Toward a definition of policy analysis

Gill, Judith I.; Saunders, Laura

doi:10.1002/ir.37019927603

Cited by 11 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Professional policy work in government is a difficult subject to categorize and define (Colebatch, Hoppe, and Noordegraaf 2011). At its heart, policy analysis is what Gill and Saunders (1992, 6‐7) characterized as “a method for structuring information and providing opportunities for the development of alternative choices for the policymaker.” This involves providing information or advice to policy makers concerning the relative advantages and disadvantages of different policy choices (Mushkin 1977; Wildavsky 1969).…”

Section: Studying the Nature Of Policy Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Policy Analysts in the Bureaucracy Revisited: The Nature of Professional Policy Work in Contemporary Government

2011

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Thirty‐five years ago Arnold Meltsner observed that professional policy analysts in the U.S. government undertook several roles in the policy‐making process, the most common of which involved “technical” information processing while others were more “political” in nature. Although still prescient, more recent empirical studies of professional policy work have found little evidence of the predominance of technicians in the ranks of analysts employed in public policy bureaucracies. However, only very weak and partial information exists on the situation in most countries, and descriptions of the nature of policy work often remain primarily normative and lacking in empirical referents. This article reexamines the duties and nature of contemporary professional policy analysis in the Canadian bureaucracy. It reveals that contemporary policy work is constituted by more complex and multisided practices than Meltsner and his followers described. These findings are significant for those wishing to understand, and improve, the nature of policy work in contemporary government. Hace treinta y cinco años Arnold Meltsner observó que los analistas legislativos profesionales en el gobierno de los Estados Unidos se encargan de diferentes tareas en el proceso legislativo, el más común involucraba el proceso de información “técnica” mientras que otros eran de una naturaleza más “política”. Estudios empíricos más recientes del trabajo profesional legislativo han encontrado poca evidencia del predominio de técnicos en puestos analíticos en las burocracias del sector público. Sin embargo, existe tenue y parcial información sobre la situación de la mayoría de los países y la descripción de la naturaleza del trabajo legislativo permanece normativa y carente de referentes empíricos. Este estudio reexamina los deberes y naturaleza de analistas legislativos profesionales en la burocracia Canadiense y revela que el trabajo legislativo contemporáneo está constituido por prácticas más complejas de las que Meltsner y sus partidarios describieron. Estos hallazgos son significativos para aquellos que deseen comprender y mejorar la naturaleza del trabajo legislativo en la gobernabilidad contemporánea.

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Section: Studying the Nature Of Policy Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Policy Analysts in the Bureaucracy Revisited: The Nature of Professional Policy Work in Contemporary Government

2011

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“…One important component of overall policy capacity in particular is the 'policy analytical capacity' of government, that is the extent to which its own employees are capable of providing high-quality, timely advice (Waller 1992;Howlett, 2009bHowlett, , 2015. Policy analytical quality has been connected at a general level (Howlett, 2009b(Howlett, , 2015Peters, 2015) with the role that policy professionals play in providing information and advice to decision-makers (Gill & Saunders, 1992;Peters, 2015), work involves the framing and scoping of decisions and management of the policy process in government. These roles require 'capacity' (Peters, 1996), which relates both to competences and skills of those who develop for government action and to the resources they need to formulate those -.…”

Section: Background: the Concern For Pacmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing policy analytical capacity in contemporary governments: New measures and metrics

Migone

Howlett

2022

Aust J Public Adm

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Assessing the policy analytical capacity (PAC) of governments has suffered in the past from the anecdotal nature of most studies, leading to different evaluations of specific analytical activities and of the overall competences and capacities of governments as a whole. What is needed to advance the field is a set of metrics that can generate insights into the capabilities of different units and how changes to their and overall government capacity develop over time. Focusing on this component of policy capacity, we map and measure the distribution of policy professionals in the provincial, territorial, and federal governments in Canada. Our measures are tested against two major findings regarding PAC: first that variation among governmental PAC varies by size of the civil service, with smaller jurisdictions likely to have less capacity, and second, that concentration of professionals in specific issue areas underscores that area's political and/or policy salience to the government concerned. Both measures prove robust in assessing Canadian government activities in these areas. Points for practitioners Policy capacity is acknowledged as a significant perquisite for policy success. While some general frameworks exist highlighting policy relevant competences and capabilities important to policy success, how to measure these remains under‐investigated. Focusing on policy analytical capacity, this paper draws on the literature on policy professionals to develop two measures of this component of policy capacity linked to the extent to which an agency focuses on analysis and the proportion of their staff who work on the subject compared to other agencies. The measures are deployed in an illustrative case of Canada and Canadian governments at the territorial, provincial, and federal level which confirms their utility and robustness as indicators of the different levels of analytical capacity different agencies employ.

