Approaching a Model of Policy Change: A Challenge to Political Science

摘要

Scholars in the theory of public policy have asked how can we understand the“incredibly complex” process of policy change? Though many answers have madeimportant contributions to this understanding, they tend to rely on theory that is either 1.)very general in scope or very narrow and specific to a particular agency’s decisionprocesses, 2.) reliant on a single or several case studies that are often of limited utility,and/or 3.) derived from multiple regression analysis that usually disregards dynamicchange and any element of feedback despite a foundation in an otherwise complex causaltheory. In fact, scientific approaches to the study of policy making processes are illdesignedto confront the apparently tremendous influence of personalities and chanceevents, the unique features of policies, and the unique and diverse range of environmentsin which policy is made. But “noise” is not unique to political systems and the goal ofpolicy theory must be to assist in understanding the role of causal elements in policymaking whether irregular and diverse or uniform and predictable. This paper summarizesseveral important causal models in public policy making and suggests ways in whichthese conceptual approaches, previously the subject of limited testing via case studies orregression models, could be made more rigorous with the use of system dynamicsmodeling.