Capturing the Political Imagination: Think Tanks and the Policy Process by Diane Stone

Author:Diane Stone [Stone, Diane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781136308970
Google: CYIsBgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17537948
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1996-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

An Epistemic Community?

Do public choice theorists based in free market think-tanks constitute an epistemic community? Potentially, but not in isolation of like- minded experts with other institutional affiliations. These scholars have shared normative beliefs. That is, they display a concern to create institutional arrangements that limit bureaucratic empire building and ballooning budgets; to establish voting rules that most faithfully translate individual preferences into public decisions; and to organise society for the greatest scope of free exchange (Caporaso and Levine, 1992: 135). They have a shared causal belief that people maximise their utilities. They have common notions of validity. This is encapsulated in a common vocabulary of rationality and methodological individualism. Their beliefs and notions of validity are communicated through a journal, Public Choice, edited by James Buchanan, and a professional society – the Public Choice Society – which ‘consolidate and give focus to what otherwise might be a fragmentary research program’ (Caporaso and Levine, 1992: 134).

These public choice theorists do not share a common policy enterprise beyond a ‘shared commitment to the application and production of knowledge’ (Haas, 1992a: 3). Yet, their shared discursive practices identify a political concern to institute a particular way of understanding of policy problems among decision- making circles. As noted in Chapter Six, a particular school of economic thinking can produce an epistemic community. Their efforts to establish public choice as a dominant conceptual paradigm is evident in the research brokerage and networking activities of think-tanks, and as people trained in its tenets gradually move into decision-making positions. For example, a network of former students and acolytes of James Buchanan have made their way into positions of power allowing discourse structuration to occur. James C. Miller, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget was his doctoral student. Other students include John H. Moore who was deputy director of the National Science Foundation; Robert D. Tollison, director of the Economic Bureau of the Federal Trade Commission; and Paul Craig Roberts now at CSIS (Solomon, 1986: 2837). There are also specific policy projects in which public choice theorists may be involved. As noted above, the environment is an area where the free market economists are using public choice to redefine environmental degradation as a consequence of government intervention and advocating property rights as a more effective means of environmental protection. Their political importance is popularising a new way of thinking about policy problems to be exploited as and when policy windows open. By gaining adherents to the public choice perspective, these policy intellectuals limit and shape the policy alternatives considered.

Metaphorical allusions cannot substitute for theoretical argument and analysis. Yet, not only is the discursive strategy a successful marketing technique to popularise a new way of thinking, it also helps identify the advocates as part of an epistemic-like community. As a former deputy director of the IEA remarked, economic problems and policy disputes will persist; ‘what matters is the language in which it is discussed’ (Wood, 1987).

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