Involvement In Public Policy Research Articles

Science policy and public accountability in Poland: the case of embryonic stem-cell research

This article examines how exercises of public involvement in science policy, which have been transported to the new member states via EU regulations, function in post-socialist democracies. Given P ...

Fostering deliberations about health innovation: What do we want to know from publics?

As more complex and uncertain forms of health innovation keep emerging, scholars are increasingly voicing arguments in favour of public involvement in health innovation policy. The current conceptualization of this involvement is, however, somewhat problematic as it tends to assume that scientific facts form a "hard," indisputable core around which "soft," relative values can be attached. This paper, by giving precedence to epistemological issues, explores what there is to know from public involvement. We argue that knowledge and normative assumptions are co-constitutive of each other and pivotal to the ways in which both experts and non-experts reason about health innovations. Because knowledge and normative assumptions are different but interrelated ways of reasoning, public involvement initiatives need to emphasise deliberative processes that maximise mutual learning within and across various groups of both experts and non-experts (who, we argue, all belong to the "publics"). Hence, we believe that what researchers might wish to know from publics is how their reasoning is anchored in normative assumptions (what makes a given innovation desirable?) and in knowledge about the plausibility of their effects (are they likely to be realised?). Accordingly, one sensible goal of greater public involvement in health innovation policy would be to refine normative assumptions and make their articulation with scientific observations explicit and openly contestable. The paper concludes that we must differentiate between normative assumptions and knowledge, rather than set up a dichotomy between them or confound them.

Public Policy Involvement by Health Commissioners

The purpose of this national study was to determine advocacy activities and level of involvement of health commissioners regarding public policy. Benefits, barriers, and perceived outcomes of advocacy efforts were also explored. A previously validated (Holtrop et al., Am J Health Behav 24(2):132-142, 2000) four-page survey was mailed to 700 health commissioners, who were randomly selected from the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) database. A three-wave mailing was performed which yielded a 50% response rate. Of these respondents, the majority (70%) were female and (88%) Caucasian. Overall, 31% of health commissioners reported being involved in influencing public policy in the last 4 years. The most common reported activities engaged in by health commissioners included voting (84%), and providing policy information to consumers or other professionals (77%). Perceived barriers to influencing policy were time, (64%), and other priorities (46%). Perceived benefits to influencing policy included improving the health of the public (94%) and making a difference in others' lives (87%). Only 15% perceived their knowledge regarding the process of changing public policy was excellent. Although health commissioners are often spokespersons for health agencies and communities, their public policy involvement is marginal. Professional preparation programs and continuing education opportunities should focus on advocacy, public policy development, and removing barriers to action.

Nursing and public policy: A tool for excellence in education, practice, and research

Complex social and health policy issues face our nation and profession, and proactive participation in the public policy arena is a key to excellence in clinical practice, scholarship, and education for nursing. The purpose of this article is to reflect on the value of the nursing profession's public policy involvement. Specifically, a case example of the author's experiences as a nurse-legislator at the state level is provided. Public policy examples and political strategies are included. Being a part of the political arena or "game" is a key to shaping health policy and, in turn, a strategy for excellence in nursing.

Examining Fiscal Federalism, Regionalization and Community-Based Initiatives in Canada's Health Care Delivery System

SUMMARY This study focuses on the ability of Canadian provinces to shape in different ways the development of various provincial health delivery systems within the constraints of the mandates of the federal Canada Health Act of 1984 and the fiscal revenues that the provinces receive if they comply with these mandates. In so doing, it will examine the operation of Canadian federalism with respect to various provincial health systems. This study applies a comparative analysis framework developed by Heisler and Peters to facilitate an understanding of the dimensionality of provincial health delivery systems as applied to the case of provincial regionalization and community-based initiatives. The three sets of relationships touched upon are: first, the levels of government and the nature of their involvement in public policy concerning the provincial health care delivery systems; and secondly, understanding of the factors influencing provincial governments' political dispositions to act in various directions. A third dimension that is taken are the factors influencing the “timing” of particular decisions. A fourth area noted by Heisler and Peters and other comparative analysts is the nature and characteristics of public and private sector activities in health care and other social policy areas. While the evolving nature of public and private sector health care delivery activities within Canada's provincial and territorial systems is a significant policy matter in the Canadian context, due to the space limitations of this article, they are not discussed herein.

Engaging Youth for Positive Change: A Critical Analysis of Case Studies on Local Action

This paper discusses the experiences and outcomes associated with Engaging Youth for Positive Change (EYPC), a youth civic engagement program developed to address clean indoor air policy, piloted in four Illinois communities. Youth involvement in public policy offers a potentially powerful tool for empowering youth to affect change, especially when youth representatives are involved as partners in identifying needs, conducting research, and making decisions. The EYPC program seeks to 1) facilitate a critical consciousness about factors at multiple levels that contribute to local problems; 2) facilitate a high level of understanding about power and politics; 3) make youth participants more effective in their efforts to advocate for a clean indoor air policy; and 4) teach youth participants how to collect and analyze data to further support their arguments when speaking to government officials and community members. The paper discusses the difficulty of reconciling a desire for deeper youth engagement with adult-directed civic education and policy goals, addresses youth experiences with the program, and discusses preliminary program outcomes and lessons learned.

