Disability, Public Policy, and Implementation

Citizens who experience mental or physical disability have traditionally represented a hidden minority in American society. Literally through institutionalization, and subtly through negative attitudes and treatment, persons with disabilities have been isolated from the social mainstream and denied the benefits and opportunities available to nondisabled persons. This exclusion results, in part, from limitations in mobility, dexterity, and communication imposed by disabling conditions. But even greater barriers to the opportunities of modern society have been imposed by nonhandicapped persons, who have feared disabled people and have been preoccupied with that group's inabilities and problems rather than their capabilities. America's citizens and institutions — both public and private — have systematically ignored the needs of disabled persons when designing facilities, employment practices, educational programs, and the delivery of public services.

Disabled citizens no longer accept the barriers that have excluded them from consuming the benefits and opportunities that are so plentiful in American life. They are actively engaged in efforts on many fronts to overcome obstacles that impede access to the benefits that others take for granted. Some victories have been small in scope but significant in impact; the proliferation of specially designated parking places for handicapped persons is one example. Other efforts have been more far-reaching and represent a long-term strategy to remove limitations imposed on persons with disabilities. Relevant here are state and federal laws to protect the rights of disabled citizens in areas ranging from access to public buildings to accommodations in employment and public transportation.

This book is about people with disabilities and their struggle to achieve equal opportunity in America. Primary attention is given to their efforts to affect the development and implementation of public policies to advance and protect their own rights and opportunities. The book is also about policy implementation, that is, about the political and administrative processes involved in carrying public laws into action. Public laws are in no way self-enforcing; instead, they must be executed by a wide variety of actors working in and through a number of institutional arenas. Understanding the dynamic process by which laws are translated into administrative guidelines and are then enforced is the key to understanding successes and dilemmas associated with implementing disability rights laws.

Implementation is a complex political and administrative process, which conceptually covers the period from legislative passage through policy evaluation. This process can be broken into components that are distinct conceptually but interact in practice. Policy refinement refers to those activities aimed at clarifying procedures, processes, and guidelines relevant to the administration of programs. Public laws set the statutory framework for implementation, but this broad policy outline leaves many questions about execution unanswered. For this reason, executive agencies are required to refine and clarify policy objectives and practices as a precursor to effective implementation efforts.

A second component of implementation is policy diffusion, the communication of the refined objectives and practices to the administrative agents charged with providing services, benefits, or protections. The outcomes of implementation are likely to closely match program objectives only if administrative agents understand policy intentions and the strategies and mechanisms selected for implementation. Diffusion is particularly important in an intergovernmental system, such as that of the United States, where both political and administrative authorities are widely distributed through thousands of public and private institutions.

Policy execution is the final component and represents the transformation activities performed by administrative agents for the purpose of distributing services, benefits, and regulatory protections. It is at this level that public and private agents interact with citizens, corporations, or other governments in an effort to achieve implementation objectives. Studies that focus on policy execution tend to take a "bottom up" approach to analysis of implementation, analyzing transformation efforts and influences on those efforts in order to understand how programs work to produce outcomes.

The analysis of disability rights policy pursued in this book will place heavy focus on the policy refinement phase of implementation. The reason for this emphasis is empirically based: in the roughly twenty-year period since the passage of disability rights laws by the federal government, the most prominent activity has been the development and refinement of guidelines, criteria, and obligations for implementation. Many of the laws raised more questions about implementation practices than they answered; they were heavily symbolic and thus imprecise as to strategies and objectives for policy execution. Public sector action to protect and advance the rights of handicapped persons is a relatively new responsibility, and as a consequence, significant effort has been consumed in policy refinement activities. This study will consider relevant issues of policy diffusion and execution where they are applicable, but considering the nature of implementation to date, most experience relates to policy refinement.

The fundamental question underlying this study of disability rights is: How did the federal government develop and refine policy objectives and strategies to carry out the legal mandates set in disability rights laws? The unfolding story presented in this book will document how the agencies of the federal government wrestled with controversial and confounding dilemmas and trade-offs in devising policies for implementation. Such policy development has not taken place in a vacuum; instead, it resulted from the frequent interactions of interested parties who wished to affect policy directions and the flow of program costs and benefits. The dynamic interactions among interested parties, in the context of institutional arenas, will be examined as a means to explain the development of implementation policies.

To understand the development and implementation of public policies to advance the rights and opportunities of persons with disability, it is necessary to consider the extent and...