PO345 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Program Evaluation, Communication Problems, Rationality
Document Summary
The matters covered by legislation have become increasingly technical, but the wording of that legislation was often very general, with the result that it was increasingly left to non-elected officials to determine how the law would be applied. These bureaucrats, like all human beings, had values that influenced the way they implemented policies. Bureaucratic discretion and the impossibility of keeping values out of the administrative process are problems as old as the modern study of public administration. They are what we today would call implementation problems. Policy implementation is the process of transforming the goals of a policy into results. It follows the actual setting of goals and is necessary for their attainment. Policies are broad statements of goals that may assume two forms: general goals and operational goals. Programs are the measures taken to achieve those goals, to implement those policies. Implementation is what happens at the program stage and is chiefly the task of bureaucrats.
