Development of American public policy : the structure of policy restraint

The study of public policy has emerged as a separate field of inquiry only in the last two decades. The explicit study of policy processes and outcomes evolved because of the proliferation of government programs in the 1960s and early 1970s that aimed, among other goals, to reduce the incidence of poverty and unemployment, to improve education, to rebuild the cities, and to clean up the environment. The concerns motivating the new policy scholarship involved explanations of why programs were enacted, how they performed, and who benefited. By 1972 policy studies as a distinct field had progressed far enough to result in the founding of the interdisciplinary Policy Studies Organization, and in the same year one of the first public policy textbooks was published. Courses on public policy analysis and process have become standard items in the curriculum of most colleges and universities, and books and journals addressing a variety of policy issues are available to both pop. ular and scholarly audiences. The number of academic journals devoted to public policy continues to grow, with, for example, the addition of the Journal of Policy History in 1989.

But unlike the older and well-established academic disciplines, a theoretical tradition has not yet emerged to guide policy analysis. Policy research often focuses on specific programs, so that one analyst's an swer to the questions of "who gets what, how, and when" may seem utterly unrelated to explanations offered by other scholars. Anyone who reads public policy journal articles or books could easily conclude that. American public policy is constructed of a crazyquilt of programs that bear little relationship to one another, that policy effectiveness cannot be reliably assessed, and that every imaginable cause of policy outcomes is equally important. For example, Thomas Dye's book, Understanding Public Policy (a sixth edition appeared in 1987), describes eight different models of public policy analysis and in effect invites readers to give all of them equal weight.