{"id":7,"date":"2018-11-27T17:53:00","date_gmt":"2018-11-27T17:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/?post_type=podcast&p=7"},"modified":"2020-11-16T19:45:57","modified_gmt":"2020-11-16T19:45:57","slug":"episode-1-dr-derek-epp-on-collective-decision-making","status":"publish","type":"podcast","link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/podcast\/episode-1-dr-derek-epp-on-collective-decision-making\/","title":{"rendered":"Episode 1: The Structure of Policy Change with Derek Epp"},"content":{"rendered":"
In the first episode of the Policy Agendas Podcast, E.J. Fagan and Katie Madel interview Professor Derek Epp of the University of Texas at Austin on his new book, The Structure of Policy Change<\/a>. They talk about policy punctuations, collective decision-making, and information processing efficiency.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the first episode of the Policy Agendas Podcast, E.J. Fagan and Katie Madel interview Professor Derek Epp of the University of Texas at Austin on his new book, The Structure of Policy Change. They talk about policy punctuations, collective decision-making, and information processing efficiency.","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/20\/2018\/11\/Policy-Agendas-Podcast-Ep1-Final.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"34.19M","filesize_raw":"35855648","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[6,4,3,9,8,10,11,12,7,5],"categories":[],"series":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-7","1":"podcast","2":"type-podcast","3":"status-publish","5":"tag-austin","6":"tag-derek","7":"tag-epp","8":"tag-policy","9":"tag-policy-agendas","10":"tag-political-science","11":"tag-politics","12":"tag-public-policy","13":"tag-texas","14":"tag-ut","15":"series-the-policy-agenda","16":"entry"},"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":613,"post_author":"38","post_date":"2020-07-01 18:02:41","post_date_gmt":"2020-07-01 18:02:41","post_content":"\n

Fagan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He studies political parties, Congress, think tanks, agenda setting, lobbying, and economic policy. In particular, he is interested in how legislatures process information and solve problems, and how party elites influence policy. He is also a graduate research fellow and former project manager with the Policy Agendas Project<\/a>. He produces and co-hosts the Policy Agendas Podcast<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before graduate school, Fagan worked for five years in Washington, DC. From 2011-2014, he was Deputy Communications Director for Global Financial Integrity<\/a> (GFI), a research and advocacy organization based in Washington, DC. GFI works to study and curtail illicit financial flows from developing countries. <\/p>\n","post_title":"E. J. Fagan","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"e-j-fagan","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-10-23 16:53:07","post_modified_gmt":"2020-10-23 16:53:07","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/?post_type=speaker&p=613","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":625,"post_author":"38","post_date":"2020-10-23 16:55:32","post_date_gmt":"2020-10-23 16:55:32","post_content":"\n

Katie Madel is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Government at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include education policy, gender policy, and political rhetoric. She received her B.A. in Political Science and English from North Central College.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Katie Madel","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"katie-madel","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-10-23 16:55:35","post_modified_gmt":"2020-10-23 16:55:35","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/?post_type=speaker&p=625","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":562,"post_author":"38","post_date":"2020-06-30 19:14:49","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-30 19:14:49","post_content":"\n

Derek Epp is an assistant professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. He joined the faculty in 2017 from Dartmouth College where he was a postdoc within the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center. In May 2015, he received his Ph.D. in American Politics with a minor in Public Policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation is titled Information Processing and the Instability of Political Outcomes and he currently has a book expanding on themes from his dissertation forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press. He graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2008 with a bachelor's in Political Science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His research agenda focuses on policy change, asking why some policies persist - remaining the status quo for decades - while others undergo frequent adjustments. In particular, he is interested in measuring the capacity of institutions to attend to political information and then tracking the allocation of that attention across issues: what issues receive attention, for how long, and to what effect. He also study criminal justice, with a particular focus on racial patterns in police traffic stops.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Derek A. Epp","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"derek-a-epp","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-10-23 17:00:10","post_modified_gmt":"2020-10-23 17:00:10","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/?post_type=speaker&p=562","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"transcript":"

