Introduction to Public Policy

Mid-Term Paper Case Study: Influencing the Agenda

Task
The task for the mid-term paper in short form is:

Prepare a case study on the United Nations successfully influencing

the national agenda setting in their favor.
The following points discuss the individual terms and the task as a whole:

This paper is supposed to focus on a single instance of activities by the UN managing to

influence the agenda suciently that an item they favor appears or an item they do not
favor disappears from the policy agenda.

You can focus on any part of the UN, and any type of policy initiatives. Think of the
following examples: the UN Secretary General calling on governments to work towards
a particular goal, a UN Security Council resolution needing to be implemented, the UN
at large or individual UN branches lobbying for progress on a policy initiative such as
the Millennium Development Goals or the Social Protection Floor Initiative, etc. Any
case where the UN is trying to get a topic on the national agenda is welcome.

Clearly delineate what you are going to include in your case study. Minimally, you
should include the following information so that the case becomes accessible for
readers who are not familiar with your home country:
A brief description of how agenda-setting usually works. This serves as a
background for the reader who may be unfamiliar with how agenda-setting works in
your country. Feel free to limit the extent of this description and assume that all
basic terms and concepts covered in our course are understood by the reader.
A description of the part of the UN and the topic that the UN is trying to promote or
demote. Ideally, your readers should come away with an understanding of the
mission, goals and mode of operation of the UN branch (what do they work on?
what are their goals? how do they work?) and the nature of the topic (is this an
unusual topic? how does this influence your country and its population?).
An analysis of why the UN wants the topic on/o the agenda and the means that are
being used to achieve this goal. This is a good opportunity to categorize and assess
their behavior, and to oset it with a brief overview of the reaction of other actors.

Clearly define the selected branch of the UN. E.g. if you selected one of the millenium
development goals, the initial push came from the Secretary Generals oce, but several
UN branches are pursuing policy changes to help countries achieve individual goals.
Make sure to clarify your focus and to speak consistently of the UN branch you are
studying in your memo (e.g. UNDP).

Home country. We are flexible in the interpretation of home country, see the section
below.

National policy agenda. For the purpose of this paper, we would like you to focus on a
policy item that is discussed at the national level. In many countries, the policy process
at the sub-national level is well established and worthy of study. However, the most
important (and therefore highly contested, well documented, ) decisions are still
taken at the national level. Focusing on the national level will reduce the lengths you
will need to go to in order to unearth relevant information, and it will make your paper
more relevant for your fellow students who are trying to understand your country.

Successful influence. The case should result in the actor attaining their goal with
respect to the policy agenda if the actor wants an item to end up on the policy
agenda, it should get there, and vice versa if the actor would like the item removed.
You do not have to establish that it was the eorts of this actor alone that achieved this
result. The agenda-setting process is messy with lots of actors trying to influence the
agenda in their favor. It is a rare occasion when you find one actor alone in pushing an
item onto or o of the agenda and succeeding. All that is needed here is that the actor
gets what it wants, no proof is needed that their influence was decisive. (While you may
not have solid proof of the influence the actor had on the final result, you are very
welcome to give your assessment whether you deem their eorts to have had a decisive
influence.)
Finally, success at the agenda-setting stage does not guarantee success in any of the
following stages, and you do not have to consider whether the actor is successful in
shepherding the issue through alternative formulation, decision making and
implementation as well. For the purpose of this paper, you have a case as long the actor
influenced the agenda-setting alone. (As above, it is interesting if you have information
about the development of the issue once it was added to/removed from the agenda, but
this should not be central to your paper.)

A final hint on the task that does not relate to the actual topic: keep your audience in mind.
Your paper is meant not only to be graded by us at the school, it is also meant to serve as a
useful source of information for your fellow students who are not familiar with your country. It
is therefore crucial that you write with a foreign readership in mind and clearly explain
national peculiarities to them.

