European Policy Analysis Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016 | Page 127

European Policy Analysis

science are the major sources to justify
state conduct. The rationality part of
this development can be traced to the
cameralistics, the “Polizeywisschaften” or
“Staatswissenschaften”, to other modes of
governmentality knowledge, to the history
of the social sciences in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries in Europe,
and of the Progressives and public
administration in the United States itself.
This movement from mere “politicking”
to
expert-supported
policymaking
and government was continued in the
United States in the 1950s through
Lasswell’s (1956) grounding of the field
or “discipline” of the policy sciences.
Since it was Lasswell’s concern to find the
policy sciences on the idea of inserting
rationality into practices of government
and administration, he departed from
a broadly defined idea of how rational
thinking and acting—that is, thought
controls speech; speech controls action;
action results feed back into thought—
would become empirically traceable in a
policy setting (good examples in Parsons
1996, 78–79). Since Lasswell, therefore,
Policy Science 1.01 courses almost all
begin with teaching students the notion
of a policy cycle: a policy problem should,
first, become an issue for public debate
and acquire agenda status; then follows
the stage of policy design or formulation,
ending in adoption (or rejection);
followed by implementation and, after
some more time has elapsed, evaluation
of results. If the policy is not terminated
after evaluation, a next cycle starts—and
so on, and so forth.

This stages approach to policy
process analysis has acquired a paradoxical
academic status. It has drawn a lot of
criticism because of lack of empirical
evidence and causal mechanisms driving

the process from one stage to the next in
the predicted, teleological, and rational
sequence. All too often researchers
were found guilty of imposing a reverse
teleological interpretation on a merely
contingent set of events. Yet, it has also
informed, at least subliminally, most
of the other approaches. One of the
enduring legacies of the stages approach
is the development of partial process
theories along the policy preparation and
formulation, and policy implementation
“divide” (Hill and Hupe 2014). Another
one is the development of evaluation
studies as separate specialization (Furubo,
Rist, and Speer 2013).

Policy design or formulation
(sub)processes were basically specifying
the thought styles or design logics or
rules in use by policymakers. In doing so,
they either refrained from positing any
sequence, like Simon’s satisficing (Simon
1957) or Lindblom’s incrementalism
(Lindblom 1968); or they developed rather
sophisticated, contingent sequences, like
in the empirical elaboration of mixed
scanning (Etzioni 1968). In this sense,
the stages heuristic was relativized from
within, so to speak. Most recently, this
relativization is even highly visible in
theories about the practice of real-time
policy evaluation (Furubo, Rist, and
Speer 2013), sometimes jointly with
stakeholders (Loeber 2010).

Finally, the stages account led
to serious questions about the research
strategies for studying policymaking.
One of the major theoretical conundrums
in all policy process research emerged
in implementation studies: the problem
of “too many variables” and “too few
cases” (Goggin 1986). This problem
had profound implications for the new
kind of theorizing that followed the

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