Decision-making in Public Administration – Part 1

It’s common to think of decision-making as being the essence of public administration.

 If you think back to the 1st module, where we defined Public Administration as a
practical science, you can begin to recognize the importance of decisions and decision-
making.
 From a political standpoint, you have to recognize that the decisions that are made by
officials who are acting in the capacity of the government and the administrative state,
the bureaucrats and the elected officials, are acting in ways that can have a great impact
upon the everyday lives of the general public.
 Action, any kind of action, requires some type of decision.
 By decision, we are talking about something that is deliberate; we’re not talking about
instincts or urges; we’re talking about rational action.
 The point that we must focus upon is that in any environment in which the
administrative state operates, there are alternatives; we have to filter through
alternatives in order to settle upon what the correct path is to take in our pursuit of the
public good.

Decision Architecture
 How situations are designed and how decisions are then made
 We’ll touch on this on the very end when we get to the question of how policies
themselves can help determine decisions that are made by individuals, what has now
more conventionally become known as nudge policies

In the first lecture, we’ll cover an introduction to decision-making and talk about the standard
idea of rational, comprehensive decision making and the response to that, which is Herbert
Simon’s notion of bounded rationality.

What is decision-making?
 Simply put, it is the process of identifying and choosing alternatives (otherwise, we
could just call this problem-solving).
 There are a lot of layers to our concern with decision-making in Public Administration
o First, we have to understand the alternatives
o We have to understand how the alternatives relate to one another
o Systematically evaluate and assess alternatives so we can select between them
o Keep in mind that doing all this are individuals acting with the public interest in
mind.
 All of these issues of understanding alternatives, sifting through the alternatives and
arriving at a decision to act, these issues force us to revisit the tension that exists
between discretion and control, which we talked about in the context of accountability
(debate between Friedrich and Finer).
o Friedrich was more a larger proponent of discretion for public actors
 o Finer emphasized the unyielding importance of control over them through
elected officials.
 With decision-making, we find ourselves exploring something that is also completely and
utterly mundane, as well as organizationally essential and complex because we find
ourselves confronting this idea of Public Administration from the perspective of not just
how individuals decide, but more importantly, the question of how we decide.

