La Dra. Cristina Moreno presenta el Paper «Communicative design in public policy», elaborado junto al Dr. José Real-Dato de la Universidad de Almería, al 1st International Conference on Public Policy celebrado en Grenoble, del 26-28 de Junio de 2013.
El paper se inserta en la Sección «Policy Design», panel Policy Design: Principles and Processes coordinado por Giliberto Capano (University of Bologna-Forl).
Abstract
Communication has a key importance in contemporary democratic politics. Governments, parties and other political actors greatly rely on extensive communication campaigns aiming to influence citizens’ preferences, attitudes, opinions and behaviour in order to get legitimacy and support for their demands and actions. In turn, citizens depend on information coming from different kind of media to keep political agents accountable. In public policy, communication is of great importance too. This is understood both by policy practitioners and scholars. In policy practice, using the policy stages-model as a heuristic, communication processes pervade the whole policy process, from the struggle on problem definition to how policy decisions are justified before the public and other participants, the way underlying policy beliefs or implementation instructions are communicated to the different actors, or the pertinent information is gathered in order to provide adequate feedback. Policy scholars – particularly those linked to ‘constructivist/argumentative’ approaches – see the policy process as a series of communicative processes and meaning struggles that shape the ‘discursive constructs’ (Fischer 2003) that constitute public policy. In sum, communication is directly related to all the relevant dimensions of public policy : power (who decides/participates in decision-making process, who is benefited/takes the burden), legitimacy (which values shape public policy and how are they accepted/made acceptable), performance (effectiveness and efficiency of policy measures), and accountability (how citizens control policy agents). In this paper we pay attention to what we term as the ‘communicative design’ of a public policy. By this, we denote the way policy-making institutions and policy designs (Schneider and Ingram, 1993) shape the communication processes affecting the above mentionned relevant dimensions of public policy – thus communicative designs are embedded in observable instances, available for empirical analysis. Our aim is to set out the conceptual building blocks to understand the relationship between the ‘communicative design’ and those dimensions.