Since the mid-1960s, an increasingly large number of people, trained in the humanities and social sciences, have come to devote their professional lives to producing policy advice. This is a global phenomenon, although until recently the intensification of activities associated with policy advising has been most pronounced in the United States. As government demand for well-trained policy analysts and advisors has risen, universities have sought to provide relevant graduate-level training.
The rise of policy analysis is usefully construed as a movement. Use of this term implies a deliberate effort on the part of many people to reconceive the role of government in society and renegotiate aspects of the relationships that exist between individuals, collectivities and governments. However, the claim that there is a policy analysis movement should not be taken to imply either consistency of purpose or a deliberate striving for coordination among producers of policy analysis. While not directly comparable in a political sense with other social movements, the policy analysis movement has been highly influential. It has served to transform the advice-giving systems of governments, altered the nature of policy debate, and, as a consequence, challenged informal yet long-established advising practices through which power and influence flow. The profundity of this transformation has often eluded the attention of social and political commentators. That is because the relevant changes have caused few immediate or obvious ruptures in the processes and administrative structures typically associated with government or, more broadly speaking, public governance.
Early representations of policy analysis tended to cast it as a subset of policy advising. As such, policy analysis was seen primarily as an activity conducted inside government agencies with the purpose of informing the choices of a few key people, principally elected decision-makers (Lindblom 1968; Wildavsky 1979). Today, the potential purposes of policy analysis are understood to be much broader. Many more audiences are seen as holding interests in policy and as being open to ā indeed demanding of ā appropriately presented analytical work (Radin 2000). Beyond people in government, people in business, members of non-profit organizations, and informed citizens all constitute audiences for policy analysis. While policy analysts were once thought to be mainly located within government agencies, today policy analysts also can be found in most organizations that have direct dealings with governments, and in many organizations where government actions significantly influence the operating environment. In addition, many university-based researchers, who tend to treat their peers and their students as their primary audience, conduct studies that ask questions about government policies and that answer them using forms of policy analysis. Given this, an appropriately encompassing definition of contemporary policy analysis needs to recognize the range of topics and issue areas policy analysts work on, the range of analytical and research strategies they employ, and the range of audiences they seek to address. In recognizing the contemporary breadth of applications and styles of policy analysis, it becomes clear that effective policy analysis calls for not only the application of sound technical skills (Mintrom 2012), but also deep substantive knowledge, political perceptiveness and well-developed interpersonal skills (Mintrom 2003). Although producing high-quality, reliable advice remains a core expectation for many policy analysts, advising now appears as a subset of the broader policy analysis category. The transition from policy analysis as a subset of advising to advising as a subset of analysis represents a significant shift in orientation and priorities from earlier times.
In what follows, we first review the sources of increasing demand for policy analysis. We then review the growth and adaptation in the supply of policy analysis that has occurred in response to this demand. We conclude by discussing the current state of public policy debate and the likely future trajectory of both the practice of policy advising and the training of policy analysts. Throughout, we take the United States as our main point of reference. However, we have also sought to demonstrate the comparative relevance of our argument. We have done this by discussing the international embrace of New Public Management orthodoxy (from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s) and government responses to the global financial crisis (from 2007 into 2012).
Before proceeding, it is useful to define terms. For the purposes of this discussion, public policies are considered to be any actions taken by governments that represent previously agreed responses to specified circumstances. Governments design public policies with the broad purpose of expanding the public good (Howlett 2011; Mintrom 2012). Policy studies refers to research on policy topics and analytical work conducted primarily by university-based researchers with the goal of critically assessing past, present and proposed policy settings. Policy studies can be undertaken by researchers in many disciplinary or cross-disciplinary settings. They can draw upon a range of analytical and interpretative methodologies. Policy studies may be historical and comparative in their scope. The term policy sciences refers to the subset of analytical techniques devised in the social sciences that have been applied to understanding the design, implementation and evaluation of public policies. Policy analysis is here discussed as work intended to advance knowledge of the causes of public problems, alternative approaches to addressing them, the likely impacts of those alternatives, and trade-offs that might emerge when considering appropriate governmental responses to those public problems. Policy advising is defined here as the practice of providing information to decision-makers in government, with the intention of improving the base of knowledge upon which decisions are made. While policy advising need not be based upon rigorous policy analysis, over recent decades such policy analysis has come to play a more central part in the development of advice for decision-makers.