Rational, comprehensive model of decision-making

 A return to that idea of an ideal type, much like Weber’s description of bureaucracy was
considered an ideal type as well, where he outlined those 6 key characteristics
 Here we are also approaching decision-making in a kind of ideal type sense, but we are
doing so with the quality of rationality at the fore.
 This idea is certainly an artifact of what we would call a managerial approach to Public
Administration
 Closely aligned with the simple bureaucratic theory that underlies classical Public
Administration.
 This rational, comprehensive model of decision-making assumes the following (key
assumptions we need to keep in mind):
o The actor is rational (this is the key idea)
 The actor has the ability to reason thorough ranked preferences
 Ability to make choices based upon the evidence provided and also doing
so by suspending ideology and personal favors.
 You should note that what we are talking about here is that notion of
formal rationality that Max Weber discusses because an actor has to have
the ability to reason through ranked preferences – notion of calculability
that is important and then make these choices that are based upon the
evidence and doing so while suspending ideology and personal favors.
 Impersonal decision based largely on calculations derived from a
thoughtful and reasoned investigation of whatever the situation actually
is
o The values are known and ranked
 This is an expression of what is important to, in this case, the
organization, the values.
 These values are known, and they are ranked.
 That’s an important component for being able to rank the preferences
o The objectives are also known and ranked.
 There could be competing objectives within an organization, which makes
organizational decision-making sometimes complex.
 In order for a decision to be both rational and comprehensive, the
objectives must be known and ranked; we have to know what our
priorities are
o There is sufficient evidence that links means to ends.
 This speaks to the idea of instrumental rationality, the notion that we are
thinking in terms of means and ends. (7:45)
  The important thing to remember here is that we can link up what it is
that we want to do with the way to do it
 Able to link up, in a clear way, based upon evidence, the means to
achieving our goals
o Ability to distinguish between ends and means
 This is a very complicated aspect of rational, comprehensive decision-
making because often times, we mistake our ends and our means.
 Sometimes we identify the means as ends in themselves
 A major consideration of the rational, comprehensive model of decision making, as you
can probably intuit control
o Concept of control is not limited simply to control over the decision maker, but
also over the conditions under which the decision is being made
o Control is a model for ensuring, to the greatest extent possible, that the wrong
decision is not made
o Control over the decision maker (The 3 ideas of control speak to the ways that
we can design systems to ensure that the right people are in the right place to
make the decision and to make sure the decision is as close to correct as
possible)
 Control over the decision maker through specialization
 What this means is that, very much in line with bureaucratic
theory, people are qualified for certain decisions, and only these
decisions end up on their desks
 One way to inflict control over any decision is to make sure that
only the people who are qualified for making certain decisions are
given that opportunity, and those who are unqualified for making
those decisions are excluded from the decision-making arena.
 Control over the decision through hierarchy itself
 The more complex decisions rise up the ladder of hierarchy to
those who are more qualified to handle them
 This speaks to the previous idea of control over the decisions
maker by pointing out that organizationally, we can set up systems
so that individuals who are more qualified to handle decisions are
receiving the opportunities to make these decisions from this
hierarchical ladder
 Control over the decision making through merit
 What is meant here is that a bureaucracy seeks to assure that only
those who have the technical ability to handle decisions are asked
to do so
o Control of the situation
 Control over the situation through definition
 It’s important to define the relevant objectives and the relevant
values. Remember, one of the key assumptions of rational,
comprehensive decision-making does have to do with knowing
the objectives, knowing the values, and being able to rank them
  What do we want to achieve? What are the parameters of
success?
 You have to be able to clarify the policy and also promote a kind of
uniformity in the treatment of that policy
 This is an important aspect of ensuring the comprehensiveness of
a decision
 Control over the situation through formalization
 We can sometimes standardize systems and procedures to make
sure we are getting all the relevant and necessary information
 You see this in standardized forms that helped to elicit relevant
information that might exclude potentially complicating factors
that also can clarify the values in the weights of those values to be
considered in the decision.
o These are all kind of abstract ways of thinking about rational, comprehensive
decision making and this notion sort of adopts a distinction that we’ve talked
about before between administration and politics where, as Wilson puts it,
administration or public administration is available in order to solve some of the
problems that have been presented in the political arena.
o Policies are identified and then a question is simply how do we get them done?
o The issue here has to do with arriving at the correct direction and knowing what
needs to be done in order to achieve these goals.
 This is what makes rational, comprehensive decision making what we
would call comprehensive.
 It’s not simply about laying out the general objective or laying out a vision
or a strategy, but its also about ensuring that the tactics that we take are
those that are directly related to achieving those goals.
 Distinction between strategy and tactics is something we will return to in
a later lecture on this subject with the notion of mix scanning by Amitai
Etzioni.
 For now, recognize that, for the administrator, there is little beyond the
standardized activity of administering to the decisions of policymakers
 This is a sort of fabricated way of thinking about public administration
that an administrator is there to execute the will of policymakers
 This is in essence, a good deal of what Herman Finer described in
the context of administrative responsibility and accountability
 In some respects, you can see this as removing decision-making
from the arena of administration
 This puts us back to that discretion and control tradeoff
 When we put more and more emphasis on control, you start to
see that administrators become more and more akin to what we
had previously called cogs in the machine.
 The design of the situation, the control over the situation and
control over the individual, both of these things are elements of
making sure that the right decision is arrived at within a system
 and that there is sufficient control to make sure the objectives
that are laid out by duly elected officials who are there to
represent the public are pursued.

This is a basic, general idea of rational, comprehensive decision making that we’re going to
revisit in a more practical sense when we get to the discussion of incrementalism.

Rational, comprehensive decision making is very much systematized around impersonality.

Because of its emphasis on control, you see a lot less opportunity for people to use their own
judgement and their own discretion for making decisions within the organization.

