Teaching policy analysis in China and the United States: Implications for curriculum design of public policy programs

Abstract

Rapid worldwide growth in public policy education now offers excellent opportunities to assess the development of the field from a comparative perspective. Our analysis, which examines recent trends in public policy education by comparing public policy analysis courses taught in professional degree programs in China and in the United States, reveals considerable disparities in these curricula as taught in the two countries. Surprisingly, these differences have emerged primarily through disciplinary foci, expertise in policy analysis, and practical experience among instructors, rather than through the distinctive social, political, institutional, and historical characteristics of the two countries. Our findings also suggest that a positivist approach to policy analysis continues to dominate classroom discussions in US programs, despite intense debates in the literature regarding the utility of that approach in guiding actual practice.

Public policy schools in the global south: a mapping and analysis of the emerging landscape

“…Policy courses were often the result of return migration, with scholars who had previously pursued their studies in the West starting to teach policy courses in their countries of origin (Yildiz et al 2011;Kuo and Kuo 2012). In other instances, new schools and programs were created to cater to the rising demand for professional policy analysts and policy advisors, who were supposed to deal with the increasing complexity of policy challenges facing governments (He et al 2016). In Brazil and East Asia, the provision of public affairs education came as a response to changes in the region's political, social, and economic systems, including the transition toward democracy (Gomes et al 2016;Wu et al 2012).…”

“…Scholars refer to this phenomenon as internationalization in the policy sciences (Fritzen 2008;Henderson and Terry 2014). Clearly, this expansion provides scholarly opportunities for comparatively assessing the development, content, and nature of policy education (He et al 2016), which, in turn, may produce insights and lessons for enhancing the quality of policy education.…”

“…More specifically, we lack knowledge about emerging patterns, and contextual challenges and opportunities. Where previous studies have focused on Anglo-democracies and developed countries (Pal and Clark 2016a, b;Ellwood 2008;Fritzen 2008;Zuo et al 2019) or compared non-US-based programs to US-based programs to determine the degree of convergence (see Purón Cid 2018; He et al 2016;Watanabe 2012), this study aims to advance our knowledge about policy schools in the Global South by comparing them on key dimensions: institutional establishment and status, mission, profile, and educational offerings.…”

Policy formulation redesigned: A new understanding of policy design and its implications for instruction

“…As already noted, the most well-articulated guidelines on how public policies should be formulated are to be found in policy analysis. A recent review has revealed that policy analysis is still predominantly positivist (He et al, 2016), and the core textbooks include those by Weimer and Vining (2016), Bardach and Patashnik (2015), Dunn (2016) and Patton et al (2016) 1 . The traditional textbooks mentioned above have been revised many times, and some efforts have been made to make them fit more in accordance with current developments.…”

On the re-institutionalization and diversification of Public Administration education in Central and Eastern Europe: A case study of post-communist Romania

“…The second point is that the narrative on PA higher education usually relies on evidence gathered from qualitative and quantitative analyses of academic curricula (and infrequently of faculty’s disciplinary backgrounds) (e.g., Connaughton and Randma, 2002; Hajnal, 2003; Kickert, 2008; Hajnal, 2015; Brans and Coenen, 2016; He et al, 2016; Pal and Clark, 2016; Staroňová and Gajduschek, 2016). Especially in comparisons across countries, typologies or morphologies of schools or programs in PA usually boil down to an assessment of disciplinary identity, typically defined in terms of what is taught.…”