Abstract
This article adopts the perspective expounded by Weimer, and Vining and Weimer, that policy analysis requires “craft skills” and, therefore, one of the fundamental objectives of public affairs programs is to prepare graduates for the professional working world by providing opportunities to learn and practice these skills. Second, the article then introduces a method of experiential learning advanced by Weaver which he calls “quasi-cases.” The two concepts are then linked through an exposition of a quasi-case—New York City’s flirtation with “congestion pricing.” The goal of the article is to show that by linking these two ideas, one can enhance experiential learning in the classroom (and outside the classroom) and thereby provide students with the opportunity to practice craft skills in semester length courses in addition to the usual approach of relying on internships and capstone projects to provide public affairs students with opportunities to learn what it means to be professional. The quasi-case of New York City’s flirtation with congestion pricing illustrates the following ideas: 1) Economic concepts and tools are necessary but rarely sufficient to understand a policy issue adequately. 2) Policy takes place in a specific intergovernmental context that shapes both process and outcome. Understanding the intergovernmental context is important if one is to appreciate how various political constraints operate in the particular setting.
Graduate programs in public affairs typically use various pedagogical tools to foster experiential learning. One reason is that our programs aspire to be “professional” which, at root, means that we want our graduates to be employable. This is no different from other professional graduate programs such as a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree or a Master of Social Work (MSW) degree. If one accepts this premise (not everyone would, for sure), we should always ask ourselves the question, are we adding value so that our students are marketable?
This article adopts the perspective expounded by Vining and Weimer (Vining and Weimer, 2002; Weimer, 2012) that policy analysis requires “craft skills” and, therefore, one of the fundamental objectives of public affairs programs is to prepare graduates for the professional working world by providing opportunities to learn and practice these skills. Second, the article then introduces a method of experiential learning advanced by Weaver (2009) which he calls “quasi-cases.” The two concepts are then linked through an exposition of a quasi-case—New York City’s flirtation with “congestion pricing.” The goal of the article is to show that by linking these two ideas, one can enhance experiential learning in the classroom (and outside the classroom) and thereby provide students with the opportunity to practice craft skills in semester-length courses in addition to the usual approach of relying on internships and capstone projects to provide public affairs students with opportunities to learn what it means to be professional.
Vining and Weimer make the observation that, like all crafts, policy analysis requires both instruction and practice (2002). When learning and practicing craft skills, Weimer comments that there is usually a blend of universal knowledge and skills that are particular to a given context. Universal craft skills include the ability to frame policy problems, the ability to identify the most salient values pertinent to the particular problem, developing alternative ways of responding to, and ultimately “solving,” the problem, and offering prudent recommendations (Weimer, 2012). Many of the concepts learned in the typical required microeconomics course, and the methods and statistical techniques taught in core courses provide the grist for universal craft skills. For example, measures of central tendency or the concept of price elasticity of demand are the same in Sri Lanka and Slovakia. But other craft skills are particular and apply to the specific situation under review. An example would be the assessment of political interests undergirding a contested policy issue in a given jurisdiction. (Siting decisions in a local community quickly come to mind.) Developing one’s policy analytic craft requires a deft integration of both universal and particular craft skills for, in most policy contexts, both will be relevant.
Even if one is unfamiliar with the craft skills terminology, or disagrees with the premise that developing craft skills is what public policy and management professional education is all about, our curriculum is structured in such a way that craft skills are the essential tools of policy analysis that are learned as students go through the graduate program—economic analysis, political reasoning, data collection and analysis, stakeholder assessment, to name a few. The challenge for instructors in public affairs programs is not primarily to introduce craft skills in a classroom—they are embedded in the typical public affairs curriculum—but, rather, to have students practice them through various pedagogical techniques. As mentioned above, public affairs programs provide the space to practice craft skills though internships and through various types of capstone projects for real or simulated clients. A client focus is useful because it forces students to practice their craft skills in a way that simulates the time constraints of real policy analysis (real policy analysis does not take place in academic semester segments) which reinforces skills such as data collection, the judicious selection of methods of analysis, report writing and oral communication and presentation.
