Summary and Main Ideas
Summary
The two groups most engaged in making policy are policy advocates and policy analysts. Policy advocates are people who feel strongly enough about something to work toward changing public policy to fix it. Policy analysts, on the other hand, aim for impartiality. Their role is to assess potential policies and predict their outcomes. Although they are in theory unbiased, their findings often reflect specific political leanings.
The public policy process has four major phases: identifying the problem, setting the agenda, implementing the policy, and evaluating the results. The process is a cycle, because the evaluation stage should feed back into the earlier stages, informing future decisions about the policy.
Practice Questions
- In the implementation phase of the policy process, is it better to use a top-down approach or a bottom-up approach on Federal policies? Why?
Glossary
Congressional Budget Office: the congressional office that scores the spending or revenue impact of all proposed legislation to assess its net effect on the budget
policy advocates: people who actively work to propose or maintain public policy
policy analysts: people who identify all possible choices available to a decision maker and assess the potential impact of each
top-down implementation: a strategy in which the federal government dictates the specifics of public policy and each state implements it the same exact way
This lesson is part of:
American Domestic Policy