The idea of rational, comprehensive decision making is so abstract that it doesn’t lend itself very
well to an example, or at least a simple example. So instead, we’re going to leave it at this idea,
these main core characteristics of rational, comprehensive decision making and turn to one of
the more pertinent and important critiques of this idea of decision making as it has been
inherited from bureaucracy and from systems of control.
 Critique comes from a 1947 book titled “Administrative Behavior” by Herbert Simon.
 Text became seminal in public administration in the postwar period.
 In Herbert Simon’s dissertation, he systematically studied basically how administrators
behave and. Most importantly, how administrators make decisions.
 Throughout his career, Simon considered himself to be what he called a monomaniac of
decision making.
 His career was devoted in large part to studying the condition for making the best
decision possible.
 A lot of this attention that he put on decision making led him to become one of the key
figures in artificial intelligence.
 What’s most novel about Simon’s work is that he shifts the focus from the level of
rationality, as it is explained in rational, comprehensive decision making, to the level of
deciding
 He puts a lot more emphasis on this idea of deciding, and what this means is that he was
more concerned with how people actually make decisions and under what conditions
these decisions can be considered rational.
o This is a marked difference from what was discussed as rational, comprehensive
decision making because that idea, at least that theory of decision making has a
kind of prescriptive feel to it in which it is telling you if you follow these basic
principles, you will be able to achieve a level of rationality and comprehension of
any situation as to arrive at the best decision.
o Simon turned the tables a bit and began to look instead, not at how people
should make decisions, but how they actually did make decisions.
o Using that type of insight, he was able to explain a little bit more of what were
the shortcoming in decision making, both at the individual and organizational
level. (18:04)
o An important point has to be underscored about his work, and this is something
that Simon put a lot of interest and emphasis on.
  People who make decisions, in the context of organizations, make
decisions differently than they do in private, and this is very important.
 What Simon is saying is that when you’re within an organization, you’re
not going to make decisions the same way you would within the private
sphere itself, as an individual.
 This observation is what gave rise to Simon’s notion of what he called
administrative man.
 He contrasted this idea of administrative man with that of what he called
economic man, or what has also been described as homoeconomicus.
 Economic Man
o According to Herbert Simon, Economic Man is the rational actor and the kind of
decision maker that emerges from that model of decision making that we just
discussed, rational comprehensive decision making.
o This is a decision maker who is self-interested and assumes to have the requisite
information about any decision situation.
o In 1947, we have this notion of rational, comprehensive decision making that this
was the best way to make a decision, and what it suggested was that this best
way was available irrespective of the private or public sphere, and that people
who were acting in the interest of achieving the best decision in any given
situation would follow this basic prescription where what we just described as
rational, comprehensive decision making.
o An Administrative Man, became a critique of this rational, comprehensive
method of decision making.
o Simon makes a very interesting connection; he explains in his book that it is
because the rational, comprehensive model does not mirror reality, that there
can actually be a study of administrative behavior.
 This ideal type of rational, comprehensive decision making requires
someone who knows all information that is necessary about the values,
knows all information that is necessary about the objectives, knows how
the ends and the means are connected and other means are related to
our values and the general objectives
 This is someone who has full cognizance and full understanding of any
given situation.
 Simon argues that this is never available to people
 Nobody is ever in that type of situation
 Going back to the this idea of the rational, comprehensive model; it
assumes this comprehensive listing of all the options and alternatives,
that’s what is meant by we know the values, we know the objectives, we
know the means, we know the ends, we know everything we can know
about the situations as it stands. That’s what makes it comprehensive;
that’s the comprehensive aspect of it.
 It assumes all knowledge of the consequences from all the alternatives
 So again, we are aware of each of the alternatives that are available to us
and we’re able to rank those alternatives and we have to know everything
 that is necessary to know about the alternatives in order to arrive at a
reasonable ranking of them
 So that’s the second assumption here is that there is knowledge of the
consequences from all the alternatives
 Then third, that the best decision is determined by a calculation of the
efficiently optimal path to be taken
 Again, this gets to that notion of calculable rationale, calculability
within formal rationality that the best decision is arrived at, as a
matter of calculation
 Not only that, but human beings can make the right calculation
 Simon argued that these standards simply were not available to people
and they could not be met, and the reason is quite simple.
 People, in general, even within organizations, but people in
general are not privy to all the necessary information.
 Even if they were privy, they would be incapable of processing the
information that is necessary to satisfy the comprehensiveness
requirement
 So instead, what people do, is they satisfice, and that is a word
Herbert Simon himself coined, satisfice. It’s a portmanteau
between satisfy and suffice.
 Essentially, satisfice means you do just enough to achieve your
objectives.
 To satisfy your goals, you will act in a sufficient fashion, and this is
generally how people act within the private sphere
 Administrative Man
o Has the ability to call upon the resources of the entire organization
o This is where Simon’s major contribution to decision making really comes out.
o This notion of administrative behavior is a recognition that this idea of rational,
comprehensive decision making is not a description of how individuals make
decisions, or even of how individuals can make decisions.
o Organizations, bringing together the various capacities of these individuals, are
able to make better decisions that they would otherwise be able to make as
individuals.
o This is where the activity of administrative man becomes pertinent is that we
don’t have just a bunch of economic man or a bunch of rational actors all acting
within the confines of the organization, it is actually the organization itself that
makes possible our ability to make better decisions.