Craft skills may also be practiced in our semester length courses and need not be left to internships and capstones only. One of the effective ways to do so is through detailed case analyses. Cases have been used for many years now, and instructors can search the many established case banks which have proliferated over the past two decades. In addition to the well-known cases from Harvard Business School, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and the Electronic Hallway, many public affairs programs have added case banks to their repertoire. The range of cases across policy and management areas, including a growing number of cases set in countries all over the world provide instructors with much to choose from. A recent case bank that features cases set in Asia can be downloaded at no cost from the website of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.
I have used cases from one or more of the established case banks for many years, and they have generally been received well by students. Cases can be used for different pedagogical purposes such as providing descriptive detail that enables the instructor to draw conceptual and theoretical inferences that go beyond the case details. Some cases provide the opportunity to practice specific analytical skills, especially if there are adequate detail in the case and the tables and appendices. While cases vary in both substance and style, they are not without criticism as a pedagogical tool. Some of the limitations of cases that have been noted include: a singular focus on a protagonist who is either the “hero” of a policy or management decision or, conversely, the principal source of failure; the simplification of politics; implicit biases in the selection of information to present which reflects the case writer’s choices; simplification of the events due to page constraints; built-in obsolescence when the real events go beyond the date when the case was completed; a built-in bias toward only a few concepts rather than a broad spectrum from multiple sources of the public affairs curriculum (for a critique of cases see Chetkovich and Kirp, 2001; see also Weaver, 2009). Of course these criticisms do not apply to all cases; nonetheless, an instructor can minimize one or more of these shortcomings by adopting a technique that is described in the next section.
The concept of a quasi-case
In presentations at both National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) and the American Political Science Association several years ago, Kent Weaver presented his concept of a “quasi case” (Weaver, 2009). Consider a quasi-case as a “first cousin” of the traditional case study found in the various case data banks. The purpose of the quasi-case, like the conventional case study, is to provide students with descriptive detail from which they will be asked to do some analysis and/or make a decision or recommendation. However, a quasi-case, unlike the conventional cases one finds in the various case banks, is not a single manuscript with a narrative that, in most instances, unfolds in chronological sequence ending with a management or policy dilemma. Rather, a quasi-case is a compilation of materials that the instructor makes available to the students. The materials may include newspaper articles, journal articles (especially journal articles that are heavily descriptive without too much advanced theoretical content), government reports, primary statistical data (such as demographic, economic or budgetary information), YouTube videos, news segments from television broadcasts, speeches, and conceptual/theoretical articles that the instructor believes will enhance learning objectives (see Weaver, 2009, for his list of suggested materials).
Notice the difference between the case and the quasi-case: In established cases, the case writer has sorted the materials for the reader, and has chosen what is and what is not important. For quasi-cases, this task is left to the students. Students can determine what they believe is important or unimportant, assign implicit weights to the information, and hone their craft skills along the way. Specifically, a quasi-case which assembles disparate readings on a policy or management challenge will require the student to frame the issue, decide what the values and value conflicts are and begin to develop alternative ways to resolve the policy in question. Along the way, the students will invariably grapple with the particular nuances of the quasi-case that will shape the analysis based on the institutional and political context. The instructor’s task, much like in the traditional case method, is to structure discussion and analysis through a series of questions. However, since the material is unstructured, it is more likely that the variation among the students will be greater than with a conventional case. This then provides the instructor with an opportunity to guide the students with the express purpose of honing their craft skills. For example, students will surely vary in their selection and assessment of information that constitutes “evidence,” thereby providing an opportunity to assess the validity of the data that students bring to their analysis.
