Lindblom’s Incremental Approach to Public Policy

How do governments actually make decisions? The textbook answer – gather all the facts, evaluate every option, and pick the best one – sounds logical. But Charles Lindblom, one of the most influential political scientists of the 20th century, argued that this “rational” ideal is largely a fiction. In his landmark 1959 paper The Science of Muddling Through, published in the Public Administration Review, Lindblom proposed a radically different and far more realistic picture of how public policy actually gets made: not through master plans, but through small, cautious, and often messy adjustments to whatever already exists.

The problem with the rational model 🔗

To appreciate what Lindblom was arguing, it helps to first understand what he was arguing against. The dominant framework of his time was the rational-comprehensive model, which assumed that policymakers could identify all possible solutions to a problem, calculate the costs and benefits of each, and then select the single best option. It was a neat, scientific ideal – and Lindblom found it completely unworkable in practice.

Real-world policymakers face strict constraints. There is never enough time to analyze every alternative. The information required is rarely complete. The political environment is full of competing interests and conflicting values. And the sheer complexity of most social problems makes any attempt at “comprehensive” analysis not just difficult, but impossible. Lindblom argued that policymakers rarely have the time, information, or political feasibility to engage in such exhaustive decision-making processes.

His alternative was not a new, perfected system. It was an honest description of what people in government actually do – and a defense of why that approach is, in many ways, sensible.

The science of muddling through 🔗

Lindblom’s 1959 essay helped policymakers understand why they needed to consider a different approach when making policy changes. He called this alternative incrementalism, or more colloquially, “muddling through.” Rather than starting from scratch and designing grand solutions, policymakers begin with the current policy and make limited, cautious adjustments. They compare a small number of alternatives that differ only slightly from what already exists. They avoid straying too far from the familiar, and they learn by doing.

This model, which Lindblom also called the “branch method” (as opposed to the rational “root method” of starting from first principles), is one where policy is made and re-made endlessly through a process of successive limited comparisons. The key insight is that this is not sloppy decision-making – it is a systematic, if imperfect, strategy for navigating genuine complexity.

Key features of incremental decision-making 🔗

Small, successive adjustments 🔗

The most fundamental feature of Lindblom’s model is that policy changes are marginal, not sweeping. Policymakers do not compare all conceivable options. They compare the existing policy with a small set of closely related alternatives, focusing only on the differences – the “increments” – rather than re-evaluating the entire policy from the ground up. Consider how national budgets are typically set: governments rarely redesign every program from scratch each year. Instead, they take last year’s budget as the baseline and debate modest adjustments at the margins. This is incrementalism in its most everyday form.

Trial and error 🔗

Incrementalism embraces a trial-and-error approach to policy-making. Policies are viewed as experiments that can be modified, expanded, or abandoned based on their outcomes. Because changes are small, mistakes are also small – and reversible. A government does not need to get it perfectly right on the first try, because there will always be another round of adjustments. This built-in corrective mechanism is one of the model’s most practical strengths.

Mutual adjustment and negotiation 🔗

Policy is rarely made by a single decision-maker in isolation. Lindblom recognized that it emerges from a constant process of give-and-take among multiple actors – legislators, bureaucrats, interest groups, and others – each pursuing their own goals. Policy-making is not a hierarchical and centrally controlled process, but rather involves partisan mutual adjustment – a process of negotiation and bargaining where decision-makers make compromises and adjust to one another. The resulting policy is not anyone’s ideal outcome; it is a workable agreement that enough stakeholders can accept.

Strategic policy-making and disjointed incrementalism 🔗

As Lindblom developed his ideas over the following decades – particularly in his 1963 book A Strategy of Decision (co-authored with David Braybrooke) and his 1979 article Still Muddling, Not Yet Through – he refined the theory into the concept of disjointed incrementalism.

The “disjointed” element captures something important: in large, complex governments, there is no single coordinating brain overseeing policy. Different agencies and departments work on overlapping problems, often without aligning their efforts. The Department of Education might address poverty through school meals, while the Labor Department runs job training programs, and Housing runs rent subsidies. None of these efforts is part of one rational master plan. They are fragmented – “disjointed” – yet together they constitute government policy.

Lindblom formally identified several stratagems that characterize this disjointed process. These include: limiting analysis to a few familiar policy alternatives; intertwining analysis of policy goals with empirical aspects of the problem; focusing more on remedying existing problems than on pursuing ideal positive goals; and distributing analytical work across many participants in the policy process.

This approach is also what Lindblom called strategic analysis: rather than attempting a comprehensive overview of all possibilities, policymakers use deliberate simplifications to cut through complexity and arrive at a workable decision. People proceed in a strategic or focused manner to get through the complexity of the problem and over their own ignorance to arrive at a decision.

Partisan mutual adjustment as a democratic mechanism 🔗

One of Lindblom’s most significant theoretical contributions was his elevation of partisan mutual adjustment from a descriptive observation into a normative argument about democracy itself. Lindblom placed incrementalism within the larger framework of partisan mutual adjustment, endeavoring to show that self-interested “partisans” practicing incrementalism could achieve policy coordination without having to impose a synoptic plan from above.

