Testing Theories of Policy-Making: Educational Funding

1 Policy-making is an essential part of every government. Each government must enact policies based on their own philosophies, backgrounds, and situations. Many governments develop very similar tendencies in policy-making while other governments have quite different tendencies about policy-making. Through looking at the different trends of policy-making in multiple countries, there are multiple theories that have been laid out which group certain countries together. By choosing a specific policy that is addressed by all countries, I will be able to test different theories that form different groups of countries that are all based certain specific similarities in countries. Through testing these theories we will be able know which theory has the best explanation for why different countries have tendencies toward certain policies. There are multiple theories of policy-making as well as multiple ways at looking at policy-making. These various ways at looking at policy-making are what attempts to explain why governments choose, create, change, or even cease certain policies. The different theories that explain this can be grouped into categories such as the cultural school, the economic school, the political school, and the institutional school. All of these categories have received attention from scholars and have been used to explain policy-making in countries (Adolino and Blake, 31). In this paper, I am going to test two of these categories to receive insight on which category best explains policy-making. The two that I will test and compare are the cultural school and the institutional school. The cultural school reasons that a country’s policy decisions can be explained by its societal differences from other countries. The cultural school would maintain that certain individuals of certain cultural backgrounds, values, and traditions would essentially feel different about government than other individuals with different cultural backgrounds, values, and traditions. Some cultures would promote having more government while other cultures would have a tendency to be skeptical about government. This skepticism leads to policies that emphasize less government. Because of a country’s cultural background, it Testing Theories of Policy-Making: Educational Funding MICAH MCFADDEN