Introduction
This debate explains a specific feature of deliberative policy analysis, the essential to assimilate empirical and normative investigation and how that can be done. From this viewpoint, it is the disagreement that founds the rudimentary component of actual policy analysis. As Majone (1989, 7) has clarified, most of the work of the policy analyst “in a scheme of administration by conversation has little to do with the proper methods of problem-solving than with the procedure of argument.” As he writes, “the job of the analyst consists in large part of producing evidence and arguments to be used in the course of public debate.” In view of this discursive nature of policy analysis, policy itself is thus best understood as “crafted argument” (Stone 1988). In an effort to advance policy arguments, writes Hawkesworth (1988, 191), the objective of policy analysis is to illuminate “the combative sizes of policy questions, to clarify the complexity of policy deliberations, to recognize the flaws of supporting arguments, and to clarify the political insinuations of contending prescriptions.
Background of city council meeting
According to Richard (1999) City council generally act as the legislative branch of the city government, as well as its policy-making body. The council also looks to the city’s goals, major projects and infrastructure improvements ranging from community growth to land use to finances and strategic planning. Council members’ statutory duties are to be performed, almost without exception, by the council as a whole. For example, the council, not individual members, must supervise administrative officers, formulate policies, and exercise city powers. Council members should devote their official time to problems of basic policy and act as liaisons between the city and the general public. Council members should be concerned, not only with the conduct of daily affairs, but also with the future development of the city.
In addition, the most important single responsibility of a council member is participation at council meetings. In statutory cities, each councilmember, including the mayor, has full authority to make and second motions, participate in discussions, and vote on every matter before the council.
What is deliberative democracy?
According to Gutmann & Thompson D (2009) deliberative affirms the necessity to justify resolution made by inhabitant and their legislatures. Both are predictable to explain the rules they would levy on one another. In democracy, leaders should hence provide motive for their decision and reply to the reason that citizen give in return. However, deliberative democracy makes room for many other forms of decision-making as long as the use of these forms themselves is justified at the some point in deliberative process.
In addition, the overall goal of deliberation democracy is to offer the most justifiable conception for dealing with ethical disagreement in politics. First is to promote the legitimacy of collective decisions. This purpose is a reply to one of the bases of ethical difference shortage of resources. Citizens would not argue about how best to allocate health care or who should receive organ transplants if these goods and service were unlimited.
Second is to inspire community spirited viewpoints on public matters in order to replies to another source of moral disagreement limited generosity. Third is to promote equally deferential method of decision making. It reacts to frequently neglected source of moral disagreement-incompatible moral worth. Fourth is to support correct fault. A well constituted deliberative forum offers chance for advancing both distinct and shared understanding. However, through the give and take of argument, member can learn from each other how to know their separate and shared misunderstandings and grow fresh opinions and policies that can more effectively endure critical inspection.
POLICY AS ARGUMENT
According to Majone (1989) the curiosity in argumentation in policy analysis draws from both theoretical and practical perspectives. On the one side, its varied theoretic influences run through British ordinary-language analysis, the Frankfurt School of critical social theory, French post structuralism, and a renewed appropriation of American pragmatism. On the other hand, it is based in applied terms on tests on the part of policy analysts and planners, from investor analysis and participatory research to citizen juries and consensus conferences. In addition, these rich sources have helped “post empiricists” in recognizing how language and modes of representation both empower and gratify their duties. They have come to appreciate how their practical rhetoric depicts and selects, describes and characterizes, includes and excludes. The discussion here is oriented around a particular line of development in the argumentative turn a dialectical communications approach based on the informal or good-reasons logic of argumentation. The productive capacities of the approach is emphasized, in particular its ability to generate ways of thinking and seeing that open new possibilities for problem-solving and action Majone (1989).
According to Majone (1989, 35), policy glitches can be represented in various languages, discourses, and frames, the link between the language of the analyst’s arguments and the language of the political setting is necessarily significant. Moreover, the ways in which analysis has to be sensitive to the shifts in political power from election to election, elite to elite, or coalition to coalition are reflected not only in policy decisions but in the very language in which policy issues and choices are made available to the public. In so far as policy makers and affected publics alike can be stymied or mystified by technical languages of expertise, the argumentative approach is put forward to help refine both public understanding and ethical imagination.
Forester (1999) and Hoch (1994) policy arguments cannot be presumed to be optimally clear, cogent, true, and free from political and institutional biases. Democratic deliberation, to be sure, is always precarious and vulnerable. But through thoughtful, informed and passionate argumentative processes citizen can learn. Policy analysis, in this admiration, can facilitate the procedure by promoting communicative capabilities and social education. To do this, though, it has to take into explanation the habits policy arguments can be tilted by disparities of resources and rooted relations of power.
