We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
The Determinants of Public Policy: What Matters and How Much.
- Authors
Burstein, Paul
- Abstract
This article is a research synthesis addressing four questions critical to our understanding of the determinants of public policy. How often and how strongly do hypothetical determinants of policy—public opinion, interest groups, the party balance, and other factors—actually influence policy? Do some hypothetical determinants of policy have more influence than others? Does the way we measure policy affect our ability to explain it? And is there a connection between how strongly particular variables affect policy, and how much effort we devote to studying them? It turns out that variables hypothesized to influence policy more often than not have no effect. When variables do affect policy, researchers very seldom say anything about how much impact they have. Variables that convey the most information to policymakers about what the public wants have a greater impact than other variables, but it is less clear how the measurement of policy affects our findings. Researchers pay much attention to hypothetical determinants of policy unlikely to matter very much, and little attention to those likely to be the most important. Implications for future research are considered.
- Subjects
POLICY sciences; GOVERNMENT policy; POLICY science research; PUBLIC opinion; PRESSURE groups
- Publication
Policy Studies Journal, 2020, Vol 48, Issue 1, p87
- ISSN
0190-292X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/psj.12243