The requirements for a quasi-case are simple. It should have a beginning and an end point, be “meaty” enough to provide students with enough detail for discussion and analysis, be controversial and, most importantly, force students to apply and integrate more than one disciplinary perspective from the public affairs curriculum. In principle, we have been doing all of this for years; nevertheless, my observation is that we assume that students are integrating the disciplinary perspectives on their own—somehow through osmosis they naturally bring economics, politics, management, quantitative methods, ethics, and substantive policy areas to bear on complex policy challenges—but we do not always provide explicit opportunities in our courses to do so. A quasi-case can be developed in such a way that the integration of economics, politics, and management are essential to build craft skills, and thereby enhance the professional competence of our students. The next section provides an illustration of a quasi-case that is developed from readily available information (see the reference section for the information used in this quasi-case). The objective of this particular quasi-case is to demonstrate how instructors can integrate both economics and political analysis, both part of the core curriculum of public affairs programs, to enhance the students’ craft skills. I have used the following quasi-case to emphasize the following themes (note: an instructor may use the same materials listed in the references to structure the quasi-case differently to emphasize other learning objectives): Economic concepts and tools are necessary but rarely sufficient to understand a policy issue adequately. Policy takes place in a specific intergovernmental context that shapes both process and outcome. Understanding the intergovernmental context is important if one is to appreciate how various political constraints operate in the particular setting. Politics has its own logic and may lead to an outcome that is at odds with economic analysis. Values expressed through politics may mean something different from the same values expressed through economic reasoning. Political leadership is relevant when assessing success or failure of a proposed policy.
The setting
The setting of this quasi-case is the City of New York, and the policy issue is the attempt by former Mayor Michael F Bloomberg to enact his plan to reduce traffic congestion through the implementation of “congestion pricing.” This quasi-case was used in the spring 2008 semester in a senior seminar for students completing an undergraduate major in public policy at the University of Albany. Some of the students were also in the Master of Public Administration (MPA) degree program through an arrangement that allows selected seniors to begin their MPA in the senior year of their undergraduate degree. In addition, all of the students were in the New York State Assembly Internship Program. The internship required 20 hours of work and earned university credit. The New York State Assembly is the lower house of the legislative branch of government. Each student was assigned to a state legislative office.
The goal of the seminar, like many capstone experiences, is to synthesize many of the theories, concepts and skills learned in the core curriculum. In addition, selected “soft” skills such as oral and written communication were practiced during the semester. What follows is twofold: (1) a description of how the quasi-case was used in this seminar and (2) additional suggestions for instructors who may wish to use the quasi-case in ways that may depart from the way that I used the quasi-case of congestion pricing.
The quasi-case of congestion pricing in the City of New York was used to explicate the basic point that economic analysis must be coupled with political and institutional analysis to fully appreciate the complexities of public policy. In addition to the in-class analysis of the quasi-case, I also included a written assignment that required students to analyze Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan and either (1) justify why it was a good idea or (2) suggest alternatives to it. Students were provided with many of the materials that are listed in the references. After the assignment was completed, the quasi-case was examined in a 90-minute class session. The objective was to integrate economic and political analysis and illustrate how several craft skills are used in the assessment of congestion pricing. Like most case discussions, there was no single correct answer. However, higher quality papers were those that identified the value and limitations of the pricing mechanism embedded in the Mayor’s proposal, recognized the intergovernmental structure and how it shaped political interests and the role of political leadership.
During the in-class analysis, the discussion flowed from economic reasoning to political analysis. First, I emphasized that there are many different market-based approaches to public policy, including various pricing approaches to policy including, for example, recreation services, refuse collection, and public transportation. Next, we discussed the ways in which prices (including consumption taxes and user fees and charges) are used to influence behavior. Obvious examples such as tobacco use and alcohol consumption were briefly mentioned. The purpose of this initial conversation with the students was to reinforce what the students learned in the core required microeconomics course.