In this context, “partisan” does not simply mean political parties. It refers to any actor with a stake in the outcome: elected officials, civil servants, business lobbies, trade unions, civil society groups, and more. Each pursues its own interests. But through constant negotiation and mutual adjustment, the system arrives at policy outcomes that no single actor could have designed alone. Significant policy change occurs, if at all, through a gradual accumulation of small changes – a process Lindblom calls seriality.

For Lindblom, this distributed, pluralistic process was actually superior to centralized rational planning. Rather than trusting a single expert or agency to compute the “correct” policy, partisan mutual adjustment distributes power, incorporates diverse values, and ensures that many voices are, at least partially, heard. In a process of partisan mutual adjustment, the system can often assure a more comprehensive regard for the values of the whole society than any attempt at intellectual comprehensiveness. It was, in his view, a democratic alternative to top-down control.

Evolution of the model: Lindblom’s growing doubts 🔗

Lindblom never abandoned incrementalism, but his relationship with it grew increasingly complicated. By the late 1970s and into the 1980s, he had begun to acknowledge a troubling implication of his own theory: that it carried a built-in conservative bias.

If policy can only change in small steps, then the existing system – with all its flaws and inequalities – is constantly reinforced. Radical reforms become structurally difficult, even when they are desperately needed. Lindblom’s portrait of business’s privileged position in advanced capitalist societies led him to conclude that corporate influence on public opinion and policy usually serves to confirm rather than to change the status quo.

His concern was not just theoretical. In his 1977 work Politics and Markets, Lindblom noted the “privileged position of business in polyarchy” and introduced the concept of “circularity,” in which even in democracies, public preferences can be shaped so that people demand only what elites are willing to provide. In this view, partisan mutual adjustment is not a level playing field. Powerful interests – corporations, well-funded lobbies – have far more influence than poorly organized citizens or marginalized groups. Incrementalism, rather than being a democratic equalizer, could instead become a slow drift in favor of the already powerful.

The critics: Dror, Etzioni, and beyond 🔗

Lindblom’s critics pointed to a deeper problem: the model fails precisely when it is needed most. Incrementalism was shown to overlook opportunities for significant innovations and to ignore the fact that incremental decisions are often made within the context of fundamental decisions that incrementalism itself cannot address.

Yehezkel Dror, writing in the 1960s, offered perhaps the sharpest critique. In his book Public Policymaking Reexamined, Dror argued for systematic reexamination and redesign of the policymaking system itself, calling for the development of alternative policies and the use of modern techniques of rational analysis where they can make a genuine contribution. For Dror, “muddling through” was not pragmatic wisdom – it was institutionalized inertia. Dror viewed the incremental model as inadequate for addressing major policy shifts or complex problems, finding it conservative and only suitable for stable situations with sufficient resources.

Amitai Etzioni took a different approach. Rather than rejecting incrementalism outright, he proposed a synthesis. Etzioni introduced a mixed scanning model in 1967, aimed at reconciling the diverse weaknesses of both the rational and incremental models by integrating features characteristic of each. His idea was that policymakers should operate on two levels simultaneously: a broad, high-altitude scan to set fundamental directions, and a detailed, incremental approach to handle specific decisions. In mixed scanning, each element helps to reduce the shortcomings of the other: incrementalism limits the unrealistic aspects of rationalism, while rationalism helps overcome the conservative slant of incrementalism by exploring longer-run alternatives.

Together, these critiques established clear limits for Lindblom’s model. Incrementalism works reasonably well during periods of stability, when policy problems are familiar and manageable. But in a crisis – a financial collapse, a public health emergency, the long-term threat of climate change – small, cautious adjustments may simply be too slow and too timid to be effective.

Why Lindblom’s model still matters 🔗

Despite its limitations, Lindblom’s incremental model retains enduring relevance. After half a century, incrementalism is still part of the policy scholar’s toolkit, with some of its core ideas continuing to drive research, often in combination with more recent theoretical approaches to the policy process. Its core insight – that policymakers operate under conditions of bounded rationality, time pressure, political resistance, and incomplete information – is as true today as it was in 1959.

The model also offers a useful corrective to the arrogance of grand planning. History is littered with large-scale, “rational” policy designs that failed catastrophically because their designers overestimated what they could know and control. Incrementalism, with its emphasis on reversibility, learning, and adaptation, provides a more humble and resilient alternative. The lesson is not that comprehensive thinking is useless, but that it must be paired with the practical wisdom to act cautiously and correct course as circumstances evolve.

What do you think? In an era of urgent global challenges – from climate change to economic inequality – is “muddling through” with small, incremental steps a responsible strategy, or does it simply allow powerful interests to block the bold reforms that are genuinely needed? And how should policymakers decide when a crisis is serious enough to abandon incrementalism and pursue more transformative change?

References

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