will they be affected legitimately"(Deborah, P 34). The policy-making process has thus become a continuous interaction between your conflict and co-operation.
In Stone's model, individuals may follow their goals through collective action. The drive is not only based on self-interests but also based on public concerns. It is because the public interest is be related to the purpose of success (Deborah, P 33). However, when there is a contradiction between self-interest and public interest, the insurance plan process could be more complicated (Deborah, P 33). If the group is encouraged under common ideas, the group will get more power, and you will see a balance between private passions and public hobbies in the conflict.
Stone immediately uses the "idea" as the core concept of this book. In her structure of "polis community vs market individual"(Deborah P 33) model, ideas have grown to be the focus. Stone tries to use have difficulty of idea to make clear all periods of policy-making process. Policy-making is followed by a continuous constantly struggle to fight for the classification of specifications, types of boundaries, and guide visitors to conduct the ideal typical definition.
The struggle of idea is seen in several coverage levels. Matching to Stone's theory, idea identifies what folks want from the insurance plan; it's the foundation for individuals to cognize and knows what the policy is. Idea provides a romance between advocators and advocacy coalitions; Idea provides "causal relationship" for these people and categories, and ideas will be shown to their plan objectives through their activities of obtaining support. And these people with the shared idea will persuade decision-makers to meet their preferences. As stated above, Stone views idea as a constantly changing vibrant and resources of construction. And by given different interpretations of ideas, the idea of the ideas will also change. She highlights that the politics of plan is to find the interpretation (Deborah P 75). Natural stone argues that the specialist to interpret idea is the key element in the policy-making process. Only legitimated idea can be changed into policy. And using the legitimacy, people's knowledge or behavior can be improved. And insurance plan change may also be made through this conversation of ideas. Ideas impacts how people cognized politics, and the change of politics will also feedback on ideas. To Rock, idea is not static; idea can be an ongoing of creating and reconstructing process of concepts.
Now I am going to make an effort to exam whether Deborah Stone's idea theory can meets with other plan process theory.
In the punctuated equilibrium theory, Baumgartner and Jones also claim that idea is a potential vitality in the coverage making process. Regarding to their booklet "Agendas and Instability in North american Politics", "a robust supporting idea is associated with the establishment" (Baumgartner and Jones, P 7); In page 16, in addition they write"the tight interconnection between organization and idea provides powerful support for prevailing circulation of politics advantage". These claims imply that idea can help people understand "what's at stake and exactly how will they be influenced (Stone, 2002)", insurance policy advocators will use institution layout to make their idea be reliable. Also, to be able to gain more power those policy actors will manipulate images and ideas. To Baumgartner and Jones, ideas are essential because they offer some potential undergirding institutional agreements; and the have difficulties of idea is the struggle over legitimate organization arrangements.
In the reserve Agendas, alternatives and general population plans, Kingdon also discusses the importance. To make useful policy recommendations, participants in the plan process are rivalling to develop new ideas; and they are trying to provide their ideas by means of potential answers to policy makers. According to Kingdon, coverage entrepreneurs "rest in wait around government with their solutions [already] in hand, looking forward to problems to float by to that they can connect their solutions, looking forward to a development in the politics stream they may use to their benefits" (Kingdon, P 165). Distributed ideas make policy business people into alliance; and these alliances want to make their ideas become legitimate. Kingdon's "primal coverage soup" (Kingdon, P 139-143) model provides us an image of how decision producers allow idea through coherent narrative process (ideas are streaming in the channels just as molecules flowing in the soup). According to Kingdon, an insurance plan community creates a short set of ideas. In case the ideas can go through the selecting process, softening up process and if they can move the exam by specialists and plan makers, they could finally become regulations. The complete process may very well be a continuing have difficulty of ideas. In cases like this, ideas are not only competing with other ideas, also, they are struggling to make it through in this primal soup. I also think Kingdon's coverage home window model is another improvement to Deborah Stone's quarrels. People are now battling to make their idea before the policy window at the correct time. This model discovers that the during the insurance policy process, critical time is also very important to ideas attempting.
However, I believe there are also some ideas which do not fully support Deborah Stone's argument. Inside the garbage can model, because the nature of unclear, policy is definitely not to be the consequence of the idea's struggling. In Kingdon's Agendas, Alternatives, and People Policies, he explains that as" garbage can into which various types of problems and alternatives are dumped by individuals taken off the field" (Kingdon, P 85). In some sense, Deborah Stone's "Struggling of ideas" assumption is more based on a goal-oriented insurance policy making process, to make it work, there must be a clear insurance plan goal from all members; while the traditional garbage can model is similar to a method-oriented plan making process, it generally does not need a clear goal or solution at the start. Within the garbage can model, people aren't fighting with each other over ideas in the ultimate solution selecting level, however it is still correct to state that each solution in the garbage can is a result of deliberative idea thinking. I think there's a small difference between Deborah Stone's theory and the garbage can model.
Another plan theory which doesn't totally regular with Deborah Stone's theory is the incrementalism theory. Corresponding to Lindblom, the incremental coverage process is more relied on former existing policies. Matching to this model, the coverage environment generally remains secure. Because the incremental aspect of the policy, the new policy will inherent the insurance plan environment from previous policy, if the former policy has resolved the battling of idea, then you will see less struggling of ideas in the new guidelines. Since the insurance policy environment is steady, it will be unlikely for all of us to take a position a violently have difficulty over ideas.
The last insurance policy process theory I'd like discuss in the context of "struggling over idea" is the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) theory. The central notion of this theory is that people or communities with the same values (core/policy/secondary) will form a coalition. I believe Sabatier's concept of belief is comparable to Deborah Stone's idea of idea. Especially, I think the concept of policy notion is participating in the role of idea in the insurance policy process. I think his core belief is rooted even deeper than idea. The center belief will sometimes become unnoticeable. And using the ACF model, we can find out that the insurance plan process is a competition among different policy beliefs, and I think this observation is close to Deborah's "struggle over ideas the 'essence of insurance policy making. '". Nonetheless it does not mean that the change in the supplementary belief level is also a result of struggling, according to Sabatier's theory, such change is more like the consequence of an incremental learning process.
In conclusion, I believe Deborah Stone's argument is useful for all of us to comprehend some insurance policy process. However, by using different ideas we should also notice whether "policy processes are struggle over ideas" should be analyzed in situations. The Punctuated-Equilibrium model, ACF model and Multiple Stream model signify that Deborah's debate is valid. In the P-E model, the change of existing idea or appearance of new idea provides turbulence to the insurance policy process; in the ACF model, the learning process can change beliefs at different level, and these changes will bring feedbacks to the insurance plan process; in the M-S model, insurance policy internet marketers will using the possibility to propose their ideas, so when critical time is come, the combined stream will become policy.
Incremental Model shows that coverage process is definitely not linked to battling when the time course of the insurance policy is very short. There could be no have difficulties when the complete policy process has already been fixed. However, I believe the source/first coverage in the incremental model is because idea battling.
The Garbage Can model shows that the choosing process within the plan process can happen as a random process, it isn't always to be the consequence of the idea battling.
