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Political scientists who are policy scholars often trace their lineage back to the pioneering work of Lerner and Lasswell (1951). But public policy did not emerge as a significant subfield within the discipline of political science until the late 1960s or early 70s. This resulted from at least three important stimuli: (1) social and political pressures to apply the profession's accumulated knowledge to the pressing social problems of racial discrimination, poverty, the arms race, and environmental pollution; (2) the challenge posed by Dawson and Robinson (1963), who argued that governmental policy decisions were less the result of traditional disciplinary concerns such as public opinion and party composition than of socioeconomic factors such as income, education, and unemployment levels; and (3) the efforts of David Easton, whose Systems Analysis of Political Life (1965) provided an intellectual framework for understanding the entire policy process, from demand articulation through policy formulation and implementation, to feedback effects on society.Over the past twenty years, policy research by political scientists can be divided into four types, depending upon the principal focus:1. Substantive area research. This seeks to understand the politics of a specific policy area, such as health, education, transportation, natural resources, or foreign policy. Most of the work in this tradition has consisted of detailed, largely atheoretical, case studies. Examples would include the work of Derthick (1979) on social security, Moynihan (1970) on antipoverty programs, and Bailey and Mosher (1968) on federal aid to education. Such studies are useful to practitioners and policy activists in these areas, as well as providing potentially useful information for inductive theory building. In terms of the profession as a whole, however, they are probably less useful than theoretical case studies—such as Pressman and Wildavsky (1973) on implementation or Nelson (1984) on agenda-setting—which use a specific case to illustrate or test theories of important aspects of the policy process.2. Evaluation and impact studies. Most evaluation research is based on contributions from other disciplines, particularly welfare economics (Stokey and Zeckhauser 1978; Jenkins-Smith 1990). Policy scholars trained as political scientists have made several contributions. They have broadened the criteria of evaluation from traditional social welfare functions to include process criteria, such as opportunities for effective citizen participation (Pierce and Doerksen, 1976). They have focused attention on distributional effects (MacRae, 1989). They have criticized traditional techniques of benefit-cost analysis on many grounds (Meier, 1984; MacRae and Whittington, 1988). Most importantly, they have integrated evaluation studies into research on the policy process by examining the use and non-use of policy analysis in the real world (Wildavsky, 1966; Dunn, 1980; Weiss, 1977).3. Policy process. Two decades ago, both Ranney (1968) and Sharkansky (1970) urged political scientists interested in public policy to focus on the policy process, i.e. the factors affecting policy formulation and implementation, as well as the subsequent effects of policy. In their view, focusing on substantive policy areas risked falling into the relatively fruitless realm of atheoretical case studies, while evaluation research offered little promise for a discipline without clear normative standards of good policy. A focus on the policy process would provide opportunities for applying and integrating the discipline's accumulated knowledge concerning political behavior in various institutional settings. That advice was remarkably prescient; the first paper in this symposium attempts to summarize what has been learned.Policy design. With roots in the policy sciences tradition described by deLeon (1988), this approach has recently focused on such topics as the efficacy of different types of policy instruments (Salamon 1989; Linder and Peters 1989). Although some scholars within this orientation propose a quite radical departure from the behavioral traditions of the discipline (Bobrow and Dryzek 1987), others build upon work by policy-oriented political scientists over the past twenty years (Schneider and Ingram 1990) while Miller (1989) seeks to integrate political philosophy and the behavioral sciences.

Any theory of the manner in which governmental policies get formulated and implemented, as well as the effects of those actions on the world, requires an understanding of the behavior of major types of governmental institutions (legislatures, courts, administrative agencies, chief executives), as well as the behavior of interest groups, the general public, and the media. The dominant paradigm of the policy process, the stages heuristic popularized by Jones (1970), Anderson (1975), and Peters (1986), has outlived its usefulness and must be replaced, in large part because it is not a causal theory. In the course of their empirical work, policy scholars have highlighted a number of phenomena that need to be incorporated into theories of the policy process. The development of such theories requires an integration 'of both political scientists' knowledge of specific institutions and behavior and policy scholars' attention to policy communities, substantive policy information, etc.Innovations by Policy Scholars in Understanding the Policy ProcessAt least since World War II, most political scientists have tended to focus on either a specific type of institution (legislatures, the presidency, courts, interest groups, administrative agencies, local governments, political parties) or on specific types of political behavior outside those institutions (public opinion, voting, political socialization). These have become the standard subfields within the discipline.In contrast, scholars interested in public policy have not been able to stay within these subfields because the policy process spans all of them. In the course of empirical work, policy scholars have highlighted a number of phenomena often neglected by political scientists without a policy focus:a) The importance of policy communities/networks/subsystems involving actors from numerous public and private institutions and from multiple levels of government;b) The importance of substantive policy information;c) The critical role of policy elites vis-a-vis the general public;d) The desirability of longitudinal studies of a decade or more;e) Differences in political behavior across policy types.

"This paper analyzes the extensive literature on policy implementation which has developed in Europe and North America over the past decades. It concludes that (1) official policymakers often have only a rather limited ability to control the behavior of street-level bureaucrats, particularly when the latter are rather high-status professionals; (2) a time-frame of at least 10 years is required to avoid premature conclusions concerning a program's effects and to permit some appreciation of the extent of policy-oriented learning; (3) erroneous causal assumptions are often among the most important factors explaining performance gaps in governmental policies; and (4) it may be preferable in many instances to start from the actors involved in policy problems rather than from those involved in implementing a policy design. Among the more promising recent advances in the implementation literature have been (1) the use of more sophisticated research designs and (2) efforts to synthesize the best features of 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' approaches into analyses of policy change and policy-oriented learning over a decade or so." (author's abstract)

A conceptual framework is proposed for integrating recent research on the use of substantive policy analysis in public policy making into a more general model of policy making over time periods of a decade or more. It focuses on policy subsystems -- the interaction of actors from different institutions interested in a policy area -- & the belief systems of advocacy coalitions within them, viewing these as the critical vehicle for understanding the role of policy analysis in policy-oriented learning & the subsequent effect of such learning on changes in governmental programs. 1 Table, 2 Figures, 170 References. Modified HA