• DOI:10.2139/ssrn.3727996
• Corpus ID: 234600314

What Is a Policy and What Is a Government Program? A Simple Question With No Clear Answer, Until Now

@article{Lassance2020WhatIA,
  title={What Is a Policy and What Is a Government Program? A Simple Question With No Clear Answer, Until Now},
  author={Ant{\^o}nio Lassance},
  journal={Social Science Research Network},
  year={2020}
}

• Antônio Lassance
• Published 10 November 2020
• Political Science
• Social Science Research Network

The difficulty of defining and distinguishing what is a policy and what is a government program is a crucial problem with practical and important consequences for the design, efficiency, and effectiveness of these public policies and programs. However, public servants are taught to live in this Babel without paying much attention to it. The article extracts this evidence from a methodology that combined a qualitative experiment and in-depth interviews with more than 350 Brazilian Federal Government employees, over the past 5 years. The article proposes a new approach to the design of policies and programs as a basic criterion for ex-ante analysis in order to contribute to making such latent inconsistencies even more glaring and evident and to overcome the most common failures, as soon and as easily as possible, before programs take their first step.