In addition, one influential approach to such a communications model has been to follow the example of law and legal argumentation. In such a scheme, policy analysts and decision makers each take on the assignment of preparing arguments for and against particular policy positions. As Rivlin (1973,25) suggested, they would “state their side of the argument, leaving to the brief writers of the other side the job of picking apart the case that has been presented and detailing the counter evidence.” However policy argumentation begins with the recognition that the participants do not have solid answers to the questions under discussion, or even a solid method for getting the answers. With this understanding the policy analysts and decision makers attempt to work out a meaningful synthesis of perspectives. Churchman and his followers have suggested that the procedure follow the form of a debate. They maintain that the problem presented by the absence of appropriate evaluative criteria can be mitigated by designing rational procedures to govern a formal communicative exchange among the various points of view that bear on the decision-making process.
Rivlin (1973) continue state that, in such a policy debate, each party would confront the others with counterproposals based on varying perceptions of the facts. The participants would organize the established data and fit them into the world views that underline their own arguments. The criteria for accepting or rejecting a proposal would be the same grounds as those for accepting or rejecting a counterproposal and must be based on precisely the same data. Operating at the intersection where politics and science confront practice and ethics, both policy analysts and decision makers would explore and compare the underlying assumptions being employed.
The structure of a policy argument, Majone (1989, 63) explains, is typically a complex mix of factual statements, interpretations, opinion, and evaluation. The argument supplies the links that connect the relevant data and information to the conclusions of an analysis. Majone’s conceptualization of the features of a policy argument is an important contribution to the development of an argumentative policy analysis. But his efforts do not sufficiently account for or clarify the normative dimensions that intervene between findings and conclusions. From the preceding discussion, we can formulate the task as a matter of establishing interconnections among the empirical data, normative assumptions that structure our understandings of the social world, the interpretive judgments inherent in the data collection process, the particular circumstances of a situational context and the specific conclusions.
(Fischer 1995b) The logic of policy argumentation thus works on two fundamental levels, one concretely concerned with a program, its participants, and the specific problem situation to which the program is applied, and the other concerned with the more abstract level of the societal system within which the programmatic action takes place. Furthermore, the evaluation of a policy argument, in this sense, must always look in two directions, one micro, and the other macro. For instance, a policy to introduce a multicultural curriculum in a particular university should not only indicate specific course offerings, but also address the larger requirements of a pluralist society, such as the need for a set of common integrating values capable of holding the social system together. It is important to emphasize that the logic of policy argumentation organizes four interrelated discourses rather than a single methodological calculus per se. The task is not to “plug in” answers to specific questions or to fulfill prespecified methodological requirements. It is to engage in an open and flexible examination of the kinds of concerns raised in the various discursive phases of the problem. In this respect, the questions do not constitute a complete set of rules or fixed requirements that must be dealt with in any formal way. Rather, they are designed to orient argumentation to a particular set of concerns. Within the discursive framework, deliberation may follow its own course in the pursuit of understanding and consensus. Policy argumentation, moreover, can commence at any one of the phases. Choosing the place to begin is determined by the practical aspects of the policy to be resolved.
ARGUMENTATIVE POLICY ANALYSIS: THE COMMUNICATIONS MODEL
Various efforts have been made to develop procedures for an argumentative policy analysis. An important case in point is the “communications” approach to policy analysis that began to evolve in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This orientation has turned the analytical problem on its head (Churchman 1971; Fischer 2003). Recognizing that the normative dimensions of policy questions cannot be dealt with through the empirical analysis that is, by converting them into variables to be operationalized these scholars have sought a viable alternative by reorienting the task to begin from the normative perspective and fit the empirical in. Indeed, as they demonstrate, this is how policy deliberation actually works. In politics, politicians and policy decision makers put forth proposals about what to do base on normative arguments. Empirical analysis comes into play but only when there are reasons to question or explore the factual aspects of the argument.
Conclusion
The research help me to better understand the structure of the policy argument as a complex blend of factual statements, norms, interpretations, opinions, and evaluations than does the empirical approach to policy analysis. At the same time, it also more closely links the analytical task to the ordinary language policy argumentation of real world politicians and policy makers. Indeed, the argument here is that the approach is a more accurate representation of how politicians, policy analysts, and citizens actually argue and deliberate about policy in the real world of politics. It offers, as such, an approach better suited to real world policy making than the conventional positivist model which emphasizes empirical analysis at the expense of normative investigation. Each of the four discourses has specific empirical and normative requirements that must be addressed in making a complete justification of a policy argument For a reason to be considered a “good” one, the analyst much convince the discursive participants that it satisfy all four discursive phases of the methodological probe.