Other instructors can certainly expand the quasi-case beyond market-based approaches to public policy. For example, congestion pricing in New York City provides an opportunity to discuss the concept of an “optimal policy mix” (Howlett, 2011) to a pressing public issue (traffic congestion to be precise). The issue can be framed in terms of creating the correct incentives for major stakeholders and then the negotiations necessary to arrive at a collective outcome that is a net gain for the commons. While there will be losers, the New York City case required a minimum winning coalition to secure political victory for the initiative’s proponents. By framing the issue in this way, the search for an optimal policy mix is one that successfully integrates the economic and political dimensions of the situation so seamlessly that one would be hard pressed to distinguish politics from economics in the construction of the policy in question. Furthermore, the case can also be used to demonstrate David Easton’s classic definition of politics as the “authoritative allocation of values” (1953)—a perspective that becomes clear as the case unfolds. Specifically, the students will observe winners and losers, debate who should bear the burden of the policy idea in terms of fairness and, in addition, debate classic values of representation, individual rights and even the political significance of “efficiency.” In other words, when approaching the quasi-case of congestion pricing, instructors have several pedagogical options to choose from.
The economics of congestion pricing
Congestion pricing is actually presented quite clearly in a You Tube video of former Mayor Bloomberg introducing his plan (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLgET9SqF3Y). Listening to Bloomberg is instructive because he makes congestion pricing seem simple without using economics jargon. The highlights of the argument for using congestion pricing as a policy tool are as follows: Most motorists in big cities experience traffic jams and some drivers must cope with chronic congestion in their daily commute to work. Additional materials were provided to the students such as testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress by former Director of the Congressional Budget Office Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who laid out the economics of traffic congestion. He pointed out that congestion is actually a negative externality since it causes delay for the motorist directly and incurs a cost on other motorists by increasing the congestion on the road at a given time of day (Holtz-Eakin, 2003). However, since drivers do not internalize these costs, motorists will continue to overuse the roads and thereby worsen congestion and pollution. The reason why the road is overused is straightforward: Everyone is trying to get to work at roughly the same time so the demand for the road or highway during peak hours exceeds the supply, which is the available road space during the peak periods. The solution is to use the price mechanism to allocate the scarce resource which will then reveal the “willingness to pay” by drivers who use the roads during peak times. The price mechanism is the tool to ameliorate road and highway congestion. The way this would happen is that the price at the peak period (say, 07:00 am to 09:30 am, Monday through Friday) would encourage some drivers to alter their work times and shift away from the peak because they do not want (or cannot afford) the peak load charge. Others might share rides (car pool) and still other commuters will shift to mass transit if it is indeed available. The whole point is to get drivers to internalize the cost of congestion and thereby shift their behavior accordingly.
To reinforce the economics behind congestion pricing students should compare Bloomberg’s description of his vision of congestion pricing to the much older and more theoretical description of the economics of pricing formulated by the Nobel prize-winning economist William Vickrey, who described the rationale behind using pricing as a way to manage demand for a scarce resource (Vickrey, 1963, 1992). Comparing the Bloomberg YouTube video and Vickrey’s article is instructive. Students will see that Bloomberg’s ideas are embedded in universal craft skills—the economics behind the plan. While Bloomberg did not use the following language, students will see that the principles behind congestion pricing include the attempt to maximize net social benefits by using the price mechanism to shift behavior of some of the people who drive to Manhattan during peak hours. This provided an opportunity to practice several concepts such as price elasticity, externalities and net social benefits before continuing with the quasi-case. Economic analysis points out that motorists intuitively sub-optimize by looking only at their marginal private cost (their driving time) when they experience traffic congestion rather than the marginal social cost imposed by their travel during peak periods (Kockelman and Kalmanje, 2005: 671).
It is useful to note that there was much skepticism about congestion pricing when Vickrey first proposed the idea and it was generally thought to be both technologically and politically impractical (Arnott, 1997). However, now, variations of the concept of congestion pricing, such as differential pricing based on peak periods, express lane charging, and discounts for shared ridership, have achieved a reasonable level of political acceptance (DeCorla-Souza and Whitehead, 2003). These observations are important so that students learn that the ideas that Vickrey promulgated over 50 years ago have actually been implemented at least in part. Furthermore, these options may come up later when the students try to develop policy alternatives to the basic plan announced by Bloomberg.
