Policy implementations

In seeking action from citizens, policymakers operate with numerous premises about what law is and how it ought to work. The premises are not necessarily well understood, yet shifts in them may be of fundamental importance to the political system and to implementation, the process by which laws in fluence behavior.

One such shift in premises is found in the movement away from a reliance on penalties and toward greater use of incentives in the implementation of public policy. Although fueled by antipathy toward bureaucracy (Schultze, 1977) and the appeal of market mechanisms (Friedman, 1962), the consequences of this shift are not yet clear. We have collected the twelve articles in this volume in order to investigate the characteristics of these two classic forms of implementation in different contexts. The symposium raises issues that the recent shift presents for law and policy research. The goal is a broad treatment of policy implementation under law.