Hello and welcome to the inaugural episode of the Policy Agendas podcast, a podcast<\/p>\n

by the Policy Agendas Project, which has a lot of peas and a lot of alliteration. My name is E.J. Fagan<\/p>\n

and the project manager of the Policy Agendas Project. Today, I am joined by Katy Middle Middle<\/p>\n

matto. I’m sorry. Okay. I’m sorry. I’m terrible. Pronouncing names as Katy, another graduate student here. Introduce<\/p>\n

yourself. My name’s Katie Matal. I study public policy specifically. I’m interested in political<\/p>\n

communication, education policy and gender politics. Yeah. And so we’re gonna have a bit of a revolving<\/p>\n

cast here on this podcast. Mostly graduate students from the project, but also faculty members here at University, Texas<\/p>\n

at Austin. The goal is to interview political scientists doing<\/p>\n

new work in the realm of public policy and defining public policy broadly. We want to<\/p>\n

talk about the discipline. We want to talk about the work. We want to talk about it, the implications of the work, et cetera.<\/p>\n

Being at the policy Dennis project, we’re always very interested in data here, which will what we’ll talk about, we’ll do that. We’ll<\/p>\n

be mixing together people who are with the University of Texas, of people who can come in here and talk<\/p>\n

with us in studio and also their political scientists from around the country for this first episode.<\/p>\n

Katie. Q Tell us what is on the agenda. We’ll be talking to Dr. Derek EPP, who is an<\/p>\n

assistant professor here at the University of Texas on his 2018 book,<\/p>\n

The Structure of Policy Change. So what’s what’s this book about? It’s got a big title, but that title can mean a lot of<\/p>\n

things. Derek focuses on the differences between collective decision making and deliberative<\/p>\n

decision making. It’s a fascinating book. It’s almost like. It’s like a psychology book. In addition to be a public policy<\/p>\n

punctuated equilibrium book. Yeah. He uses a lot of budget data to<\/p>\n

look at how these decisions are made. Yeah. It’s really great. I’m excited to play the episode and that’s<\/p>\n

going to follow this. But first, we just I have a couple of quick announcements. So this is our first episode. We’re<\/p>\n

really excited to hear what you think about this episode. If you’ve any feedback, there’s eight people you think we should be interviewing, if there’s questions<\/p>\n

we should ask. If you know my voice is annoying, whatever. Email us at policy agendas at Gmail<\/p>\n

dot com or tweet at us at policy agendas if you like the podcast if that feedback<\/p>\n

is positive. Please leave us a rating on i-Tunes if you can that helps people discover the show.<\/p>\n

Please share it with your colleagues and friends. We really think this podcast has potential. We think that the discipline<\/p>\n

has a hole for people discussing new work and we think it’s a lot of fun and so we’re really excited to share it with you.<\/p>\n

And with that note, next up is our interview with Professor Derek EPP on the structure of policy<\/p>\n

change. We are now joined by Derek App, Derek is a assistant professor of<\/p>\n

government here at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of the book. We are going to discuss today the structure<\/p>\n

of Policy Change. Derek, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much. It’s wonderful to be here. Katie<\/p>\n

and E.J., I really appreciate being the first guest on your very exciting podcast. Thank<\/p>\n

you. Thank you. Derek is also heavily involved in the Party Agendas Project here at U.T. And sadly, he’s<\/p>\n

a familiar face, is the perfect person to get this started. And we’re going to start talking about the structure of<\/p>\n

policy change. So, Derek, I’d like you to be a first for the listeners who haven’t haven’t read<\/p>\n

this maybe or or or you know, that to pick it up. Can you summarize this book? What what what<\/p>\n

is the argument you make in the structure of policy change? Salud. So this is a book that<\/p>\n

is first of all, I had to write a dissertation when I was a graduate student at USC. And so this is the<\/p>\n

final culmination of that dissertation project. But the book looks at how governments<\/p>\n

process information and what the consequences are for how policies<\/p>\n

change over time. And so pretty much from the from the get-go studying the genocide in<\/p>\n

studying policy process, people been interested in how do policies change over time. And there’s been a lot<\/p>\n

of developments in that area. So if you talk about famous studies, for example, you Schnyder<\/p>\n

conflict expansion, the three streams approach by Kingdon, you have garbage can model.<\/p>\n