Students may not fully appreciate the differences between how equity is analyzed by economists and how equity might be formulated by politicians. This theme became apparent as the quasi-case unfolded. Emphasizing this was important so that students practiced not only economic reasoning but political analysis as well. Moreover, the concept of equity was useful in demonstrating that politicians are not simply self-serving when they appealed to their own concept of equity but were actually both representing what they perceived as the interests of their constituents and their own self interest in maintaining political credibility. More on this later.
Since congestion pricing is one type of market-based approach to public policy, I first explored the equity implications of congestion pricing before delving further into the NYC quasi-case. Among those that could be mentioned are the distributional impact on income, the differential impact on neighborhoods within a metropolitan area and how the revenues from congestion pricing will be used (see Taylor et al., 2010, for a discussion of equity in congestion pricing). Discussing equity is important because it helps students to identify an important value that is embedded in the policy idea. Uncovering the implicit values behind a policy idea like congestion pricing is important because it gives the students practice in developing one of the universal craft skills that underpins policy analysis.
Students in the seminar were not aware that Mayor Bloomberg’s idea was not new. After pointing out that fully functioning congestion pricing schemes exist in only a few cities around the world, I briefly described congestion pricing in Singapore and London, Great Britain. This is a good place to introduce the concept of policy transfer so that students learn that policy ideas do indeed travel across time and space. There are now YouTube videos describing congestion pricing in Stockholm, Sweden and/or Singapore, that are useful in explicating the point that congestion pricing is not a new idea. In particular, pointing out that the Singapore experience with congestion pricing goes back to the 1970’s reinforces the point that congestion pricing went from theory (Vickrey, 1962) to practice in little more than a decade (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRS_urfujmw; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFO7wdqUolA). The two YouTube videos can then be followed by some details about the mechanics of congestion pricing. Box 1 and Table 1 show that Bloomberg’s plan was similar to London, Stockholm and Singapore. Box 1 and Table 1 were made available to students, and we spent about 10–15 minutes going through the mechanics of congestion pricing.
Box 1 . Congestion pricing in London and Singapore
Congestion pricing compared: New York, London, Singapore, and Stockholm.
*There is a period of time around Christmas where no fees are charged.
**Travel to and from the island of Lidingö is exempt from tax, given that the one route into Stockholm is within a tax-affected area.
The key features of Bloomberg’s plan are found in two reports that were made available to the students (City of New York, 2007a, 2007b). Mayor Bloomberg proposed a three-year pilot program; at the end of the three years a decision would be made whether or not to make it permanent. The congestion pricing zone was targeted as the area of Manhattan below 86th Street. The rationale was summarized in the following statement from PlaNYC2030: On a given workday, the Manhattan CBD is home to nearly 2 million workers from around the region, hundreds of thousands of tourists, and several hundred thousand residents. Cars compete for the road with buses, trucks pedestrians, cyclists and taxis. Vehicles trapped in traffic spew pollution into the air, putting the health of those living near congested roads at risk; and the resulting jams cost the region more than $13 billion dollars every year. As our population grows by another 900,000 people, we add more than 20 million visitors annually and 750,000 new jobs—many concentrated in the CBD—the consequences of congestion will become ever more severe. (City of New York, 2007b: 88)
Between the hours of 6:00 am and 6:00 pm, automobiles entering the zone would be charged $8 and commercial vehicles $21. Cars staying completely within the zone would be charged $4 and trucks $5.50. These charges would apply on weekdays only. Taxis and for-hire vehicles, mass-transit buses, emergency vehicles, and any vehicle with a handicapped license plate would be exempt from charges (City of New York, 2007b: 89). New York’s congestion pricing scheme and payment systems would use similar technology as London and Stockholm. Details of the technology and methods of payment can be found in the reports mentioned above. Some of the details are also included in Table 1.
