Letter
from the Editor
Greetings.
This is the third issue of Policy
Currents that has been published as an e-newsletter. We’ve had a few growing pains and learned
some lessons in making the transition from paper to electrons, but hopefully
the transition has been relatively straightforward from your perspective. I welcome any suggestions or comments that
you may have about how to continue to improve the newsletter.
One of the primary benefits of this transition has
been the creation of new opportunities for initiatives to benefit members of
the public policy section, as a result of spending less money on printing and
mailing. One of these initiatives is
Mark Schneider’s “Take a Footnote for a Drink” experiment. As Mark
has previously explained, the goal of this experiment is to foster communication between different
generations of policy scholars. It
works like this. Let's say that you are
a junior policy scholar and you frequently cite the work of a more senior
policy scholar. You have never met that scholar but would like to. You contact
Mark by email at mark.schneider@stonybrook.edu with the name of that scholar. Mark will try to broker a meeting between
you and that senior scholar during the APSA meeting in San Francisco this
August. The meeting could be over drinks, perhaps a decaf latte grande with
skimmed milk (which Mark prefers to call a "why bother") or perhaps a
more serious drink. The junior scholar
gets to meet someone whose work has been important to his or her research,
while the senior scholar fulfills a fundamental professional obligation as a
teacher and scholar. The senior scholar will be reimbursed by the section for
the costs of the drinks.
One of the other benefits of moving the newsletter
to a web-based environment is that it permits us to use the section’s website
in new and innovative ways. We have
created three bulletin boards for you to use.
To date, they haven’t been getting much traffic. I’d encourage you to bookmark the website (www.APSAPolicySection.org) and to
utilize the bulletin boards as much as possible. These bulletin boards offer a mechanism for democratizing
communications among members of the policy section. All three of the bulletin boards share the same userid and
password, which you will have received in the email notice notifying you about
this newsletter. In particular, I would
encourage you to take advantage of the announcements bulletin board when you
would like to share information about an upcoming conference or want to
advertise a job opening. While I am
happy to include announcements in the newsletter, the bulletin board offers you
a way to make announcements on your time frame, rather than once every three months.
This
issue of the newsletter has two articles.
One by Matt Potoski, which takes on the implementation debate that has
been going on in this newsletter for almost four years. Potoski suggests that some of the quandary
in developing theories to explain implementation of policy choices revolves
around different forms of uncertainty in the policy process. He provides a taxonomy that highlights three
forms of uncertainty: technical uncertainty, political uncertainty, and
collective decision uncertainty. One of
the more intriguing aspects of this approach is that it puts uncertainty itself
at the center of attention, forcing us to ask not what do we know, but what are
we unable to know yet need to know. He
concludes with some suggestions of methodological approaches for addressing
directly this quandary.
The
second article you will find is by Brian Shoup. Shoup’s piece is the third of four articles that he is writing on
the policy field, based on the web-based survey of members of the Public Policy
section early last fall. This article
deals with pedagogical issues and course requirements in the departments where
members of the Policy Section teach.
Some of the findings are surprising, especially relating to the
differences between Master’s level programs and Ph.D. programs with respect to
requirements for policy theory courses, substantive policy courses, and
methodological training. In the next
issue of the newsletter, we will complete the report of the findings from this
survey, with a report on the articles and books that members of the section
judge to have been most important and influential over the past several
years.
In
conclusion, I hope you will let me know your thoughts about the newsletter and
the webpage. If you have suggestions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact
me with them. My email address is kbickers@indiana.edu or you can always
reach me at 812-855-4198.
Best
regards, Ken Bickers
Associate Professor and Co-Associate Director,
IU Workshop in Political
Theory and Policy Analysis
| Index | Policy Currents Home Page |