2.1 Policy as a response to social problems

All policies aim to resolve a public problem that is identified as such on the governmental agenda. Thus, they represent the response of the political-administrative system to a social reality that is deemed politically unacceptable.

It should be noted here that it is the symptoms of a social problem that constitute the starting point for the realisation of its existence and of a debate on the need for a policy (for example, decline in the state of forests, drug-associated delinquency, high unemployment). At the initial stage of all public intervention, the actual causes of the collective problem have not yet been defined with certainty or defined consensually by public and private actors. The increase in unemployment levels in industrialised countries and the material precariousness of unemployed people prompt the state to create or revise its unemployment benefit system and to take measures to revitalise the labour market. Air pollution arising from industrial production and the consumption of fossil fuels prompts the state to develop an environmental protection policy. Urban criminality and the deterioration of the physical state of drug addicts are the triggers for new policies on the distribution of heroin under medical supervision. Although this interpretation of policies as institutional responses to (changing) social states that are deemed problematic is dominant within policy analysis, this assumption must be relativised.

Firstly, some instances of social change do not give rise to policies, mainly because they are not visible or expressed (for example, nonvisibility of consequences, long-term consequences only, lack of political representation of the disadvantaged groups), or because no mode of state intervention proves feasible and consensual (for example, negative electoral impacts, absence of political-administrative implementation bodies, the inability to influence the behaviour of certain private actors in reality). Thus, the pluralist vision whereby the ‘service hatch’ state responds in an egalitarian and automatic fashion to all ‘social demands’ must be rejected.

This point raises questions about the ways in which social problems are defined (Dery, 1984; Weiss, 1989), their thematicisation on the governmental agenda (Kingdon, 1984, 1995; Rochefort and Cobb, 1993), the definition of target groups and the eventual decision not to get involved or apply a collective solution (Bachrach and Baratz, 1963).