| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Perverse incentives | When government intervention encourages individuals to take actions that are not in the collective interest of the government policy |
| Symbols | Anything that stands for something else and whose meaning depends on how people interpret it use it or respond to it |
| Target Populations | The individuals or groups who a policy is supposed to effect both positively and negatively |
| Direct Government | When the government performs services or benefits like garbage collection street repairs welfare directly rather than through a third party |
| Condition | An underlying phenomenon with the potential to develop into a problem as evidenced through indicators that measure the underlying phenomenon |
| Regulation | A type of formal policy making established through the adoption of rules and standards that must be followed |
| Negative Externalities | The costs resulting from a market transaction that reduce the welfare of a third party who was not involved in or consulted regarding the original market transaction. Examples air pollution noise second hand smoke |
| Government Failure | When government intervention causes a more inefficient allocation of goods and services than would have occurred if government had not intervened |
| Subsidy | Funding paid by government to an enterprise which benefits the public. The enterprise receiving the subsidy can be private public an individual or another government |
| Causal story | A theory about what causes a problem and how particular responses would alleviate that problem |
| Positive Externalities | The benefit resulting from a market transaction that increase the welfare of individuals who were not involved in the market transaction. Examples clean parks safe schools |
| Market distortion | When government intervention causes the proper functioning of markets to shift out of balance usually by providing a competitive advantage to some firms over others |
| Private goods | Goods that are both excludable and rivalrous |
| Collective Action Problems | When the result of individually rational actions produces unintended negative consequences for society as a whole |
| Policy Benefits and Costs | The distribution of wins and losses as a result of a policy |
| Public Information | Activities where the purpose design and plan intends to provide a benefit through the delivery of information to the public or various publics |
| Policy Problems | Issues that are elevated in the public eye enough to necessitate governmental action |
| Policy Tools | Instrument that government uses to address or solve a given problem or issue |
| Fees | When an amount of money is charged to offset the cost of a program or discourage people from doing something that the government wants people to do less often |
| Underproduction of Public Goods | The insufficient production of a good that is provided collectively for users whose use is not precluded by others |
| Agency Capture | When the agencies operate in the interest of the industries that they are supposed to regulate rather than the interests of the general public they represent |
| Grants | An award of cash of goods to an organization for which a service or performance is expected |
| Market Failure | When the private market is not efficient which is often due to monopolies externalities information failures or underproduction of public good or merit goods |
| Monopoly | A persistent market situation in which there is only one provider of a product or service |
| Social construction | The process of defining problems and of selling a broad population on this definition |
| Electoral incentives | The way in which officials are elected may produce |
| Information Failure | When markets or government are less efficient than they could be if everyone involved had full information |
| Public Goods | Goods that satisfy a collective want of the society and from which if any one member of the group reveives the benefit all members of the group benefit |
| Free riders | Those who receive benefits without paying for them |
| Rationality | An assumption that individuals know what they want and are capable of choosing the best alternative available to them |
| Bounded rationality | realization that individuals may aim to make choices consistent with their self interest but are limited by the information they have and their ability to consider all potential options or outcomes |
| fragmentation | The way in which our policymaking process is divided across levels of government, branches of government, and specific policy issue networks |
| Incrementalism | A process of policy change that consists of on-going, small refinements in current policy |
| Issue Networks | Groups or individuals share common beliefs who integrate their efforts for a specific purpose such as gaining information or achieving a goal |
| Parallel processing | When many policy areas are advanced at the same time with different units focusing on each area |
| Punctuated equilibrium | A model of policy change in which policy is characterized by long periods with little or no change interspersed with short periods of rapid or dynamic change |
| Rational decision making | An organized, comprehensive, step-by-step process by which policymakers weight all possible outcomes and choose the one that best maximizes well-being |
| Serial processing | When policy is addressed in either a sequential approach - dealing with one issue at a time |
Combine with other sets
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