The National Origins of Policy Ideas by Pedersen Ove K. Campbell John L

Author:Pedersen, Ove K., Campbell, John L.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Negotiation and Consensus in Economic Policy Analysis

In Germany, institutional mechanisms coordinate policy research organizations in ways that sometimes produce compromise in analysis, forecasts, and policy recommendations. Often this stems from the state’s inducements and demands, such as its mandate that the Joint Economic Report group compromise on a single forecast or the Leibniz Association’s demand for state-of-the-art analysis before it rewards research organizations with membership. In Denmark, however, most policy research organizations simply assume that they ought to cooperate and compromise. They also assume that their reports and analyses—not to mention their data and methodologies—are like public goods to be shared freely among all participants in the knowledge regime, often even before publication. As noted earlier, people told us several times that this is a taken-for-granted part of the Danish negotiated economy model. And it is amplified by the fact that there is a strong sense of social partnership and solidarity among many policy research organizations as well as a fundamental consensus on the core principles of socioeconomic balance. As a result, cooperation, compromise, and consensus emerge more naturally and organically in Denmark’s knowledge regime.

Consensus-oriented cooperation and compromise occur on three levels. They happen within individual policy research organizations; across policy research organizations; and thanks to the bridging effects of some policy research organizations, across organizations operating in knowledge, policymaking, and production regimes.

DØR provides an especially good example of organic consensus-oriented cooperation and compromise within a policy research organization. In fact, the Social Liberals—a party constantly seeking consensus—convinced other parties to establish DØR by law as a vehicle for consensus making in the first place. Yet, as we have seen, controversy and disagreement occur within the council over some of the reports it receives from the Wise Men. This is not surprising. According to Peter Birch Sørensen, the Wise Men chair, within a year of the council’s founding, “[i]t became clear that it isn’t enough to just have some university professors prepare a report on how they see problems. That doesn’t guarantee that there will be a consensus automatically emerging on what to do about the problems.” Part of the difficulty at the time was that some people worried that the Wise Men’s reports were being influenced by the social partners on the council. As a result, the Wise Men decided not to take council input into consideration while they prepared their reports. Nor did they change them if they received criticism from the council when the reports were discussed. In short, they distanced themselves from the council. However, the Wise Men do take the criticisms seriously and consider whether they should change things in subsequent reports in order to improve the chances for consensus next time. Sørensen was clear about this:

If we are faced with fairly heavy criticism from a broad range of council members, of course that makes an impression on us. We sometimes ask ourselves, well … the criticism that we received, was it justified? Or to what extent would there be any reason for us to,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.