Viešosios politikos kultūros formavimasis Lietuvoje: aplinkosaugos politikos ir visuomenės dalyvavimo sociologinė eksploracija

This paper aims at diagnosing change in policy culture in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly Lithuania, focusing on the field of environmental policy. The article analyzes public participation in the Soviet period, the years of break down of the Soviet system, and contrasts it with social change during the years of transition to a market economy and democratization of society. Based on interviews with relevant actors, secondary data analysis, and discourse analysis, this paper illuminates the shift of public involvement in environmental science and technology policy to a different mode. This shift, or dialectics of policy culture, is epitomized by a changing mode of citizen participation – from latent forms and “double faced” culture in the Soviet times towards euphoria about civic democratic governance and direct participation during the years of “Singing revolution”, and towards another round of colonization of public policy by the bureaucratic domain and the private sector during the 1990s.

Advocacy skills training for young adult cancer survivors: the Young Adult Survivors Conference at Camp Māk-a-Dream

This manuscript reports on the design, implementation, and evaluation of the Young Adult Survivor Conference (YASC)-a 4-day retreat designed to provide an educational and support experience for cancer survivors diagnosed as children, adolescents, and young adults. The goals of the program were to address issues of survivorship, provide cancer education and tools for self-advocacy, and build bridges of support among young adult cancer survivors who may be experiencing similar journeys through life. YASC was designed to offer advocacy skills specific to participants' needs. Workshops focused on understanding late effects, mentoring and communication, tips for starting peer support programs and networks, and opportunities for offering public testimony and involvement in public policy. Program evaluation indicated that participants achieved personal goals and expectations for having fun, meeting other survivors, understanding more about their cancer and potential late effects, and learning about how to tell their story so that it will help others. Involvement with peers who have shared a similar experience provided participants an opportunity to address areas of concern such as coping with uncertainty, dependency vs autonomy, social exclusion, body image, intimacy, sexuality and fertility, and career options. Participation in programs such as the YASC offers young survivors opportunities for life experiences that may promote successful achievement of age-appropriate developmental tasks.

Ron Hira: Managing the Impacts of Offshoring

Editor-in-Chief Frank Ferrante interviews Ron Hira, a public policy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the IEEE-USA vice president for career activities, about the pros and cons of offshoring. The article includes discussions about the differences between outsourcing and offshoring, Hira's involvement in public policy, the future of IT in the US, and the need for IT workers themselves--not just the corporations they work for--to get involved in offshoring policy discussions. It's not a matter of stopping offshoring, Hira says, the question is how to better manage it.

Private Finance and Public Policy

This paper articulates a logical foundation-drawn from disparate literatures-for understanding why safeguarding financial stability is an important economic policy objective. The paper also explains why private aspects of finance provide broader social economic benefits and have the characteristics of public goods. Unique aspects of finance are examined, as are the linkages between finance, money, and the real economy. Sources of market imperfections in finance are identified and their implications are analyzed. The arguments imply that reaping the full private and social economic benefits of finance requires both private-collective and public-policy involvement as well as a delicate balance between maximizing the benefits of positive externalities (and public goods) and minimizing the costs (including potential instabilities) of other sources of market imperfections in finance.

Service users, social policy and the future of welfare

This article considers the issue of public and service user involvement in social policy in particular relation to the increasing importance of populist approaches to welfare policy and ideology. It reports on the new emphasis on participation in social policy and the limits of involvement so far achieved in both the practice and discipline of social policy. It discusses the increasing commitment of welfare service users and their organisations to equal involvement in the social production of social care and social policy and the political and methodological problems of continuing to exclude them. It argues the importance of an inclusive approach to social policy as a discipline and practice both to counter the populism which has increasingly characterised and dominated social policy over the last 20 years and to provide the basis for progressive and defensible social policy for the future.

Toward a Pro‐Life Politics

Toward a Pro‐Life Politics

Microbiologists’ Perceptions of Planetary Protection

As society enters the 21st century, NASA and its international partners are planning to conduct numerous new and exciting missions within the solar system. Many of these missions are motivated by scientific questions in Astrobiology that focus on the origin and evolution of life in the universe. These explorations will involve the search for evidence of life beyond Earth and the return of geological and atmospheric samples to Earth for analysis. In a society that places ever-increasing importance on the role of public involvement in science and technology policy, questions about the possible risks of biological contamination from sample return missions will be examined and debated in the media. These perceptions will, over time, form an important input to the development of risk management policies and strategies concerning sample return missions. Studies on risk perception that we conduct today form a baseline of information against which we can observe changes in public risk attitudes.

