35 3.12 – CHAPTER 3 SUMMARY
- CHAPTER SUMMARY
This chapter provides a foundation for understanding when and under what circumstances governments choose to act. Governments in liberal democracies primarily exist to serve the public by providing services that cannot or would not be provided by the market. Market failures occur when there is an inefficient allocation of goods and services by the free market. Governments often use market failures as a rationale for intervening in economic activity. However, governments do not always correct market failures. The limits of the democratic process, political, and cultural constraints often result in circumstances where government intervention does not improve society.
The policy making process involves more complexity than simply moving a bill through the legislative process. The stages model allows for greater understanding of the intricacies of the process by highlighting six prominent steps:
(1) problem identification, (2) agenda setting, (3) formulation, (4) legitimation, (5) implementation, and (6) evaluation. The policy process does not always proceed perfectly through each stage. The strength of the stages model is its ability to create a set of manageable frameworks from which we can understand each stage in the process, even if the process is not always precise. The stages model provides a foundation to explore the nature of policy making before and after the legislative process even begins. We spend the remainder of this text investigating each step in greater detail.