And one of the important innovations in this field study is, is what has been known as the punctuated<\/p>\n

equilibrium theory. And this was actually developed by one of our professors here at U.T., Brian Jones,<\/p>\n

along with his colleague, Frank Baumgardner, who is who is at u._n._c. And they borrow the name<\/p>\n

punctuated equilibrium from biology. And it’s this is the idea that change<\/p>\n

can go through long periods of what is temporary equilibrium and then you’ll<\/p>\n

have brief periods of very dramatic change. And so<\/p>\n

what they observed is that policies when we looked at policies, whether we focus on a particular<\/p>\n

policy area like nuclear energy, like pesticides, like NASA, whatever<\/p>\n

the area was, or if we aggregated outwards and we looked at the entire federal government’s<\/p>\n

budget, we would find what would they turn this punctuated equilibrium pattern, which is<\/p>\n

to say a lot of Stacie’s, a lot of very low level changes and then a few really<\/p>\n

dramatic overhauls where the government appears to dramatically rethink the way it’s going<\/p>\n

to approach an issue. And so the question that they were interested in is why<\/p>\n

do we observe this? And this is actually something that scholars of the policy process have<\/p>\n

been struggling with for a long time. We had theories that the good job of explaining the punctuations<\/p>\n

and that would be things like the policy windows again. Kingdon, we had theories that did a good job<\/p>\n

of explaining the incrementalism and that would be like without Askey and his theory of incrementalism<\/p>\n

punctuated equilibrium is the first to put them together in a really nice way. And what Jones and Baumgardner<\/p>\n

told us is that it comes down to basically frictions or roadblocks that<\/p>\n

act on the policy process. And they identified institutional roadblocks and also<\/p>\n

cognitive ones. And these are simply things that disrupt how governments are going to process<\/p>\n

information. So rather than sort of continuously and proportionally<\/p>\n

updating to new information that happens in the world, governments become stuck on a<\/p>\n

certain idea or certain dimension of a problem. They really overinvest in<\/p>\n

that dimension. And then as time passes and the policy solutions to settle<\/p>\n

on become further out of step with the world, when they do get around to<\/p>\n

revising that policy, the changes can be really dramatic. So that’s sort of the jumping off point<\/p>\n

for that before the book gets involved in. What I was curious in is what are some particular mechanisms within<\/p>\n

government that affect how how institutions and policymakers can process<\/p>\n

information? And what we would expect is some types of institutions allow for more<\/p>\n

proportional processing of information and others it’s going to be more intermittent. And<\/p>\n

so the words that is typically used in conjunction with this theory is disproportionate information processing.<\/p>\n

And in the book, I decide that it really comes down to three different things. There’s that there’s the capacity<\/p>\n

of governments to process information. And this is things like how much research capacity<\/p>\n

there’s a government have, how professional is the legislature, how much support staff do<\/p>\n

policymakers have, what is their ability to really engage with information and try to find solutions to<\/p>\n

problems? And so all of that is capacity. And then I look at complexity. Some issues<\/p>\n

are simply more complex than others. Shark attacks are very complex. We don’t know how to predict<\/p>\n

when a shark is going to bite somebody. So that’s a complex issue if you’re going to try and solve that.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, something like old age is is conceptually very simple. We know how old the population<\/p>\n

is. We know how old it’s gonna be tomorrow. And so that would be you know, that’s complexity. Complex<\/p>\n

issues. Simple issues. And then the third area that I focus on. And this<\/p>\n

to me, I think is perhaps one of the more innovative areas of the book is to look at what I term<\/p>\n

collective decision making. And so I draw a distinction between deliberative processes.<\/p>\n

And these are what most of us are familiar with. So if you’re a member of a group and you have to figure out<\/p>\n

how are we going to allocate our time or resources, you would engage in a deliberative process. And in fact,<\/p>\n

most of the policymaking that we see is is done through this deliberative process where people<\/p>\n

meet in a room. They debate. Maybe they vote. All of that I term deliberation.<\/p>\n

And I draw a contrast with what could be discerned, collective or disaggregated decision making,<\/p>\n

which is when you have a lot of semi-autonomous actors who all make their own decisions.<\/p>\n

And then the final outcome that we might measure is, is the the collective output<\/p>\n

of all those independent decisions. So the quintessential example of this would be a stock market.<\/p>\n