Nurses speaking up for mothers and children: 25 years of public policy involvement.

Public policy decisions directly affect the health care of women and children and also affect the practice of maternal and child nursing. The past quarter century has seen a shift in nursing involvement in the public policy process. Heightened awareness of the collective power of nurses, greater independence of the nursing profession, the increasing capability for generating research to guide the formulation of public policy, and nurses' better understanding of the political process have all contributed to the increasing influence of our nation's 2.6 million nurses. The passage of several significant pieces of legislation, such as expansions of the Medicaid program for pregnant women and children in the late 1980s, have opened up new opportunities for nurses to further shape the nation's health care agenda for women and children. Nurses can and should become more involved with the policy-making process at local, state, and national levels to assure that decisions are made that benefit this important population group. Leadership in the public policy arena will give nurses the best opportunities for putting forth the agendas that will accomplish these goals.

Resources, Frequency, and Methods: An Analysis of Small and Medium-Sized Firms' Public Policy Activities

This study compared the public policy interactions over time between small and medium-sized firms. Hypotheses related to firm size, frequency of activity, and influence methods were developed and tested. Small and medium-sized firms had different patterns of public policy involvement, with medium-sized firms reporting less activity but more success in influencing the public policy process than did small firms. Of the influence methods, only letter writing was significant to reported success rates. A regression analysis revealed that firm size and letterwriting variables provided the best fit in a linear-relationship model.

Public policy involvement by nurse practitioners.

The purpose of this study was to determine the level and type of public policy involvement, as well as perceptions regarding public policy involvement of nurse practitioners. A four-page survey was mailed to a sample of 600 certified nurse practitioners, randomly selected from the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners' database. A three-stage mailing procedure yielded a 73% response rate. Most (59.6%) were involved in three or less public policy activities. The most frequently indicated activities included voting (87%) and giving money to a campaign (57%). Lack of time was the most frequently cited barrier, while improving the health of the public was cited most often as a benefit. Overall, nurse practitioners felt they had limited knowledge on how to go about changing public policy, were somewhat interested in public policy issues, believed the actions of public policymakers were very important, and believed these actions influenced the public's health. The majority (79%) had received some information/education on public policy change. Those most active in public policy had high public policy efficacy expectations and perceived a high number of benefits to public policy involvement.

Public Policy Involvement by Health Educators

Public Policy Involvement by Health Educators

Public Policy Involvement of Nutrition Professionals

This research study reports the nature and level of public policy involvement in a sample of members of the Public Health Division of the Society for Nutrition Education. The survey instrument was a self-report, closed-ended questionnaire that was mailed to all members of that division. One follow-up attempt after the initial mailing resulted in a response rate of 66% (n = 396).When asked to rate current level of involvement in public policy change, 44.3% reported no involvement, 47% were somewhat involved, and 7.3% reported that they were very involved. Those most likely to be involved were registered dietitians, those with government jobs, and those with doctoral degrees. Although most reported some benefits to involvement, the majority indicated that they had not received any formal training and said they lacked the skills for involvement. Lack of time and frustration with the process were the most frequently cited barriers. Professional organizations trying to increase member participation in public policy issues could use this information. For example, results indicate that organizations need to be more visible with their commitment to public policy involvement. They might consider providing members with updates on current issues and feedback about the impact of their efforts. Additionally, continuing education programs should emphasize hands-on skill development.

The End of the Experiment: Corporatism Collapses in Australia

The article argues that Australian corporatism was an inherently contradictory formation, since it was dominated by economic liberal policies, but with the appearance of trade union involvement in public policy. Since economic liberalism is, almost by definition, opposed to the interests of unions, such union involvement had to be misguided, or more apparent than real. The tensions between democratic corporatism and economic liberal policies, the latter unsuccessful in terms of industrial adjustment, caused the 'corporatism' to become increasingly authoritarian and exclusionary. This contributed to a loss of working-class support, shown in declining union density and the drift of working-class votes to Labor's political opponents.

Private Management and Public Policy

The book Private Management and Public Policy by Lee E. Preston and James E. Post has had a major impact on the business and society field. The authors introduced the concept of public policy into the field as an alternative way of thinking about social issues that was different from the concept of social responsibility that was so popular in the early years of the field. The concept of interpenetrating systems theory they developed attempted to provide theoretical support for business's involvement in public policy and to deal with the problem of atomic individualism that has only recently been recognized. The field is indebted to the authors for developing the broad outlines of an alternative theory of the firm in society that offers the possibility of overcoming traditional dichotomies that have plagued the field since its inception.