Bringing Society Back in: Actors, Networks, and Systems in Public Policy

A key thesis of this contribution is that the analysis of policy processes in the last decades has focused too much on governmental and conventional political actors, on the one hand, and too much on actor-centered bottom-up perspectives. As the microfoundation of social explanations has moved to the fore, actor constellations became the core of policy explanations and contextual factors and systemic perspectives moved into the background. The chapter proposes a renewed perspective on public policy with the aim to bring social factors back into play, particularly at macrostructural level. This means not only that non-governmental, civil society organizations and social relations should be given greater consideration, but even more important are various forms of structural differentiation at the macro level of societies which should be reintegrated into policy explanations.