What is important to focus upon in Simon’s critique of rational, comprehensive decision making
as an ideal type is the development of administration of organization as an opportunity for
better decision making, but also to the fact, as Herbert Simon acknowledges, that individuals
simply are not capable of the kind of rational, comprehensive decision making that is expected
of a fully rational organization.
In the next lecture, we’ll talk more about the alternative way of thinking about decisions within
organizations, which is called incrementalism.
Decision making in Public Administration – Part 2

Continuation of Simon’s critique of rational, comprehensive decisions making and his work on
administrative behaviors
 Simon concluded that organizations provide a more extensive capacity for decision
making; the reason for this is that individuals in isolation are what Simon considered to
be boundedly rational
 Bounded rationality refers to the condition that individuals both do not have access to
all the information that’s necessary for making a comprehensive decision and, even if
they did, an individual is not capable of processing that amount of information in order
to arrive at a calculated decision.
 This is why individuals tend to satisfice, meaning they do just enough to satisfy their
objectives in order to get where they want to go through their decision making.
 Simon is basically pointing out that the two core pillars of rational, comprehensive
decision making, are simply unavailable to individuals
o They do not have the information available to them, so it cannot be
comprehensive
o Even if they did have the information, they would not be able to act in a purely
rational way
 Basically, what Simon argues is that the conditions for rational, comprehensive decision
making simply aren’t possible in individuals
 However, as Simon points out, a properly designed system in an organization offers
opportunities for approximating those conditions, these conditions that are apparently
impossible within an individual
 What he’s saying is that organizations allow for more complex decision making and
action; Simon holds the potential of organizations in very high regard
 He sees this potential to be in the ability that groups of people, with properly assigned
tasks, allows for the discovery and implementation of the right decision in a given
situation. This is the general potential he sees within organizations
 Simon would become one of the most influential theorists of organizational behavior in
the 20th century, as well as systematization, specifically through his work on artificial
intelligence.
 He arrived at his thoughts on organizations by focusing upon how individuals actually
make decisions and distinguishing between that fictional ideal of homoeconomicus and
the actual conditions of what he called administrative man.
 However, his thoughts on organizations, at least early on, were in many respects,
actually a return to an idealized condition, because, as you heard, Simon believed in the
potential of organizations to approximate those conditions of rational, comprehensive
decision making to overcome the limitations that were brought by any given individual
 Simon is recognizing the shortcomings of individuals, but seeing the potential within
organizations to overcome their shortcomings.