Moving beyond universal craft skills to the particular
At this point, an instructor has options based on the additional craft skills that she or he wants the students to practice. I selected implementation analysis as a craft skill that is important to practice since the students were in the New York State Assembly Internship Program. Often, policy analysis is long on design but gives inadequate attention to the details of execution that ultimately determines whether an initiative will likely be successful or not. During their internship, the students were exposed to many policy ideas in the form of proposed legislation. Nevertheless, they needed to learn that good ideas are not necessarily effective policy so anticipating how challenging it is to go from an idea to implementing the idea on the ground is an important lesson.
A technique known as a “premortem” (see Klein, 2007) is one way to force students to come to grips with the vagaries of implementation. The technique is simple, and asks students to assume that they have a crystal ball and they envision project failure. The premortem was a useful way to move the discussion from congestion pricing as a market-based policy to one that will have to run through the intergovernmental gauntlet. Since they were interns in the New York State Assembly, they could then practice political and institutional analysis in “real time.”
The students were asked to say why the project will fail. I then listed the various reasons offered by the students on the board. Some found fault with some of the specific features of the plan, such as the actual charge or the boundaries of the congestion pricing zone. Ultimately, the major problems with Bloomberg’s plan were not in policy design. Rather, the plan failed because of well-placed political opposition that ultimately defeated it, but since one goal of the quasi-case is to show that even political defeat is nuanced and is embedded in both in the particular intergovernmental and political contexts, the instructor developed these points in some detail.
Depending on what the students list in their pre-mortem exercise, it is important to move beyond the economics and the technological challenges of congestion pricing. The analysis shifted to the political obstacles of successfully implementing Bloomberg’s plan. While the seminar students were broadly familiar with the geography of New York State and the City of New York other instructors should spend about 10 minutes describing important aspects of the political landscape. A map of the City of New York and its surrounding areas would be helpful. The instructor should point out that the area of the plan is actually small in relation to the commuting areas which include not only Long Island and some of the counties north of New York but, in addition, motorists from New Jersey and Connecticut. It is also important to highlight that motorists travelling into the proposed congestion pricing zone in Manhattan also come from the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.
Next, salient features of intergovernmental relations including the fact that there could have been federal government money to support the plan and, most important as it turned out, the requirement that Bloomberg’s plan needed approval from the state legislature in Albany, New York (the state capital) 1 are essential facts. In other words, the legal and intergovernmental dimensions of NYC’s proposed congestion pricing plan were complicated. If one were actually mapping the decision, there are several places where the plan could be delayed or terminated—and we have not yet come to the raw politics of the proposal. While there were some alternatives available to the city, there was no way that all of the intergovernmental dimensions of the case could have been substantially simplified. Since the state government, meaning primarily the state legislature, would necessarily be a key player, Bloomberg’s straightforward economics would have to make it over what turned out to be a high political hurdle (see Pecorella and Stonecash, 2006). Later these points can be used to reinforce the craft skills that need to be considered when going from the universal to the particular. To accomplish this learning objective the instructor may assign several of the articles from The New York Times (listed in the references) that covered congestion pricing during its short political life.
Stakeholders
Stakeholder analysis is a useful craft skill to use in this quasi-case. Identifying the key stakeholders is important for understanding the political dynamics that unfolded. The students should be able to identify most of the key individuals and groups from the materials listed in the references. An instructor could then ask the students to do a simple stakeholder power/interest grid to forecast where the likely stakeholders will likely fall on the grid. Table 2 lists many of the proponents and opponents of Bloomberg’s plan. The stakeholders are drawn from the secondary information that the students will have available, and they may choose to emphasize one or more in the table as they work through the politics of congestion pricing in New York. Students need not identify all of the stakeholders. However, a stakeholder analysis will allow the instructor to tease out the importance of politics as Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan made its way through this political gauntlet.
Proponents vs. opponents NYC Congestion Pricing.
