American With Disabilities Act Policy Analysis

Introduction

Since the American with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed in 1990, it has provided a means for individuals with disabilities to have reasonable accommodations in their everyday life (Harrison, 2002). The ADA was one of the the last civil rights acts passed by the United States Congress and was a hard fought victory for people with disabilities. Since 1990 the ADA has strived to help millions of Americans with disabilities live an happy and productive life. There have many studies conducted on the ADA and this will be a policy analysis critique on one of those studies. The study that will be examined is Tracie Culp Harrison’s Has the Americans With Disabilities Act Made a Difference? A Policy Analysis of Quality of Life in the

The first seven will be based on the phases of policy making and they are agenda setting, formulation, adoption, implementation, evaluation, succession and termination. Understanding the phases of policy making will give better insight into why these changes in policy were suggested in the first place. The eighth and last section of the paper will bring all of the findings of the policy changes with the ADA together into the conclusion. Agenda Setting In this policy proposal the author set the agenda by describing how the ADA is viewed and hailed as a ground breaking civil rights act. He then lets the reader know that there are issues with the ADA and wants to know if it has been effective to achieve the goals it set out to achieve. He describes effectiveness as changing the quality of life of people with disabilities. To do this the author states the policy report will present the findings to the ADA on how affective ADA, This policy analysis has all the intention of improving the ADA and the life’s of people with disabilities.

The adoption stage may go through several stages. Various interest groups and actors have a large degree of influence on this stage, as they have financial resources at their disposal. Officials’ influence and resources may be based on their positions and relationships. Legislators are able to vote, hold hearings, and influence the policy agenda in various ways, including co-option, heresthetics, and rhetoric. Heresthetics, in particular, seems to be one of the first tactics that is employed in the example of Justin Dart, the father of ADA. Heresthetics is a power playing strategy in which one person attempts to gain advantage through power manipulation of the policy agenda as well as the policy evaluation. Dart is cited by Harrison (2002) as taking strides in combating special interest groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, The New York Times, The Wall Street journal, etc, who fought against the passage of ADA. Harrison, however does not go into how Dart went about doing this. In the realm of political feasibility, Harrison does discuss and assess the resources of actors in the prime example of how President Nixon vetoed ADA twice because he thought the program would be too expensive. Obviously, ADA would be eventually