Academic & Crossref DOI Search

Abstract: This chapter reviews the development and growth of the policy-analytic profession. Historically, government decision makers have often called upon those with expertise to assist them in reaching their decisions. This chapter, however, concerns a new professional class of advisors that began developing during the 1950s in the United States. This new profession assists policy makers in understanding better their alternatives and relevant considerations for choosing among them. From here, the chapter offers some perspective on the research to date that has attempted to assess the effects of the profession—a perspective that emphasizes some important differences across the many types of governmental settings that utilize policy analysis, and the methodological difficulties that assessment efforts confront.

Abstract: This introductory chapter gives an overview of the essential components of public policy. Starting from the quest for evidence-based policy-making in twenty-first-century states, the chapter introduces this book’s fundamental understanding of ‘how to do (good) public policy’. The core argument is that doing public policy requires the skills and capacities to understand the policy problem at hand and expertise regarding past and present policies related to this problem—what has been tried and tested, what failed, and what worked. But policy-makers and supporting analysts also need an understanding of the political process of getting to good policies. On the basis of a brief survey of the intellectual foundations of policy analysis, the chapter introduces an ‘interactive’ approach to policy analysis and how it relates to other branches of policy analysis. Finally, the chapter identifies the constituent components of how to do public policy, which structure the book: process, policies, and capacity.

Abstract: As shown in this chapter, Action Plans (AP) can be considered as means of improving both the efficiency and effectiveness of public policies. Such plans aim to coordinate and target the production of administrative outputs in terms of defining (functional, temporal, spatial or social) priorities. The chapter shows that the ‘service level agreements’ (French: mandat/contrat de prestation; German: Leistungsvertrag), which are increasingly used in Switzerland, can be in interpreted as specific action plans that attempt to control public action by means of specific allocations of public action resources. Initially aimed at limiting state intervention (liberal state), such agreements have become general instruments for the management of public policies by identifying (quantitatively or qualitatively determined) objectives and related resources and outputs to be produced by various public agencies. The chapter shows, however, that such agreements take little or no account of the effectiveness in terms of the results (outcomes) of public policies. Hence, new public management reforms still lack adequate management or control of their (claimed) capacity for steering problem-solving through public policies by means of the allocation of budgets of both very familiar (Law, Time, Personnel, Money) and still not entirely recognized resources (Organization, Information, Consensus, Political Support).

Abstract: This chapter revisits the foundations of public policy analysis as presented in our previous textbook of 2011 (Knoepfel et al., 2011): the definition of public policies (distinction between substantive and institutional policies), the rejected notion of public action, causality models, actor triangles and resources. It adds some new perspectives on the relation between actors (political-administrative actors, target groups and beneficiaries) and their resources. Finally, it brings some clarification to the topic of the institutions, which are considered as the ‘rules of the game’, and introduces a list of possession, behavioural and decisional rules that feature in the constitutional and private law of Switzerland. The majority of these rules can also be found in other democratic political systems.