The deadline for the approval of Bloomberg’s congestion pricing scheme came on April 7, 2008. NYS Assembly Speaker Silver announced on that day that the Assembly would not hold a vote on Bloomberg’s modified plan and, with that decision, congestion pricing died (Confessore, 2008). Since the end of congestion pricing in the Big Apple came in real time—during the semester of the seminar—the students were able to discuss why it failed and actually died a quiet death, at least by the standards of New York State politics. Below are some of the lessons learned.
What do the students learn through this quasi-case?
The first lesson from NYC’s flirtation with congestion pricing is that ideas and values matter. This is an important part of professional education and it is embedded in the learning and practice of craft skills. After reading Vickrey, listening to Bloomberg, reading some of the reports, and watching the YouTube videos about Singapore and Stockholm, students should appreciate that there are powerful applications for some of the economics concepts and tools that they have learned in their core economics course. In particular, they should see how market-based approaches to public policy, particularly pricing, can be applied to an important policy problem like traffic congestion.
Identifying the values that lie behind congestion pricing is a second valuable lesson. The concepts of equity and fairness are especially prescient. Note that the economic meaning of equity and what may appear as political rhetoric (the congestion charge won’t stop the BMWs from driving to Manhattan but it will stop the Chevrolets) actually shows that different values are at work. These different meanings of equity and fairness are useful to explore since they frequently get expressed in so many policy issues.
Some students argued that the politicians who opposed the plan were disingenuous. I found this to be a good place to reinforce the distinction between the universal and the particular when developing craft skills. Politicians behave differently from economists. They have their own interest in preserving their coalition and getting re-elected. In this quasi-case, one way the politicians were able to pursue this goal was to use the intergovernmental framework to serve this political goal. The fact that Bloomberg needed approval from the state legislature provided some of the key opponents with a very valuable perch from which they would be able to ultimately kill his plan. Since my students were interns in the New York State Assembly in the spring 2008 semester, I was able to reinforce this important lesson. I emphasized the importance of both the institutional framework and politics by posing a simple question: If congestion pricing has intuitive appeal based on its straightforward economics, why is it that there are so few city examples of the successful implementation of congestion pricing in the world? The answer, in my opinion, is that the NYC experience is not unique. Political constraints will be substantial more often than not. (For an interesting article that illustrates the pedagogical value of encouraging students to integrate different disciplinary perspectives in their analysis, see Mead, 2013.)
While Bloomberg is mentioned early in the quasi-case, and his announcement of the plan would be an effective way to launch an analysis of congestion pricing, the materials do not provide an opportunity to analyze his political leadership on the issue in any depth. Nevertheless, some students did bring it up. I reminded the students that his congestion pricing idea was announced in his second term so he was hardly a political novice. Mayor Bloomberg was lauded for proposing a bold idea. But ideas are not the same as political strategy and several accounts of the reasons for the failure of NYC’s flirtation with congestion pricing place some of the blame squarely on Bloomberg’s shoulders. A couple of “juicy” critical comments from elected officials that are embedded in articles from The New York Times suggest that his mayoral style, at least on this issue, did not help his cause. In particular, he was not especially effective in working with key state legislators in an effort to bring them around. Some might argue that, given his enormous wealth, he is not a typical big city mayor who needs to court a winning coalition, beholden to special interests and the like. Perhaps, but no post-mortems of NYC’s congestion pricing plan gave high leadership marks to the mayor on this policy issue. Since the Mayor’s plan failed during the semester, I chose not to dwell on political leadership. However, with the passage of time, this theme would be expanded.
Students should be challenged to think about alternative ways that the congestion pricing issue could have been framed at the outset? We examined some of the alternatives the students came up with in their papers, discussed the pros and cons of them, and speculated as to whether they would achieve the same goals that were embedded in the Mayor’s plan.
