European Policy Analysis Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016 | Page 130

The Role of Theories in Policy Studies and Policy Work

with (Haugaard 2014). The temporal
and/or social inclusion or exclusion from
the puzzling and powering that together
make up policymaking determines the
success or failure of actors’ political bid
for cognitive and organizational power.
Not institutions as enabling or restraining
parameters, but the intentions, frames,
strategies, resources and modes of
power acquisition and maintenance, or
coercion, domination and hegemony,
and cooperation and conflict are the
key. Theories of hard bargaining in
bureaucratic politics (Allison 1971),
of political opportunity structures for
social movements (Kriesi et al. 1995) and
operational modes of cadre bureaucracies
(e.g., Rothstein 2015) exemplify these
agonistic policy process theories.
Policy(making)
Problematic

as

Managing

the

The third core value of policy
that we identified was problematization,
and much of the theorizing about policy,
particularly in the last few decades, has
focused on the concept of problem. It
was not part of traditional theorizing
about governing, which focused on order
and how it was achieved and in what
circumstances it could be considered
legitimate to use coercion to achieve order.
The development, between roughly the
eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century,
of cameralistics, “Polizeywisschaften”
or “Staatswissenschaften”, other modes
of governmentality knowledge, 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, culminated in Lasswell’s call for the
mobilization of academic social science in

the process of governing to create a “policy
science” which was problem-focused,
interdisciplinary, and explicitly normative,
leading to the development in (mainly
United States) universities (though it
emerged from defense contracting and
the RAND Corporation) of a technology
of systematic choice grounded in
microeconomics (Radin 2000; 2013).
The function of policy analysis was to
clarify the problem, predict the outcome
of competing options, and evaluate the
action taken; this was “speaking truth to
power” (Wildavsky 1979).

Much of this “policy analysis” was
done, though how much it was used in the
policy process, and for what purpose, was
questioned (Lindblom 1990), and it became
clear that the nature of “the problem”
was not self-evident, but emerged from
intellectual clashes and political power
play of different and partial perspectives.
Majone (1989) argued that the work of
the policy analyst was more like that of a
courtroom lawyer, crafting a persuasive
argument, than a laboratory scientist, and
attention was directed to the processes of
“problematisation”: how situations were
seen as normal or deviant, when deviant
situations were seen as “problems”, when
“problems” demanded collective action,
who should initiate such action, what
actions were appropriate, how the utility
of these actions could be assessed, and so
on. The emerging “argumentative turn” in
policy analysis strongly focused attention
on this process (e.g., Fischer and Forester
1993; Hajer and Wagenaar 2003; Hoppe
2010; Yanow 1996).

In this perspective, the central
question is: How and why do ideas,
beliefs, images, ideologies, worldviews,
paradigms, or other mental constructs
impact on policy processes? Why do some

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