The Policy Process: How Policies Are Made
Policy studies often focus on how policies are made rather than on their content or the causes and consequences. The study of how policies are made generally considers a series activities, or processes, that occur within the political system. These processes, together with the activities involved and likely participants, may be portrayed as in Table 3-1.
Although it may be helpful to think about policymaking as a series of processes, in the real world these activities seldom occur in a neat, step-by-step sequence. Rather the processes often occur simultaneously, each one collapsing into the others. Different politic actors and institutions politicians, interest groups, lobbyists and legislators, executives and bureaucrats, reporters and commentators, think tanks, lawyers and judges may be engage in different processes at the same time, even in the same policy area. Policymaking is seldon as neat as the process model. Nonetheless, it is often useful for analytical purposes to brean policymaking into component units in order to understand botter how policies are made.