Politics as Social Learning: Policy Experts, Political Mobilization, and AIDS Preventive Policy

Abstract

In a world increasingly dominated by high technology and esoteric scientific knowledge it is not surprising that political scientists and sociologists have begun to ask what role experts and specialists play in the policymaking process. Inaugurated almost a century ago by Weber's seminal essay on bureaucracy and the rationalization of authority, this issue was subsequently developed out of neo-Marxist debates over the relative autonomy of the state into a more explicitly state-centered perspective. Though state-centered theorists have not abandoned pluralism altogether, bureaucrats and policy experts have increasingly taken center stage in policy analyses. These state actors are portrayed as “policy experts,” free from political pressure, focused on making policy recommendations based on the most up-to-date knowledge of the field. Instead of pursuing votes and campaign money, policy experts seek the most efficient answers to social problems, a rationalized process of positivistic scientific inquiry and experiential learning. In most areas of public policymaking, this boils down to the reductive analysis of prior, presumably analogous, policy outcomes, drawing lessons for the future from the successes and failures of the past. Seen from this perspective, policymaking is portrayed as “a deliberate attempt to adjust the goals or techniques of policy in response to past experience and new information.” History thus not only transforms state capacities (as in historical institutionalist accounts) but alsodirectlyeffects the ways in which policymakers think about social problems. Political scientists refer to this as a “social learning” process.