Chapter 6 Decision-Making Readers guide When a specific policy problem has become a part of the institutional agenda, the relevant actors will address it in the course of the decision- making process. This stage consists of two theoretically separable-albeit empirically closely related actions The first action concerns the drafting of a legislative proposal, which often involves a debate about the more specific nature of the social problem to be resolved by it. Based on this definition, official and unofficial policy makers discuss the policy design. which also includes decisions about the instruments to be employed and their specific settings. Central to policy formulation are the executive and the ministerial bureaucracy: the latter in particular often has a dominant position. The way in which the ministerial bureaucracy develops a policy proposal might be affected by external expertise, policy recommendations of international organizations, interest group preferences, partisan ideology and bureaucratic selfinterests. The second action related to decision-making refers to the actual adoption of the policy proposal in order to turn it into binding law. At this stage, the number of actors involved diminishes and executive legislative relations are brought to the fore. Depending on the institutional and procedural characteristics of the country concerned, in the formal adoption process the executive and the legislature can either be on an equal footing or have a relationship in which one dominates the other, bringing us back to the characteristics of polities discussed in Chapter 3. We illustrate how institutional arrangements may affect decision-making processes by referring to Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.