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“…Our inscrutable ineffable friend, policy analysis. (Wildavsky, 2018, p. xxxiii) As the quotes above illustrate, while policy work might be an activity in which literally hundreds of thousands people engage every day, and a field that has given rise to a substantial body of literature, both the nature and object of such work remain contested (Birkland, 2015;Gill & Saunders, 1992;Guba, 1984;Peters & Zittoun, 2016;Smith & Larimer, 2018). Even as expansive a definition of policy as Dye's (1984) often-cited "Public policy is what governments choose to do or not to do" (p. 1) has been critiqued for minimising the role of non-government organisations in establishing policy, treating policy work as synonymous with decision-making, and framing policies as primarily the result of conscious and intentional action, while neglecting the role played by less visible social structures and relationships (Colebatch, 2006b).…”

Section: Policy Practice As Social Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

Policy Practitioners’ Engagement With Evidence-Based Policy: A discursive analysis

Huntington¹

2021

Preprint

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The idea that there should be a link between systematically structured knowledge and the policies pursued by governments is not new. Its pre-20th century roots include attempts to establish a ‘science of society’ by social reformers of the 18th and 19th centuries, aspects of the emergence of the modern state system and, arguably, stretch back to classical philosophy and religious scholarship. Since the late 1990s, however, it has assumed special prominence as a global movement that encourages jurisdictions to explicitly incorporate the language of evidence in their understanding and definitions of good policy. While this agenda goes by a number of names, the most common is ‘evidence-based policy’ (EBP). This evidentiary turn in policy has generated an extensive body of associated scholarship, involving a diverse range of theoretical positions, critiques, and debates. However, such literature has largely concentrated on macro- and meso-level system issues: structures for knowledge uptake and transfer, principles for using evidence, and underlying conceptual debates. Far less well-explored – and almost entirely absent in relation to Aotearoa New Zealand – are the experiences and perspectives of the practitioners working in policy development. This gap is especially glaring if policy work is treated not as a process of problem-solving, but rather as a humanistic and socially situated practice. Treating practitioners as active and interested participants in the creation of policy means treating them as the ultimate determinants of how evidence manifests in, and influences the outputs of, policy work. Similarly, through their work policy officials create and adopt formal and informal evidentiary definitions, accepted standards, and relevant weightings. It is through applying these social constructs that ‘information’ is transformed into ‘evidence’. While such practices are constrained by the environments within which they work, it is ultimately the practitioner who locates, analyses, and incorporates evidence within policy work. In this thesis, I use the concept of interpretive repertoires from discursive psychology as frameworks to explore how those involved in policy work engage with the idea of evidence-based policy. These repertoires are symbolic sets of meanings, characterisations, and relationships that people can use as resources for engaging with phenomena. Just as a musician’s repertoire represents a set of pre-existing pieces that they can perform, an interpretive repertoire is a pre-existing conceptual framework that a person can use to interpret (or establish the meaning of) ideas, actions, or settings and link them to each other in a coherent way. I approach this topic from an interpretive and critical perspective, taking policies as the results of a fundamentally social process shaped by the interaction of different values, interests, and cultural assumptions. The research has involved in-depth interviews with senior officials in the field of skills policy, including advisors and analysts, managers overseeing teams of such officials, and officials focused on developing and generating evidence for policy. I analysed interview texts to identify repertoires operating across three domains: repertoires of practice (what it means to work as a policy official), repertoires of context (what influences the environment in which officials work), and repertoires of evidence (the role of evidence in policy work). I identified three main repertoires each of practice and context, and five main repertoires of evidence. I also found that individual repertoires clustered across domains to produce three interpretive stances toward evidence-based policy work. The Evaluative stance is characterised by valorising diversity, debate, and judgement; the Scientific stance values rigour, truth-seeking, and consistency; and the Pragmatic stance emphasises utility, compromise, and sustainability. Each stance integrates practitioners’ constructions of the work they do, the context for that work, and the purpose of evidence into a coherent framework of meaning that supports them to engage with the abstract concept of evidence-based policy. This work contributes primarily to two key literatures. Firstly, the thesis adds to a relatively small but growing body of empirical research into evidence use in policy work environments. It makes a particularly novel contribution here by situating evidence use as a type of social process, and focusing on deep exploration of practitioner ‘voice’ as a way of analysing this process. Secondly, the research makes a methodological contribution to the analysis of policy work by demonstrating the value of using concepts from discursive psychology as a way of exploring the position of practitioners within the policy environment. Through discussion of the repertoires and stances I identified in practitioners’ interviews, I present a more nuanced picture of approaches towards evidence amongst policy practitioners in Aotearoa New Zealand.

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Toward a definition of policy analysis

Abstract: Policy analysis is a real‐world decision‐making tool. The literature is published, most frequently, in public administration studies, but also in political science, philosophy, organizational psychology, economics, and business administration.

Cited by 11 publications

References 16 publications

Policy Analysts in the Bureaucracy Revisited: The Nature of Professional Policy Work in Contemporary Government

Policy Analysts in the Bureaucracy Revisited: The Nature of Professional Policy Work in Contemporary Government

Assessing policy analytical capacity in contemporary governments: New measures and metrics

Policy Practitioners’ Engagement With Evidence-Based Policy: A discursive analysis

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