And I make the case that these aggregation gains that you see in things like the stock market<\/p>\n

allow those systems to process informationally much more efficiently than you might commonly observe<\/p>\n

from the deliberative process is neither of them are perfect. There are still cognitive frictions that act on both<\/p>\n

the collective and the deliberative decision making. But the collective decision making can<\/p>\n

circumvent that to some extent. So your dependent variable here is instability or policy<\/p>\n

punctuations however you want to say it. Why is this dependent variable that we should care about? What’s there? The<\/p>\n

why does it matter that we can predict when some systems will be more stable and some will be more unstable?<\/p>\n

Yeah. So I mean there’s there’s a couple of answers to that. One is is simply that’s what one of the things you’re<\/p>\n

interested in and as political scientist and it actually tells us, I think a lot about sort of fundamentally<\/p>\n

how do governments operate? Are they meticulously updating in response to new information<\/p>\n

or are they surprised the lot? And when we observe a system that is producing a whole lot<\/p>\n

of punctuations, a whole lot of Stacie’s, that would appear to be a system that is<\/p>\n

surprise a lot, which is to say that problems are getting better or worse. But those<\/p>\n

those changes in the problem streams are not being smoothly translated into policy outputs.<\/p>\n

And so I think it speaks directly to the kind of governance that we receive and what we can expect<\/p>\n

from government. It doesn’t mean that government can’t solve problems, but we should be realistic<\/p>\n

about government’s ability to to quickly adapt the problems. And there’s lots of examples. So there’s there’s<\/p>\n

there’s tons of problems that we can identify and we say, why isn’t the government doing something about that?<\/p>\n

And but but that to a large extent, is part of the system. And so that’s what the book is actually<\/p>\n

looking at, is trying to understand under what conditions could the government perhaps respond more quickly to things<\/p>\n

that we might identify as problems, things like climate change, things like immigration. These are issues that for a lot of people<\/p>\n

are calling out for some attention and and they’re not getting them. And so this book tries to answer,<\/p>\n

well, why might that be the case? So how does the discussion on<\/p>\n

collective decision making coming to us? Right. So the collective decision making so this<\/p>\n

is a literature on punctuated equilibrium that had focused on basically whatever type of governmental<\/p>\n

system we would observe this same dichotomy between status and punctuation. And that<\/p>\n

was it was such a reliable finding that I think they they published a bunch of people, published<\/p>\n

an article called The General Empirical Law of Public Budgets, which was simply saying that that<\/p>\n

budgets fall when no matter where you look at what level, what country they fall. This punctuated equilibrium pattern.<\/p>\n

A lot of small level changes, a few really big ones. So that’s unusual. You don’t find a lot of political scientists published<\/p>\n

an article called The General Empirical Law. We usually say that for, you know, the natural sciences.<\/p>\n

And so there was this big question out there, what is there anything that can kind of get around this? Is there any area<\/p>\n

where we see less of a dichotomy between spaces and punctuation? And I think that the collective<\/p>\n

decision making offers us perhaps our best bet on on that regard. So when you look at<\/p>\n

distributions of changes coming from these collective processes, you tend to find a much lower<\/p>\n

level of punctuation than you do from your typical deliberative process. Now, that’s not to say the<\/p>\n

punctuations never happen. And we know this from the stock market. I mean, the housing market collapse,<\/p>\n

that’s a punctuations stock market, but that kind of thing is less common from your collective systems<\/p>\n

than it is from your from your deliberative system. You have a whole chapter<\/p>\n

testing different systems or situations with this collective decision making.<\/p>\n

You summarize those a little bit, right? So so the first thing I wanted to do and this might actually be<\/p>\n

the next chapter in the book, but then the one you’re talking about. But for someone to judge thinks in between. Oh,<\/p>\n

a lot of people, when they hear sort of market systems of collective decision making, they think will private firms.<\/p>\n

And so they think, Wilson, should we just privatize government services? But I want<\/p>\n

to carefully make the point in the book that the decision making that takes place within a firm<\/p>\n

I would consider deliberative. Those are decisions that are about how we are going to allocate resources that would<\/p>\n

take place in a board room that’s going to that’s very different than the kind of decision making we would observe from a market,<\/p>\n

which is a bunch of quasi independent investors trying to make some money. And so<\/p>\n

