The Changing Pattern of Public Policy Formation

Change is the order of today, and the nightmare or the hope of tomorrow. For better or worse, the orbit of public policy is ever widening in all nations and in international organization as well. With its widening have come profound changes in the methods of policy formation; so much so that the normal vocabulary and thought patterns of the lawyer, and even of the political scientist, are among the chief obstacles to its understanding.In the article that follows there are considered, first, the changes in the over-all culture of which public policy formation is a part; and, then, and only then, the more precise changes in policy formation itself.Laws were once the typical expression of public policy. In this, their one-time characteristic rôle, they are now dying or dead, however reluctant many of our national leaders are to read the obituary column. Our so-called statesmen choose rather to live still in a world of dreams in which nostalgia for the days of a government of laws blinds them to the changed and paramount contemporary characteristic of government, which is organization to attain objectives. In the strict sense of the term, a law is a general rule of conduct. But today government consists largely, not of these general rules, but of continuous intervention—intervention by men in the relations between groups. The changing pattern of public policy formation is understandable only as change induced by this drastic alteration which lies at the very heart of the nature of government.