This document provides an overview of public policy analysis. It discusses four main intellectual imperatives in the field: 1) holism and modeling the whole policy process, 2) examining the consequences of policies, 3) producing useful knowledge, and 4) ensuring democracy. The field draws from multiple origins like America, France, Germany, and Latin America. It covers defining public policy, the structure of the field, and its historical development focused on understanding the world and enacting change. Research examines topics like the policy cycle, issue typologies, behavioral outcomes, and democratic participation. The overall goal is a holistic and problem-solving approach.

1. ANÁLISIS ECONÓMICO
Dr. Héctor Ramón Ramírez Partida
FRAGOSO HERNÁNDEZ JAZMÍN ALEJANDRA
Diciembre 2012

3. Political situations: an overview

4. Four intellectual imperatives

5.  The field of public policy is American in intellectual origin in ways
that are important to understanding its trajectory and
contributions.
 During the same period, the study of political science in France
and Germany focused on the proper administration of the state
(Stein, 1995).
 In contrast, in Latin America, independent research units often
provided advice and criticism direct at pressing problems, though
their visibility- indeed their viability- waxed and waned with the
rise and fall of democratic regimes.
 In contrast, in Latin America, independent research units often
provided advice and criticism direct at pressing problems, though
their visibility- indeed their viability- waxed and waned with the
rise and fall of democratic regimes.
 The field of public policy has deep roots in this third tradition
(virtuous popular democratic majorities) with all of its inherent
contradictions over concentrated or diffuse political power
I Organizing knowledge: definitions, structure
and history

6.  Most authors move straight to the question of defining
public policy and the policy process.
 Lawrence Mead captured the scope and sense of the
field when he wrote that public policy is an approach to
the study of politics that analyzes government in the
light of major public issues.
 James Anderson offered a representative definition
when he wrote that a policy is a purposive course of
action followed by an actor or set of actors in dealing
with a matter of concern.
 Definitions of the policy process are moved varied.
Some closely link public policy with all governmental
action.
 B. Guy Peters wrote that public policy is the sum of
activities of governments.
 Others in the problem- solving school draw their
inspiration from systems theory with definitions based
on inputs, transformations, and outputs.
A. Definitions: the window to history

7.  Allthe definitions emphasize a holistic view of
policy- making, a belief that the whole is greater
than the sum of its parts, those individuals,
institutions, interactions, and ideology all matter,
even if there is notable disagreement about the
proportional important of each.
 In the language of the structure agency debate,
most political scientists specializing in public
policy see causation at and beyond the individual
level.
Three definitional traditions

8. The fragmentation of publishing in the field
is emblematic of its multiple origins and the
lack, for good as much as for ill, of an
authoritative arbiter of ideas or
approaches.
Education for the public interest further
fragments the field, because political
science as a discipline does not routinely
educate students for problem- solving.
In the main, liberal arts departments of
political science teach about public policy at
the undergraduate and graduate levels, but
they do not provide education for action.
B. Structure of the field

9. C. History: to know the world and change it

10.  Fields with unity of method and well defined
scope have a greather likelihood of creating
cumulative knowledge and high theory than
fields like public policy with its history or diffuse
methods and subjects.
 Public policy has lacked a tradition of intellectual
criticism, (that questions the deep structures of
government and the state) a tradition that has
helped the field of comparative politics develop
normative and empirical theory in the face of
similar problems of scope and methods.
 But within each of the four imperatives there is a
richness of research that is both self- consciously
about policy and contributes to theory and
practice in the others fields as well.
II. What do we know? Research based on
the four imperatives

11. At as a field, public policy embraces modeling
the whole, but public policy is not alone in
this approach. Modeling the whole is an
honorable and widespread traidition in the
social sciences.
The holism of the policy field is distinctive
because the research has more concrete and
circumscribed aims- to develop a single, or
even several, general theories of
governmental processes into a leser extent,
to embed these theories of governmental
processes into a larger understandings of the
relations between state and society.
A. Holism

12. The holistic imperative

13.  Policy making rarely looks like the textbook
discussions of the policy cycle.
 Sometimes a solution goes looking for a problem.
 Similarly, the content of policies is not merely
determined in the decision making phase.
 Rather, policy content is negotiated over and
over again, in problem definition, legislation,
regulation, and court decisions, and again in the
decisions made by street- level- bureaucrats.
 But even acknowledging the porous nature of the
policy process, the stages of the policy process
often have specific characteristics.
1. The policy cycle

14. The scholarship on issue typologies exists
side by side with the work on the policy
cycle. The focus of the issue typologies
literature is not patters of actions during
stages of the policy cycles.
How could the typology literature and
policy cycle literature be integrated? Some
initials steps are clear.
2. Issue typologies

15. The research in the field of public policy
has also emphasized the consequences of
governmental actions for people.
A large body of research seeks to answer
the question “what happens to which
people and why?.
This intellectual imperative has the scope
and the limits of the field in general.
The what happens question is usually
defined in behavioral not normative
terms.
B. Consequences

16. The impulse to desing better systems for
government is also part of the third
imperative of the polici field: to produce
useful knowledge.
This imperative recognizes the social
responsabilities of social scientists.
The hard part of being useful is making
sustained difference on the basis of
scholarly research.
C. Useful knowledge

17. Stone’s concern about how much and what
kind of governmental instrusion citizens
experience is linked to the fourth imperative:
democracy matters.
Indeed, all of the other imperatives- holism,
the importance of the consequences of
governmental actions, and the drive for
useful knowledge contribute to the
democratic humanism that Lasswell felt best
described the policy endeavor.
Lasswell took a hopeful view of human
nature, public participation, and political
judgment.
D. Democracry matters

18. Conclusions