I was trying to look at how can government integrate not so much privatization,<\/p>\n

which I think is different by market systems. And so look at a few instances<\/p>\n

of deregulation. So, for example, the deregulation of airlines, I spent quite a bit of time talking<\/p>\n

about regional cap and trade programs, which is the government trying to sort of impose a market collective<\/p>\n

on a policy output. And then the biggest example is is is monetary policy<\/p>\n

and exchange rates. And this is this is obviously an important area of of of<\/p>\n

policymaking. Exchange rates are important in some countries like like historically China<\/p>\n

has been has sort of artificially held their exchange rate a certain level. And so they would decide<\/p>\n

within the Chinese politburo what level they think is appropriate for their change rate to try and<\/p>\n

achieve whatever economic goals they might have. And that is is different than a country like the<\/p>\n

United States, which lets their exchange rate fluctuate freely on the market. And you observe a really<\/p>\n

profound difference in the distribution of changes, depending on whether you’re looking at the free floating<\/p>\n

currencies like the United States and a lot of the Western democracies versus the countries that are artificially<\/p>\n

manipulating their exchange rates. So they thought this was an important<\/p>\n

chapter because even having identified this collective decision making, it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a huge<\/p>\n

role for it in policymaking. And so I wanted to illustrate that there are some key areas where where<\/p>\n

it can be a big part of the process in that Chapter 8. You<\/p>\n

you also analyze the difference between the decision making a public firms versus private firms or<\/p>\n

republic organizations versus private organizations and different types of those organizations. And what you show is that<\/p>\n

in terms of expenditures for when you’re comparing, for example, private colleges versus public<\/p>\n

colleges or you’re comparing the United States postal system vs. U.P.S. and FedEx.<\/p>\n

There’s no difference between in the distribution of changes for those private firms.<\/p>\n

So this feels like a fairly profound and important finding. And I’m curious. I mean,<\/p>\n

are you taking a shot at Adam Smith right here? Right. Is this used to saying that the invisible hand might not be that<\/p>\n

that the information conveyed from the market to firms does not produce<\/p>\n

efficient outcomes or more efficient outcomes, then allow the privatization<\/p>\n

people, people who support privatization tend to I tend to believe no, definitely nothing. Not doing<\/p>\n

anything as ambitious as taking shots at Smith. I actually I’m actually a big believer in the book with the<\/p>\n

efficient market hypothesis. And I think that’s. I mean, the reason that you find fewer<\/p>\n

punctuations from markets is because I think they are informationally efficient, that that fits pretty<\/p>\n

directly with the distinction I’m trying to make between collective decision making in deliberative<\/p>\n

ones. But the point is simply that the firms are firms maybe publicly traded on a market,<\/p>\n

but that’s still the way that they’re going to allocate resources within the firm. That’s not necessarily a<\/p>\n

collective process. That’s the same type of process. Whatever goes on in their boardroom, presumably some sort<\/p>\n

of deliberation. And so the point I’m making in that in the book is that those conversations<\/p>\n

that are happening in the boardroom are not necessarily any more informationally efficient<\/p>\n

than what you would find. In the public service. And so when we compare<\/p>\n

areas where there’s both areas of the economy, which is both a government service like mail delivery<\/p>\n

and also private service like FedEx, we find that we find about the same level of punctuations in how<\/p>\n

they’re spending their money. In both of these both of these areas. But it does imply that, for example,<\/p>\n

I might not see many gains in efficiency if I decide to privatise a service. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.<\/p>\n

And so that’s I think the book is pretty skeptical. And I want to be clear, I’m just talking about, you know,<\/p>\n

this is a huge literature and I’m just talking here about informational efficiency. So there may be a major<\/p>\n

argument for privatization that relies on on other areas. But I think there’s there’s no real<\/p>\n

clear argument that that firms, at least for now, have shown the book that firms are going to be<\/p>\n

inherently better at processing information than governments would be.<\/p>\n

And and I think that’s because both of them are relying on this pretty deliberative way of allocating resources.<\/p>\n

Now that, you know, it may be that if we look at the areas in which firms are involved,<\/p>\n

that those tend to be less complicated areas. And that’s an argument that’s been made as a government. Maybe<\/p>\n

it looks inefficient because we give government all the hard problems. That’s why we have government<\/p>\n

in the first place. So I can’t rule that out. But I can’t say that when you compare something with the same industry<\/p>\n

where both the government and the firm is involved, it doesn’t look like in terms of their ability<\/p>\n

to process information, the private sector is doing any better. So higher education is a great example of that.<\/p>\n

