The Policy Sciences: A Very Short History of the Field of Policy Studies
It is not hard to extend the history of policy studies back to antiquity: what governments do or do not do has occupied the attention and interest of humans ever since there were governments. All advisers who whispered in the ears of princes, and their rivals who assessed and countered the prince’s decisions, were students of public policy. All were interested in answering the research questions listed just a few paragraphs ago. Using these questions as a means to define its intellectual heritage, policy studies can legitimately claim everyone from Plato (who laid out a lot of policy recommendations in The Republic) to Machiavelli (who in The Prince had some definite ideas on how policymaking power should be exercised) among their intellectual founders. Other political thinkers Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, James Madison, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill qualify as policy scholars under this definition. They all were broadly concerned with what government does and does not do and were often interested in specific questions of what the government should do and how it should go about doing it as well as in assessing what impact
the government has on various problems in society. Most students of public policy, however, consider the field of policy studies a fairly new undertaking, at least as a distinct academic discipline. Public administration, economics, and political science consider their respective policy orientations to be no more than a century old. Many claim a lineage of less than half of that. Systematic policy analysis is sometimes attributed to the development and adoption of cost benefit analyses by the federal government (mostly for water projects) in the1930s (Fuguitt and Wilcox 1999, 1–5). Others trace the roots of policy analysis back no further than the 1960s (Radin 1997). Whereas any claim to identify the absolute beginning of the field of public policy studies and its various subfields should rightly be taken with a grain of salt, most histories converge on a roughly common starting point. That starting point is Harold Lasswell, who laid down a grand vision of what he called the “policy sciences” in the middle years of the twentieth century. Even though his vision has been, at best, imperfectly realized, most of the various policy orientations discussed thus far share Lasswell as a common branch in their intellectual family tree, even as they branch off into very different directions elsewhere. In some ways Lasswell’s vision of the policy sciences was a vision of what political science should become (see Lasswell 1951a and 1956). Yet though Lasswell gave political science a central place in the policy sciences, his vision was anything but parochial. The policy sciences were to draw from all the social sciences, law, and other disciplines. The idea of the policy sciences was an outgrowth not just of Lasswell’s academic interests but also his practical experience in government. Lasswell was one of a number of profhigh profileial scientists who helped government formulate policy during World War II (Lasswell was an expert on propaganda he wrote his dissertation on the topic and during the war he served as the chief of the Experimental Division for the Study of WarTime Communications). This experience helped solidify Lasswell’s idea that a new field should be developed in order to better connect the knowledge and expertise of the social sciences to the practical world of politics and policy making.