Malign Policy: Conceptualising Ill-Will in Public Policy

The evidence is mounting that in liberal democracies – which overwhelmingly are the home or object of study for western-dominated schools of public policy – that we can no longer default to the long-held assumption that policy-making is, prima facie, a public interest-led activity. The supposition that government decision-makers sometimes act with ill-intent, or that institutions are procedurally harmful, is new to neither political studies nor international relations. Yet despite a cottage industry of normative and descriptive models of policy-making, public policy scholarship has largely failed to conceptualise malice, malignity and ill-will. This article surfaces and challenges the default analytical assumption of the benevolent policy official, exposing its epistemological and normative frailty and arguing that our models of policy-making must theorise policy malignity with respect to: malicious, corrupt or malformed public policy decision-making and institutions designed to systematically harm the interests of a segment or segments of the public. The articles draws from multiple cases to inductively build a conceptual model of policy malignity to capture these dynamics.