Theories of Policy Change and Variation Reconsidered: A Prospectus for the Political Economy of Public Policy

Abstract

In this paper, the development of field of public policy is represented as three distinct ages of theory building and testing. The first was the classic period of studies of decision-making and rationality; the second was an age of synthesis when theories of decision-making were blended into accounts of agenda setting; and the third — which is starting to take shape — is the age of political economy of public policy drawing on models and methods that have been applied to international relations and comparative politics, which are increasingly addressing public policy. The paper’s argument offers a challenge to public policy scholars to use theory and approaches from political economy and to integrate them with classic and synthetic approaches so that knowledge and theory building is cumulative. The paper contains a review of the development of public policy theory in the 1990s; it provides an account of the current period as one of normal science; and it then reviews some recent work in comparative political economy as examples of the research on public policy taking place.

Keywords: public policy, political economy