A persistent criticism of policy analysis is that it undermines basic democratic institutions and processes by replacing public participation with expert analysis. Many decision makers shun broader participation because of the complexity of an issue or the cost, uncertainty, and delay often associated with public involvement. This article presents a model for the systematic inclusion of public input into relatively complex public policy decisions. It outlines two determinants of success in public participation efforts: the purpose for public involvement and the nature of the issue; furthermore, it applies the model to two issues in recent Utah history that have involved public participation. Using these principles, decision makers should be able to design and implement public participation strategies that both inform the public about substantive policy questions and improve the quality of the final decision.Lawrence C. Walters is associate professor of public policy and management at Brigham Young University. His current research interests focus on policy analysis theory. He has also published articles on tax policy, education, finance, and quantitative policy analysis methods.

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This article details an approach for empirically eliciting and examining public service values and their impact on decisions made by public servants. The approach involves adaptation of the Schwartz Portrait Values Questionnaire such that it: (1) elicits values relevant to an individual's public service role rather than broad personal values; and (2) incorporates values omitted by the Schwartz framework, including those identified by Jørgensen and Bozeman and others. To examine the impact of public service values on specific public management decisions, we use structured decision context statements similar to those proposed by Tetlock. We find that: (1) the adapted instrument maps favourably to the Schwartz personal value space; (2) the public service values space includes value sets that expand and refine the personal value space defined by Schwartz; and (3) the public service values elicited can be used to predict decisions made by respondents in specific public service decision contexts.

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Although a universal hierarchy of public values has proven elusive, the literature in individuallevel values suggests that decision makers do organize their personal values into hierarchies based on context. Through analysis of public values and public decision preferences gathered in a pilot study of city-level public administrators (n = 182), we use an empirical approach to identify context-relevant public values for five different decision contexts. We then demonstrate multiple possible approaches to modeling individual-and community-level policy preferences based on value hierarchies derived from the individual-level data. We find that the predictions based on value hierarchies are better than would be predicted in the absence of such hierarchies, and that these differences are statistically significant. These findings suggest that while creating a universal hierarchy of values remains challenging, context-relevant public value hierarchies at smaller units of analysis may be useful in describing, predicting, and explaining the decisions of public administrators.

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Railroad companies in the United States pay hundreds of millions of dollars in property tax each year. Railroad and tax officials often disagree about the appraisal methodology as well as the appraised value of railroads. A frequent area of disagreement is in the measurement of obsolescence, defined as the reduction in value due to changing economic conditions or design limitations. Current methods of measuring obsolescence in railroads systematically overestimate obsolescence. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) can be used to obtain a better measure of obsolescence. The states of Utah and Wisconsin have adopted the DEA method of measuring obsolescence.

This paper examines the outcome of a non-binding full disclosure process to control increases in the property tax. The data used in the study cover a 20-plus-year period in fi ve MSAs in Utah. During the period of our analysis, metro areas in Utah experienced rapid increases in the market value of residential housing. The results of our analysis suggest that local assessors in Utah captured this increased value in their appraisal and reappraisal processes. However, our results also demonstrate that the effective property tax rate did not keep pace with increases in assessed property values, implying that a non-binding full disclosure law did limit growth in the property tax. Furthermore, it limited the property tax while avoiding some of the unintended consequences imposed by binding property tax limitations.