Notes on your home country

For most of you, the choice of your home country will be simple: if you have a single
nationality and you have lived in that country in the recent past, you should consider this
country your home country.
If you happen to have multiple nationalities, you are free to choose which of your nationalities
you consider to be your home country for the purpose of this paper.
Alternatively, if you have spent substantial time outside of the country (countries) of which you
are a citizen, you are free to choose a country of recent residence as your home country.
If you can choose between multiple countries, consider the ease with which you can gather
information and your familiarity with each country as factors, but if you are still undecided,
consider taking the less well-known case since this will increase the value of your paper for
your fellow students. You do not need to notify us of your choice.
Finally, we should consider political systems that are currently in some form of reform or
turmoil. If the policy process of your home country is currently being re-defined, you can

choose one of three approaches: firstly, you can decide to describe the situation before the
current reform process was initiated. Obviously, this will be less useful for your potential
readers since that process is not likely to be the one that they will find if they decide to work in
your country. However, there still is some use since you are providing them with a historical
perspective, and it should be easier to accomplish than the alternatives. Secondly, you can
choose to describe the situation during transition. This involves the dual challenge of the ad
hoc nature of the process (you are unlikely to find substantial documentation) and the lack of
permanence of your findings. Nonetheless, transition processes are interesting cases due to
their very fluid nature. Finally, you could attempt to extrapolate what the policy process will
look like at the conclusion of the transition. This is a highly speculative endeavor, but in many
cases, it is possible to see in which direction a process is moving when considering the point of
departure and the shape of the reform process.

Formal criteria
Your paper should be 3'000 words in length.1 Within that length, you will need to provide the
reader with an introduction, background information on the agenda-setting process in your
country, description of actor and issue, and the analysis of the attempt to get the issue added
to/removed from the national policy agenda. Here is an example structure for your paper:2
1. Introduction (customarily about 5% of the text3).
2. Brief overview of the agenda-setting process in your country (20%3).
3. Description of UN branch and issue (30%3).
4. Analysis on the successful attempt to influence the agenda (40%3).
5. Conclusion/discussion (5%3).
Your paper has to be handed in on Monday, September 15, 2014, at or before 8:00 a.m., via the
appropriate SafeAssignment folder in Eleum. You can request an extension if it is unlikely that
you will complete your paper by the deadline. Submit your request for an extension online by
completing this form before the original deadline. Requests for extension received after the
deadline will not be granted unless there are extraordinary reasons (illness, emergency; with
documentation).
Only papers received by the deadline will be distributed for peer review, so if you fail to hand
in your paper on time or request an extension, your paper will not be distributed and you will
not receive a paper for review. This means that you forfeit the 5% of the final grade that you
would get from your peer review it is equivalent to a half-mark deduction of your final grade
if we assume that you would get a perfect 10 for your peer review.
In writing your paper, be sure to clearly mark and reference all outside sources that you used.4
Note that your paper will be checked for plagiarism both automatically and manually, and the
1 This includes the entire body text but not the title page, table of contents, bibliography or appendices. Please
resist the temptation to move parts of your main argument into the appendix. You can diverge from the goal of
3'000 words by up to 10%, but papers below 2'700 or above 3'300 words will be marked down.
2 This is a convenient, but boring example. Feel free to structure your paper in any way that makes sense to you.
3 This is only an illustrative example and you are not required to adopt this structure. The size indications are in
no way binding and serve for your orientation only. The only criterion that matters here is whether your
structure is helpful to the reader in grasping the information and arguments presented.
4 You are free to use a reference style of your choice. APA style is very common at Maastricht University, Chicago
A-D style is frequently used in political science. Maastricht University provides you with a free license for
EndNote for PC or Mac to manage your bibliography. Visit http://licentiesoftware.unimaas.nl/ to download.

UNU Regulations specify non-trivial consequences for plagiarism, up to and including

permanent removal from the UNU part of the program and loss of the UNU diploma.

Anonymized peer review

In order to prepare your paper for anonymized peer review and circulation, please keep in
mind the following conditions.
We accept your paper in the following formats:

Microsoft Word.
LibreOce/OpenOce/StarOce/NeoOce Writer.
Apple Pages.
Rich Text Format.