Charles Lindblom
 It wasn’t until the work of Charles Lindblom in the 1950s that we have an actual critique
of rationality that is focused not only on individual limitations, but also on organizational
limitations.
 What Lindblom was studying and showed was how organizations make decisions and
found that some of the same shortcomings about individuals are consistent with
organizations themselves.
 Charles Lindblom’s critique of rational, comprehensive decision making and, more
importantly, what he calls incrementalism
o Rational, comprehensive decision making in the reading that you all did is what
he refers to as the root method of decision making.
o According to Lindblom, the failures of this type of decision making are based
upon limitations in a multitude of areas
 The first of these is the cognitive, or problem solving, ability of both
individuals and organizations (this aligns closely with Simon’s idea about
whether or not individuals have the capacity to address things in a
rational fashion). Lindblom makes the point that organizations suffer
similar pathologies in this respect.
 Secondly, the available information isn’t always available even to
organizations. Although organizations may make it easier to acquire and
process information, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the organization
is designed or positioned in a way to do such a thing
 Remember, Lindblom is focusing upon how organizations actually
make decisions similar to how Simon was focusing upon how
individuals within organizations actually make decisions.
 This problem of available information, in many respects, concerns
also future consequences and future conditions; it may be the
case that we have a lot of information about the past, that gives
us no guarantees about what the future will hold or what the
future will bring.
 So, in that case, available information is unavailable in a strict
sense.
 Third problem is the cost of research; it’s not a zero cost
 What Lindblom points out is that organizations have limited
resources and that they can devote only a portion of their
resources to the actual research to get and acquire information
and arrange or organize that information for the assistance in
making decisions.
 The fourth important limitation Lindblom identifies is that even within
organizations, the ability to distinguish between facts and values is not
always apparent
 We do not necessarily distinguish between these as individuals
 We often times conflate facts and values, but in an important
sense, Lindblom points out, that this is also done within
organizations, and this has a lot to do, for example, with mission
 statements and agenda setting where organizations lay out the
direction they want to go.
o Oftentimes these directions are laid out in a way that
speaks more to what we want and what we desire and
what we find important than it does to the actual facts on
the ground.
 The fifth point that Lindblom makes as to a limitation is the dynamics of
the policy process in and of itself. (7:46)
 Issues come about not in a linear fashion or even necessarily in a
reasonable way.
 Organizations have to address issues as they are brought to the
organization and that it’s not always clear that they can plan for issues
that come up that an organization must face
o What do organizations then do? As Lindblom puts it, the solution to this is to
focus on what he calls successive limited comparisons. He later developed
disjointed incrementalism.
 This is the idea of the branch method that Lindblom outlines for us
 This essentially defines incrementalism
o Incrementalism will be an important way of thinking about decision making,
especially as you get into your discussions of organizations and public policy later
in your education.

Incrementalism
 The idea of incrementalism is based first upon a recognition that values and empirical
analysis are intertwined, both for organizations and individuals.
 It’s not always clear that we were able to separate ourselves, our facts and our values
 Facts are not objective and independent or independent of those who are observing it.
 Even empirical analysis, the things we conduct research about is value laden.
 We make decisions about what to measure, how to measure it, and these decisions have
a bearing upon what it is that we’re doing research upon and how that research is then
produced.
 Lindblom makes this case when he talks about two issues
o Inflation.
 Inflation isn’t just a neutral idea, even within economic analysis
 Some inflation is accepted, but of course, inflation is not necessarily good
for those consumers, but it’s good for the economy as a whole, so there’s
a value judgement that’s made in it.
o Relocation of tenants
 There’s the discussion of the relocation of tenants and especially when it
comes to affordable housing in a more modern sense.
 These present some major issues about what is important, do we
prioritize housing as an asset or housing as a shelter?
 So, this recognition that values and empirical analysis are intertwined is an important
part of incrementalism.
 Another important part is that there’s no widespread agreement on the cause of many
things that we find ourselves facing, hence the solution to any problem.
 So, organizations come to find themselves facing issues in a variety of ways, and it’s not
always clear that we know why a problem is a problem.
 Even if there was a very clear agreement on why a problem is a problem, there would be
no agreement over the way to achieve the solution.
o What Lindblom is speaking to here is the fact that there can be actual
disagreement about the nature of our problems, even whether or not what is
broadly considered a problem within the organization is an actual problem that
needs to be addressed.
o So, if you can’t even agree upon the nature of the problem, certainly, you can’t
agree upon things to do about it.
 Another component of incrementalism is a general rejection of the distinction between
means and ends
o This is important because, what Lindblom points to here is, that instead of
focusing upon means and ends, which is this sort of an instrumentally rational
way of approaching things, a very bureaucratic way of approaching things, he
says that really, especially in the arena of policy and public service, is agreement
and negotiation between policy analysts and decision makers.
o So his point is that, given the fact, as previously mentioned, that we don’t
necessarily know what a problem is or where this problem comes from or the
cause of the problem, that means that we really don’t understand the
relationship between the means and the ends.
o We don’t know what to do about this problem or how to do anything about this
problem.
o So, instead, what decision making within organizations tends to prioritize is
agreement and negotiation.
o Oftentimes, this comes down to negotiating the actual problem definition itself.
(12:51)