The Socialist State and the Peasantry

Abstract

The question that Griffin addresses — why do governments do what they do? — is the complex essense of policy analysis. To answer it requires, at the empirical level, an identification of how government agents actually act, as opposed to how they say they act. To explain these actions, the ideological justifications governments provide for their policy actions then need to be separated from the ‘real’ (and possibly partly unconscious) motives that operate at different levels of the polity and bureaucracy. Making a distinction between ‘levels’ is a reminder that governments are not undifferentiated entities. Conflicts over policy directions between the political leadership and government agencies, and between and within government agencies, occur because of people’s different interests, perceptions and beliefs.

Rather than assume that governments attempt to maximise social or economic welfare but fail to do so, it might be more suitable to assume that governments have quite different objectives and generally succeed in achieving them. Rather than criticising governments for failing to attain, or offering advice on how to attain a non-goal, it would be instructive if more time were devoted to analysing what governments actually do and why. (Griffin, 1975, in Clay and Schaffer, 1984, p. 2)