And you see, if you look at how private universities are allocating their budgets, you see<\/p>\n

actually it’s an even more pronounced dichotomy between doing nothing and then making really radical<\/p>\n

changes. Then you see at public universities, you do want to come back to this<\/p>\n

public university and education example. First, though,<\/p>\n

can you explain efficiency? Because I think that can mean a lot of things, right?<\/p>\n

Yeah, that’s a good point. And so I’m pretty clear I want to be clear in the book early on that when I’m<\/p>\n

talking about efficiency, I’m talking about informational efficiency. And this is a rather abstract<\/p>\n

concept. But it basically what it means is, is how good is this system at processing<\/p>\n

information? And so when people refer to things like the efficient market<\/p>\n

hypothesis, what they mean is that markets are very good at translating relevant<\/p>\n

information about buying and selling assets into actual values of those assets.<\/p>\n

So it’s a pretty smooth translation of information and we think that that doesn’t really happen<\/p>\n

in governmental systems to the same degree. And so that’s what we mean. When I when I say efficiency, I’m just simply<\/p>\n

meaning that the informational efficiency, that translation of of informational inputs into<\/p>\n

policy outputs and there’s no efficiency has nothing to do<\/p>\n

with any normative arguments that good or bad policy. It’s simply about the<\/p>\n

ability to process this information. Yeah. Insofar as I look in the book, I think it’s<\/p>\n

not too much of a stretch to make a normative argument. I mean, I think given the choice between more<\/p>\n

informationally as efficient systems and less informationally efficient systems, we would choose<\/p>\n

greater efficiency. But there may be tradeoffs. I mean, governments do a lot of complicated.<\/p>\n

Governments are concerned with things like justice and fairness. And and they’re not just China be the most efficient.<\/p>\n

They’re also trying to be the most equitable and things like that. And so if there’s tradeoffs there, well, then we<\/p>\n

would have to take those seriously. Yeah. This comes up a lot and studies are punctuated<\/p>\n

equilibrium. And I think I’d almost take a stronger, stronger stance on it. So I look at the city of Austin.<\/p>\n

Steve Austin, we’ve we’ve had tremendous economic growth over the last 10 years or so. And as a result,<\/p>\n

we have a transportation problem. We don’t have enough roads. And if 10 years when we started to see<\/p>\n

that trend developing, the city of Austin had reacted, you know, with the distribution of changes available<\/p>\n

to it and begun building roads, we wouldn’t have as much traffic as we have right now. And you can see this come up in<\/p>\n

area after area. So, I mean, I think I think we can say that efficient, that there is a level of efficiency<\/p>\n

here and maybe, maybe we shouldn’t expect a perfectly normal distribution changes. But, you know, we weren’t<\/p>\n

some of the states you’re looking at are very, very far from normal in terms of their budget and their budgetary<\/p>\n

changes at least. Yeah, that’s a great point. And I didn’t mean to suggest that there I think there really are major<\/p>\n

consequences to these things. The question and you raise this is to what extent<\/p>\n

can we be hopeful? I mean, how many reforms can government actually put in place that are going to allow them<\/p>\n

to do better at this? Because really they do have even even a local government has a pretty difficult<\/p>\n

job when you consider all the problems they could be attending to. And I think there is a certain degree of natural<\/p>\n

complexity that makes it very difficult. Now, that said, I think<\/p>\n

and this is one of the things I talk about in the book, you know, we do have to look at policies<\/p>\n

or institutions like nonprofessional legislatures. And I think<\/p>\n

we do have to seriously consider what does that mean for for a state like Texas? Our ability.<\/p>\n

Ability of our state legislators to sort of anticipate problems and respond to them<\/p>\n

maybe ahead of time where as they’re happening and one of the things I show in the books is that the states that have the<\/p>\n

nonprofessional legislatures, you actually do tend to see more punctuations,<\/p>\n

which would which appear to be sort of overcorrection. So let me ask you about that really quickly,<\/p>\n

because one thing I think about with Texas is that although we have a nonprofessional legislature,<\/p>\n

we also have an incredibly powerful executive branch. The executive branch’s power is not not nested<\/p>\n

in the governor’s office. It’s nested in a series of elected officials. So he is there like a hidden tradeoff that that<\/p>\n

that exists in some of these places where you the system is adjusted to to find that capacity<\/p>\n

elsewhere. Yeah, that’s a good point. And so that’s that goes slightly beyond the scope of the book. But<\/p>\n

