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Improving Implementation Through Framing Smarter Statutes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Helen Ingram and
Anne Schneider
Helen Ingram
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science and School of Public Administration and Policy University of Arizona
Anne Schneider
Affiliation:
College of Public Programs Arizona State University, Tempe
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Abstract

Statutory design is the source of many problems encountered in implementation, yet policy scholars have not made much headway in providing coherent and consistent advice for framing smarter statutes. There is a great deal of disagreement about how much discretion statutes should leave to implementers, and four distinct and conflicting schools of thought have emerged. This article advises that none of the perspectives is always correct and patterns for allocating discretion should take into account the implementation context. Contexts vary from statute to statute and may change for different policy elements within particular policies. The core elements in policy content are identified and linked in a scheme that is more comprehensive and relevant to policy results than previous work. The article also provides a ‘value-added’ conception of implementation in which the extent of discretion exercised by implementers is measured by changes they make in the core elements of policy.

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Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Public Policy , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , January 1990, pp. 67 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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