Make sure to include the following essential information on the front page, but only on the
front page: your full name and student ID number, title and subtitle (if applicable) of your
paper, course name and code as well as the place and date of submission.
DO NOT INCLUDE YOUR NAME, STUDENT ID OR OTHER PERSONALLY IDENTIFYING
INFORMATION ON ANY PAGE EXCEPT THE FRONT PAGE! Your paper will be anonymized
by replacing the front page, so if you mention your name or other means of identifying you
later in the paper, you will give your identity away to your peer reviewer and other readers.

Grading
Original works handed in on time (with or without extension) will be graded on the following
three components:
1. Formal requirements. This includes requirements on the completeness and
comprehensibility of the text, correct use of language, the presence of an easily
discernible, logical structure and correct usage of sources. This will make up 25% of the
grade.
2. Understanding of the topic. This includes the correct identification of actors and issues,
as well as a good grasp of the policy process. Your performance here amounts to 35% of
the grade.
3. Quality of your argumentation. The most important part of the assessment is based on
the inherent logic of your argument and the skillfulness of its presentation. It is not
enough to get the facts right, they have to be logically linked in a way that provides the
reader with a clear picture of the case. This counts as 40% of the grade for your paper.
Since all participants are originally enrolled at Maastricht University, grades will be provided
on the Dutch scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being best and 5.5 being sucient to pass. (Since this
is a UNU course, the original grade will be registered with UNU on the scale from 0 to 100%
and on the truncated letter scale, see rule 85 of the UNU regulations for the grading scale and
approx. translation of grades.)
The grading will be accompanied by a brief reasoning and will be posted at the latest by
Monday, October 6, 2013. An inspection hour will be announced together with the grades.

Advice on useful sources

To enable your description of the policy process in your home country, you will need to find
appropriate, reliable sources. In order to complete this paper, you will need to rely primarily on
local sources for the facts of the case. You are free to quote non-English sources as part of your
argument, and you are free to use non-academic sources to support your presentation of the
case.5
When looking for academic sources that you will need when describing aspects of the policy
process, the works cited by Hill and Kingdon are a good starting point. (This is a non-trivial
component of the task: if you can explain parts of the policy process and the actors involved in
the terminology used in the literature that we are all familiar with, you enable your readers to
better understand the situation in your home country.) If you need additional sources, use the
journals listed on Eleum, as well as online literature databases such as the International
Bibliography of the Social Sciences and JSTOR. Journals to which Maastricht University
subscribes will be accessible for free through these services as long as you are using the UM
network (either in a UM building or by virtual private network). You may also want to use
Google Scholar, which not only indexes most important publications (including the content of
books and working paper series that are not published through a regular academic publishing
house), but also presents results in a way that takes the subscriptions of Maastricht University
into account.
A source that has grown in importance in recent years is Wikipedia. While Wikipedia
continuously improves the quality of its information and can surpass the level of traditionally
edited publications, there are also articles on Wikipedia that are clearly wrong or even
misleading. In general, you could use information from Wikipedia, but only in two ways:

Feel free to cite articles that have had their quality checked. The dierent Wikipedias
indicate such articles in a special way.6

Other articles should not be used as sources themselves, but will often contain highly
useful pointers to other sources that can then be cited.7 This rule applies to
encyclopedias in general.

You should remain cautious when using other online sources and any source in general,
adjusting your level of mistrust by the perceivable quality of the source.
Finally, given that some of you have first-hand experience with the policy process in your
home countries, you are free to use your own experience. If you decide to do this, it is crucial
that you qualify your experience to the reader (i.e. you will need to mention in broad, ideally
non-identifying terms how you got your experience).

5 Some referencing styles require that non-English sources be listed with their original title and an English
translation. This can be helpful for the reader, but is only mandatory if the reference style of your choice
requires it.
6 Cf. the respective explanations in Wikipedia in English, Dutch, German, Spanish, French, Italian, or
Portuguese.
7 Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has also argued for using Wikipedia as a spring-board in this Quora
post.