Policy studies often focus on how policies are made rather than on their content or their causes and consequences. The study of how policies are made generally considers a series of 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 these processes often occur simultaneously, each one collapsing into the others. Different political actors and institutions-politicians, interest groups, lobbyists and legislators, executives and bureaucrats. reporters and commentators, think tanks, lawyers and judges-may be ingaged in different processes at the same time, even in the same policy area. Policymaking is seldom as neat as the process model. Nonetheless, it is often usedul for analytical purposes to break policymaking into component units in order to understand better how policies are made.