The evolving demand for policy analysis
Demand for policy analysis has been driven mostly by the emergence of problems and by political conditions that have made those problems salient. Early in the development of policy analysis techniques, the people who identified the problems that needed to be addressed tended to be government officials. They turned to academics for help. Frequently, those academics deemed to be most useful, given the problems at hand, were economists with strong technical skills, who had the ability to estimate the magnitude of problems, undertake statistical analyses, and determine the costs of various government actions. During the twentieth century, as transportation, electrification and telecommunications opened up new opportunities for market exchange, problems associated with decentralized decision-making became more apparent (McCraw 1984). Meanwhile, as awareness grew of the causes of many natural and social phenomena, calls emerged for governments to establish mechanisms that might effectively manage various natural and social processes. Many matters once treated as social conditions, or facts of life to be suffered, were transformed into policy problems (Cobb and Elder 1983). Together, the increasing scope of the marketplace, the increasing complexity of social interactions, and expanding knowledge of social conditions created pressures from a variety of quarters for governments to take the lead in structuring and regulating individual and collective action. Tools of policy analysis, such as the analysis of market failures and the identification of feasible government responses, were developed to guide this expanding scope of government. Yet as the reach of policy analysis grew, questions were raised about the biases inherent in some of the analytical tools being applied. In response, new efforts were made to account for the effects of policy changes, and new voices began to contribute in significant ways to policy development. To explore the factors prompting demand for policy analysis, it is useful to work with a model of the policy-making process. A number of conceptions of policy-making have been developed in recent decades. Here, we apply the āstages modelā, where five stages are typically posited: problem definition, agenda setting, policy adoption, implementation, and evaluation (Eyestone 1978).
Initial demands for policy analysis were prompted by growing awareness of problems that governments could potentially address. Questions inevitably arose concerning the appropriateness of alternative policy solutions. Thus, in the United States in the 1930s, as the federal government took on major new roles in the areas of regulation, redistribution and the financing of infrastructural development, the need arose for high quality policy analysis. With respect to regulatory policy, concerns about the threat to the railroads of the emerging trucking industry prompted the expansion of the Interstate Commerce Commission (Eisner 1993). This body employed lawyers and economists who helped to devise an expanding set of regulations that eventually covered many industries. Although the American welfare state has always been limited compared with welfare states elsewhere, especially those within Europe, its development still required concerted policy analysis and development work on the part of a cadre of bureaucrats (Derthick 1979). Initially, much of the talent needed to fill these positions was drawn from states like Wisconsin, where welfare policies had been pioneered by Robert LaFollette. As the role of the United States government in redistribution expanded, policy analysts swelled the ranks of career bureaucrats in the Treasury, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Department of Health and Human Services. Meanwhile, benefit-cost analysis, a cornerstone of modern policy analysis and a core component of public economics, was developed to help in the planning of dam construction in the Tennessee Valley in the 1930s. Politicians at the time worried that some dams were being built mainly to perpetuate the flow of cash to construction companies rather than to meet growing demand for electricity and flood control (Eckstein 1958). The broad applicability of the technique soon became clear and its use has continually expanded. At the same time, efforts to improve the sophistication of the technique, and to develop variations on it that are best suited to different sets of circumstances have also continued to occur (Boardman et al. 2006; Carlson 2011).
Several features of policy development, the politics of agenda setting, and the policymaking process have served over time to increase demand for policy analysts. The dynamics at work have been similar to those through which an arms race generates ongoing and often expanding demand for military procurements. In Washington, DC, the growing population of policy analysts employed in the federal government bureaucracy led to demand elsewhere around town for policy analysts who could verify or contest the analysis and advice emanating from government agencies. A classic example is given by the creation of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). This office was established as an independent resource for Congress that would generate analysis and advice as a check on the veracity of the analyses prepared and disseminated by the executive-controlled Office of Management and Budget (Wildavsky 1992). The General Accounting Office ā renamed in 2004 the Government Accountability Office ā was also developed to provide independent advice for Congress. The purview of this Office has always been broader than that of the Congressional Budget Office.
As the analytical capabilities available to elected politicians grew, groups of people outside government but with significant interests in the direction of government policy began devoting resources to the production of high-quality, independent advice. Think tanks, like the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, established in the 1920s and 1940s respectively, and both still going strong, represent archetypes of many independent policy shops now located in Washington, DC (Smith 1991).
Today, due to the knowledge base of think tanks and their entrepreneurial capacity, their staff and affiliates are often regarded as members of a select few who dominate policy. Networks between non-governmental policy experts and politicians in the United States are strengthened through appointments into government departments ā often described as a ārevolving doorā ā in which policy experts frequently move into and out of key positions in the government over successive presidential elections. Therefore, United States think tanks are often viewed as trustworthy sources of advice to the administration because of their deep connections, the star status of some of their people, and their sophisticated influence efforts.
It is useful to note that the roles, character, and effectiveness of think tanks are shaped by country-specific institutional and political factors. In the United States, most think tanks tend to serve both as āwatch dogsā and as āidea brokersā; how much they exhibit either characteristic depends largely on their alignment or lack of alignment with the political colours of the current Administration. In contrast, most think tanks operating in Asian countries tend to view their role as āregime-enhancingā (Stone 2000; Stone and Denham 2004; Abelson 2004).
Parliamentary systems, found most conspicuously in Commonwealth countries, tend to exhibit greater centralization of legislative power and accountability than systems like that of the United States where the separation of powers is a fundamental characteristic of governance. Centralization of power gives those in leadership positions greater control over policy. The electoral system can serve to either enhance or diminish the power that those in government exercise over policy development. This has been clearly exhibited in the case of New Zealand, where a switch in 1996 from first-past-the-post to mixed me...
