THE INEFFICIENCY REDUCTION IN SCHEDULING THE PUBLIC POLICY AGENDA

• Main Author: POPESCU Luminiţa Gabriela
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Technopress 2014-06-01
• Series: Journal of Public Administration, Finance and Law
• Subjects: public policy; democracy
• Online Access: http://www.jopafl.com/uploads/issue5/THE_INEFFICIENCY_REDUCTION_IN_SCHEDULING_THE_PUBLIC_POLICY_AGENDA.pdf

In this paper, I have tried to demonstrate that a major problem related to the reduction of the inefficiency of the public policy agenda is that of representation. In other words, to demonstrate how many or how few of the public opinion priorities are translated into public policies, especially through suffrage mechanisms or other connection types developed between the elected officials and citizens. On one hand, representation is the key to the proper functioning of any democracy and an important value itself. On the other hand, a good functioning of the democracy must take into account as a primary value not only representation, but also the means of solving the problems. This involves information processing, communication, and the way through which the public’s preferences are created and influenced by the governmental strategies and through collective dynamics along with establishing the public agenda. The main conclusions one may draw from this presentation are the following: reducing the inefficiency of the public policy agenda implies the congruence between the parliamentary and public agendas; bringing forward the concept of policy congruence is possible only if there is an obvious congruence between citizens’ priorities and governmental activity; placing citizens’ priorities on different levels in the governmental and parliamentary agendas (although priorities of the Government may be similar with those raised by the Parliament) may suggest multiple possibilities for influencing the two agendas by forces other than the public opinion.