I think that is the natural thing that happens is that there is a certain whether you have a<\/p>\n

nonprofessional legislature or not. You know, the problems are the same. And you’ve got to figure out a way as a<\/p>\n

responsible government to try to solve those problems. And so that may mean you put more power in the hands of the<\/p>\n

executives. Another thing that it’s typically meant is that for the states with the nonprofessional legislatures<\/p>\n

that you have more power with, with interest groups, or at least they have more control over the information<\/p>\n

that is being received and processed by legislators, because it’s simply the legislature might not<\/p>\n

have any independent research capacity which makes them quite rely on whatever interest groups<\/p>\n

want to tell them. Tell you this in a slightly different direction.<\/p>\n

One of the things in your. Chapter on pathologies<\/p>\n

of decision making may not be exactly the title, but because<\/p>\n

you actually have a you have a. You do a quick study<\/p>\n

on presidential elections that. I thought I had some interesting<\/p>\n

implications. Do you want to summarize? Sure, yeah. So what I do in<\/p>\n

the chapters is I look at elections as being one of these types of political<\/p>\n

decisions where you see where it may be. Here is closer to the collective decision making<\/p>\n

model than the deliberative one in the sense that the electoral outcomes are the result<\/p>\n

of millions of independent voters making their own semi-autonomous decisions. And then we aggregate all that together<\/p>\n

to figure out who wins the election. And then now that’s not obviously exactly like the stock market, but it’s closer<\/p>\n

to that than the type of deliberation that would typically take place within the legislative<\/p>\n

session. And so what you see is that electoral changes and two party vote over<\/p>\n

time, these tend to be relatively stable, normally distributed. And again, not not<\/p>\n

a whole lot of punctuations, which would indicate that there is some degree of informational efficiency when we<\/p>\n

aggregate out and look at election electoral systems.<\/p>\n

I mean it, but your book seems to indicate that it’s not completely<\/p>\n

normal, that presidential elections specifically do actually seem<\/p>\n

to have some collective decision results,<\/p>\n

which to me seems to imply that there’s actually a moderate<\/p>\n

a moderating effect for the debate process.<\/p>\n

You mean the presidential debates? Yeah. So if it’s deliberative. If<\/p>\n

they kind of counter to this is deliberative decision making, which is everybody kind of<\/p>\n

talking about it. I think it’s very I think the book is all about relative<\/p>\n

the grids of informational efficiency. I don’t think any of our systems, any human system is going to reach perfect<\/p>\n

information efficiency. The market isn’t it’s not the perfect efficiency market<\/p>\n

hypothesis and even the market doesn’t get there. I think certainly presidential<\/p>\n

elections don’t quite get there either. And the big problem we have there and to a somewhat lesser<\/p>\n

degree with the market is that, of course, voters are not. Independent actors were<\/p>\n

are highly influenced by by what our peers are doing, and that means that we are susceptible<\/p>\n

to the type of herd mentality and this is the same type of mentality that may create a market bubble. Now, I don’t<\/p>\n

know if anyone’s directly sort of used that analogy in terms of presidential races, but you could see the same type of phenomenon there.<\/p>\n

So I don’t mean to imply that any of these processes are perfectly efficient, but it’s just that we see<\/p>\n

fewer or less of this dichotomy between spaces and punctuation than we would when we’re looking<\/p>\n

at government systems. So we can move on to talk about your conclusion in<\/p>\n

case you got a few questions here. And I’ll just want to start off with that. Another just an overall question<\/p>\n

here. Is deliberation bad? No deliberations. It’s not bad. It’s not. I think,<\/p>\n

in fact, deliberation is is basically inevitable. I mean, there’s a lot of decisions<\/p>\n

that we have to make that are not simply going to be solved. There’s just simply no collective mechanism<\/p>\n

that we could impose over them. And so I think, you know, you lose some informational efficiency,<\/p>\n

but it is fairly unavoidable. In the book, I talk a little bit about like, well, what would a system<\/p>\n

of like budgeting that was based on collective decision making look like? And you could imagine that you<\/p>\n

allow every member of Congress to allocate some certain amount of funds and then the total<\/p>\n

budget is just all those allocations put together. And so then each member of Congress would have<\/p>\n

to make very strategic decisions about how do I want to allocate my portion of this budget.<\/p>\n

