VALUE-CRITICAL POLICY ANALYSIS 305that these groups were racialized after being forcibly incorporated into the country’s population.
It is this understanding of the social context of language use and status that shapes the outlook of
pluralists and motivates them in the language policy debate.
Assimilationists, on the other hand, have a very different view of the relevant social context:
Their attention is fixed on the massive number of new immigrants—most from non–English-
speaking countries—who have become part of the U.S. population in recent decades, and whom
they see as being encouraged by misguided or self-interested ethnic political activists to resist
linguistic (and cultural) assimilation, to the detriment of the immigrants and the whole country.
Moreover, assimilationists believe that this contemporary context is very different from that of
previous periods of high-level immigration to the United States, arguing that previous immi-
grants understood that assimilation was the necessary result of migrating to a new country and
that this understanding was supported and facilitated by the educational and other public policies
of those earlier periods. Understanding the language policy conflict between pluralists and
assimilationists, then, begins with an understanding of their very different views of the relevant
social context underlying their policy proposals.
Other policy issues, of course, have other relevant social contexts that give rise to political
conflict. In the case of transportation policy, to give another example, those who favor expand-
ing governmental support for mass transit systems have a view of the social context that stresses
the negative consequences of Americans’ overwhelming reliance on the automobile (e.g., en-
vironmental damage; waste of economic and natural resources; dependence on foreign oil in an
increasingly dangerous world; inequitable access to convenient transportation for the young,
old, and impoverished parts of the population; etc.). In contrast, those who favor continued
reliance on the automobile as the country’s primary means of transportation articulate a very
different view of the relevant social context, one that stresses the immense “sunk costs” already
invested in automobile usage and that sees continued technological innovation as the key to
diminishing both the environmental destructiveness and the global insecurities related to gas-
powered vehicles.
In describing the social context, therefore, the policy analyst needs to focus on the larger
societal forces shaping the positions of protagonists in the policy debate. The primary aim of the
analyst, again, is to clarify what is at stake in a particular public policy conflict. Accomplishing
this clarification can be greatly helped by understanding and articulating the protagonists’ views
on the forces that have shaped social life in directions that have led to the protagonists’ calls for a
particular kind of public policy response.
Once the policy analyst has arrived at a balanced and accurate description of the protagonists’
views of the social context shaping political efforts in relation to a given (actual or proposed)
public policy, it will now be helpful to articulate carefully, accurately, and as succinctly as pos-
sible the policy positions of the protagonists. What, exactly, are the proposals being made by the
competing camps about the issue in contention? For example, what kinds of laws or administra-
tive regulations do the protagonists want to see legislators and/or executive officials adopt in
order to deal with the situation that has resulted in the policy conflict? The aim here is to be
comprehensive and synoptic in getting an overview of the situation, rather than to go into detail
on precisely what is being proposed. This is so because most of the time slight variations in policy
approach do not involve shifts in underlying values. Incremental shifts sometimes signal important
symbolic differences between camps, and they are often the stuff of compromise at the final stages
of policy development, but they do not inform us much about the underlying value conflicts.
In the case of language policy conflict, the basic positions of the two sides have remained
fairly consistent over a long period of time, despite a multitude of specific policy proposals and