How Our Understanding of Policy Change is Affected by the Measurement of Public Policy, Hypothetical Determinants of Change, and the Relationship Between Them

Studies of policy change might be expected to include (1) measures of public opinion and advocacy activities aimed at changing policy; (2) measures of policy concrete enough to be the focus of public opinion and advocacy activities; and (3) a close match between forces potentially influencing policy and the policies themselves, so that, for example, a measure of public opinion would gauge opinion about the specific policy being studied, rather than some other policy. An informal meta-analysis of recent articles on policy change shows, however, that studies of policy change are generally not set up this way. Few studies include measures of public opinion or advocacy activities; measures of policy are often too complex to be linked to any particular determinants of policy; and the connections between policies and their potential causes are problematic. It is therefore not surprising that a substantial majority of hypotheses about the determinants of policy change are not consistent with the data, and that researchers very seldom claim that the hypothetical determinants of policy they study actually have a substantial impact on policy. Measuring policy and its hypothetical determinants in problematic ways undermines the ability of social scientists to explain policy change.