I don’t know. I don’t think the federal government is going to test that experiment anytime soon. But it be<\/p>\n

interesting to look at what that kind of process would look like. But I do think realistically<\/p>\n

the role for collective decision making, I think it’s important to recognize the informational<\/p>\n

gains that can be made through this type of decision making. But I think its role in setting public policy<\/p>\n

is is probably always going to be somewhat circumspect. Now, with that said, things like exchange rates,<\/p>\n

I mean, that’s some serious policy. I mean, that’s an important chunk of the economy.<\/p>\n

And so it’s not that it’s zero, but it’s not like we can replace all deliberative decision making with<\/p>\n

with a more collective process. So this example you just gave on<\/p>\n

the budget. Is it? Is that do you imagine? And this is, of course,<\/p>\n

an experiment in a theoretical experiment at this point. But<\/p>\n

do you think that would work with policy as well if all the members kind of separately<\/p>\n

came to a conclusion? Celera’s is hard to envision what that would look like. I mean, the budget,<\/p>\n

you can sort of imagine it because, you know, it’s it’s it’s dollars. It’s quantitative<\/p>\n

as a policy. You have you cannot say abortion policy. It’s you couldn’t<\/p>\n

you couldn’t use collective decision making because it’s all about, you know, what is what is fair, what is<\/p>\n

just is right. And so I think you’re not going to replace<\/p>\n

it. There’s there’s a major is obviously a major role for deliberation in the way policy is made.<\/p>\n

So that’s I mean, that’s that’s one of the lessons of the book. And, in fact, not just the book, but sort of this this entire field of literature<\/p>\n

is that to some degree that these, you know, respecting the system, these punctuations. And so we just have to sort<\/p>\n

of recognize them for what they are and and realize that this is a limitation<\/p>\n

of governance to some degree. I think the<\/p>\n

one of the last questions that I kind of have for you is<\/p>\n

what what is the most compelling question that formed for you as you were writing this book or<\/p>\n

as you finished this research? Yeah, that is a good question.<\/p>\n

Yeah. The most compelling question that form for me, I think<\/p>\n

is it’s just this question of of how much do we want our governments<\/p>\n

to engage in information and what the consequences are of<\/p>\n

maybe turning away from information one. And this isn’t a trend to talk about in the book, but<\/p>\n

it’s true is that we’ve seen sort of a decline in the analytic capacity of government<\/p>\n

and a decrease in what might be called technocratic policymaking or<\/p>\n

honest numbers policymaking and a rise of more ideological policymaking. And so I<\/p>\n

think it’s interesting to consider what that kind of shift moving away from an information based model,<\/p>\n

what that means for our policies, but substantively, normatively, but also<\/p>\n

how our policy is going to change over time. And you imagine that we might end up with a government that is surprised<\/p>\n

by sudden policy crises more often than than we might have had otherwise.<\/p>\n

Derek, thank you for joining us, everybody. The book is The Structure of Policy Change. I highly recommend it.<\/p>\n

And we will we’ll put all the links in the descriptions for this podcast to that book. Katie,<\/p>\n

thank you for joining me as well. And this has been your Policy Agenda podcast. Thanks for having me. It’s<\/p>\n

been great.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/20\/2018\/12\/The-Policy-Agenda-Logo3-e1545063000555.png","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/podcast-download\/7\/episode-1-dr-derek-epp-on-collective-decision-making.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/podcast-player\/7\/episode-1-dr-derek-epp-on-collective-decision-making.mp3","audio_player":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/podcast-player\/7\/episode-1-dr-derek-epp-on-collective-decision-making.mp3<\/a><\/audio>","episode_data":{"playerMode":"dark","subscribeUrls":[],"rssFeedUrl":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/feed\/podcast\/the-policy-agenda","embedCode":"

Episode 1: The Structure of Policy Change with Derek Epp<\/a><\/blockquote>