A useful article, written after the demise of Bloomberg’s plan, comes from Bruce Schaller, a NYC Deputy Commissioner of Transportation at the time, who offered an intriguing assessment of congestion pricing (Schaller, 2010). He contrasts arguments in favor of congestion pricing that are based on societal benefits (like clean air) with individual level benefits (like shorter commuting times). Appeals to societal benefits only, in Schaller’s view, will not be persuasive and provide no counterweight to opponents who will try to block the initiative through the political process. This is essentially what happened in NYC since legislators in eastern Queens and southern Brooklyn viewed the Mayor’s plan as disproportionately impacting their districts. In Schaller’s view, the benefits to drivers (individual level claims) were not clearly articulated by the proponents; therefore, the proponents did not artfully connect straightforward willingness-to-pay analysis, a cornerstone of any public pricing decision, in the building of a political coalition in support of the proposal. Willingness-to-pay is a necessary ingredient in congestion pricing but it will not guarantee political success. It is useful to read Schaller’s article after the full treatment of the case. The reason is that it allows the analysis to return to the universal in developing craft skills since the article makes the important point that achieving the desirable social benefits of less congestion and pollution needed to be harnessed to self-interest more closely. Schaller’s perspective can then be buttressed by referring to an excellent study of a referendum in support of congestion pricing in Stockholm, Sweden, which supports Schaller’s perspective (see Harsman and Quigley, 2010).
Conclusion
Developing craft skills require pedagogical techniques that force students to practice—to learn by doing. One way to do this is to provide students with a wide array of undigested materials and ask them to make sense of the situation by applying the knowledge and skills learned in their public affairs courses. This is the value of Weaver’s concept of a quasi-case. It is, of course, not the only way to learn and practice craft skills but it is, in my judgment, a useful technique. The quasi-case, unlike the cases available from established case banks, is fluid and adaptable. The instructor, through the selection of materials made available to the students, chooses what to emphasize and which skills to practice. The quasi-case can also stay current more easily than the cases available from case banks by updating materials as new sources of information become available.
Let’s return briefly to NYC’s flirtation with congestion pricing and fast-forward to the present. Is Bloomberg’s plan dead? The answer is obvious, or is it? Should the instructor be so inclined a brief You Tube from the most recent mayoral election would show that the leading candidates said as much. Yet, most recently a proposal for charging tolls on the bridges to Manhattan that are currently toll free has been floated—and the new mayor, Mayor di Blasio, has not disavowed it. The lesson for students is that some policy issues may have a long shelf life by their very nature. Traffic congestion in big cities is one of them. 2
There is one more lesson that comes from the congestion pricing case. It is now quite common to invoke a policy “tools” framework (see Salamon, 2002) when analyzing policy design alternatives, and the tools approach does indeed apply to NYC’s flirtation with congestion pricing. Logically, a city can use other tools—regulation quickly comes to mind—to achieve the policy goal of less congestion and pollution. When we look at the case through a design prism we see that the challenge is not one of sequencing decisions but, rather assessing the important issues that are likely to determine the outcome that operate simultaneously. There are three—political interests, law (specifically the assignment of responsibilities between the state and local government), and markets. So, the challenge to decision-makers is not to search for the optimal policy mix but, rather, to frame the challenge correctly in the first instance. In my judgment, students in the seminar developed a more nuanced view of policy analysis through the written exercise and the quasi-case. The essential learning outcome from an exercise like the one I described in this article is the ability to improve one’s policy analytic ability. This is developed through repetition—the essence of learning any craft—not through a single exercise, so it is difficult to measure the impact of one quasi-case. One approach to experiential learning would be to develop perhaps four or five quasi-cases to be used in a semester to build craft skills further through the method described in this article. What can be asserted, nevertheless, is that Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan provided the students with a more nuanced appreciation of public policy than they had at the beginning of the semester. They also learned to integrate multiple perspectives including markets, politics and institutions in their understanding of what happened in the state capital and in the City of New York. If students are able to tease out these lessons from NYC’s flirtation with congestion pricing, they will have learned much.
Footnotes
Conflict of interest
None declared.
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.