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Contemporary political science has long been focused less on the policy content than on "polity" & "politics," in particular. In the middle of the last century, many political scientists decided that such a self-restraint poses certain difficulties, deciding to launch discussions on how the social scientists can & should examine policy. Harold Lasswell's 1951 essay "The Policy Orientation" has launched the discussions. Here, Lasswell claimed that policy research should be separated from a traditional research, ie., focusing on theory, the subject & descriptive in terms of the style it pursues. An essay may, beyond doubt, be described as one of the political science's classics. Not because Lasswell in the space he had, managed to think with subtlety & in depth from a theoretical point of view, but for the reason that he clarified the parameters that later became decisive in analyzing the content of what politics is: analysis must focus on problems; it must be multi-subject & clearly normative. Thus, these three parameters become the part of the fundamental criteria the European Association of Public Administration Accreditation, founded in 1999, uses in accrediting European public education systems. In spite of the fact that many had agreed on the requirements Lasswell posed with regard to public policy as the focus of the social sciences, there was still a lack of common understanding on how these requirements should be implement. To the contrary, they have become the object of unresolved vigorous discussions. Some might interpret this as a weakness of policy analysis, yet some would see this as a proof of healthiness, ie., that the public policy analysts develop the subject of their expertise. Adapted from the source document.

Introduces selected papers concerned with the discovery of HIV in the blood supply in six West European countries. With the discovery that HIV was in the blood supply & was being transmitted to hemophiliacs & recipients of blood transfusions, policymakers had to change regular routines & standard operating procedures in an atmosphere of fast adaptation that involved quick learning not typical of government bureaucracies. Prompt action was required in a situation of great uncertainty & amidst contradictory information. Within four years, the advanced industrial nations had adopted preventive measures. Both the speed in stopping the transmission of a disease & the controversy raised were unprecedented. Contributors seek to discover why such an apparent medical success could be considered a political failure & why the blood crisis was considered a political failure in some countries, but not others. 2 Tables. L. A. Hoffman

Explores the comparative success of Sweden's programmatic management of the HIV & blood crisis in the 1980s as the country applied some of the most restrictive measures in the world & kept the transmission of HIV through the blood supply as merely a marginal health problem. Sweden possessed a professional blood policy community with effective international connections & a politically autonomous blood policy subsystem that allowed the national board of health & welfare, the blood banks, the hemophiliac community, & Kabi, the blood products manufacturer, to take swift & effective actions as research on HIV infection progressed. For example, in Feb 1985 & before a public mandate, Kabi submitted its entire production of clotting factor concentrate to heat treatment. Some counterproductive action & lax supervision of Kabi on some practices allowed 98 hemophiliacs & 80 transfusion recipients to become infected. Two existing compensation plans were immediately applied to these victims, thereby avoiding controversies over compensation that raged in other countries. L. A. Hoffman

The conventional conception of the linkage between science & policy making is based on a rational & positivist science model of decision making that creates a false dichotomy between allegedly legitimate rational research utilization & illegitimate political research utilization. However, the rational decision-making ideal bears little resemblance to the reality of actual policy formulation. Alternative decision models -- eg, the satisfice model, cost-benefit analysis of rationality, & the garbage can model -- produce a more realistic account of social science research utilization. Awareness that research is transferred to & becomes part of a discourse of action reveals that the contribution of science to policy making is less tangible & potentially more influential than usually assumed. 67 References. Adapted from the source document.

The digital media environment changes the way citizens receive political information, also during an election campaign. Particularly first-time voters increasingly use social media platforms as news sources. Yet, it is less clear how accessing political information in such a unique social setting affects these cohorts' decision-making processes during an election campaign, compared to experienced voters. We compare effects of these two groups' political information exposure on their vote choice certainty during the 2015 Danish national election. We furthermore test how the relation between exposure and certainty can be mediated by active campaign participation. An 11-wave national panel study was conducted, using a smartphone-based assessment of citizens' ( n = 1108) media exposure and vote choice certainty across the campaign period. Results suggest that first-time voters' social media exposure is responsible for their increase in certainty as the campaign progresses, while this effect is absent for experienced voters.