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Traces the growth of interest in a policy focus in Britain during the 1970s and early 1980s, and its subsequent partial displacement by an emphasis on public management.

Introduces a special journal issue covering "Public Policy Yearbook 2013". Adapted from the source document.

Purpose: The following syllabus is designed to introduce students to public policymaking at the national level of government. As designed, this course has the following goals associated with the process, issues, and institutions of national policymaking:1.Acquaint students with the political dynamics of the policy process— with particular focus on policy networks: those persons from the departments or agencies, members of Congress and their staff, and interest groups who interact on specific policy issues.2.Introduce the complexities of the specific policy issues that form the national agenda (e.g., trade, agriculture, welfare, taxes).3.Emphasize the importance of political institutions and their formal procedures—with particular stress on the budget process and presidential agenda setting.

We are pleased to present the sixth edition of the Public Policy Yearbook. Each year, dating back to its launch in 2009, we have used the content of the Yearbook to develop indicators for tracking developments in public policy scholarship. While we recognize that trends we can identify are only representative of the sample of Yearbook scholars, the patterns of scholarly focus have remained quite stable despite a more than doubling of our membership over the 2009-2014 period. In this introductory article, following a brief description of the Yearbook, we take a comparative look at how research trends in the Yearbook have evolved over the last six years. Adapted from the source document.

Reviewed & criticized are the dominant approaches to the study of public policy found in the recent literature, & proposed is a general framework within which policy study can be more directly related to the central concerns of politically science. Despite a massive increase in interest in policy, little progress has been made in developing theory to explain policy. Policy study has been dominated by two important, though limited, approaches: those of public administration & "policy analysis." It should be linked more directly to basic political issues such as power, conflict, & ideology. Policy should be regarded not as consensual problem solving, but as competition among clashing alternatives, & for scarce resources. The most important question to ask about it is "who gets what?" rather than questions about "efficiency & effectiveness." Policy study must be comparative, & it must seek ways to relate broad political conditions such as power, ideology, & institutional constraints directly to the policy outcomes, through the mediating influence of bargaining processes among decisionmakers. Policy study has been weakened by the continuing stress on case studies, the premature response to the demand to be relevant & prescriptive, & by the failure to specify the dependent variables: to isolate what we want to know, as political scientists, about policy. Policy study should seek to explain patterns of policy across political units. The patterns can be characterized in three sets of dependent factors: (1) variations in the scope of government -- the range of matters about which governments make decisions; (2) variations in the means, ranging from voluntarism & delegation to coercion & centralization, through which governments seek to implement decisions & secure compliance; & (3) variations in distribution, ie, variations in the distribution of costs & benefits across political relevant groups such as SCs, regions, religious groups, etc. Patterns of policy are thus distinguished from individual decisions, or particular programs. AA.