Politics 396
Public Administration Internship
Policy Paper Guidelines
As you know, one of your three paper assignments, the Policy Paper, asks you to act as if you are an administrator or a politician who’s lobbying for policy changes on behalf of your government agency or your legislative office. The assignment puts you in the position of addressing a legislature, such as a city council, a state legislature, or Congress, where you have an opportunity to request legislation that will promote more effective and progressive policy to address, if not solve, a policy problem. For example, if you’re working for the Bureau of Prisons as an administrator, you might recommend policy that restores rehabilitation programs to the nation’s prisons since they are more effective in preventing repeat-offenders than merely retribution and long prison sentences. Or, if you’re a state politician, you might recommend policy that eliminates private prisons since they provide a counterproductive profit motive for private companies that perpetuates racist and unnecessary mass imprisonment. Obviously, lobbying for more funding can always help, but what you’d be requesting goes beyond that: it would be, perhaps, a change in how officials look at or diagnose the problem (such as homelessness, unemployment, crime, etc) and the adoption of policies that would better address the causes of the problem.
You’re not expected to miraculously “solve the problem” with your pleas and proposals. But your Paper should reflect an understanding of the problem your group is addressing and its causes (not merely its symptoms—which may be the focus of existing government policies), and it should present policy ideas as to how those causes might more successfully be addressed. You might be aided in this assignment not only by the background provided by the book you’ve chosen for your Academic Paper, but also by discussing this issue with the people who are working with you, for your agency or politician. That is, if they had a chance to advocate policy that would really make a difference, what would they propose. You’re welcome to borrow their ideas, along with your own.
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