Defining Public Policy

When it comes to identifying and solving societal and economic issues, where does a government begin? According to Associate Professor Daniel Berliner, Course Convenor on the Public Policy Analysis online certificate course from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), the answer lies in public policy.

Transcript

Public policy is an important way in which governments respond to the needs of citizens.

Public policy is the system of laws, regulatory measures, courses of action, and funding priorities that are created by a governmental entity.

Governments use public policy to solve societal and economic problems. The policies chosen by a government represent an aggregation of the individual preferences of individual members of society. Public policies differ widely between different countries.

In the Netherlands, for example, healthcare is provided free by the state; while in the United States, healthcare is largely operated by the private sector. Countries differ in their solutions to societal issues, such as migration, climate change, abortion, and taxation.

Frameworks help us to order and simplify reality, in order to understand trends and identify solutions to public policy problems. They also provide a lens through which we can make predictions about the consequences of different possible public policy reforms, and which we can use to suggest explanations for public policy processes and outcomes.