ABSTRACT
In considering policy alternatives, the types of policy recommendations made will be of interest, and in dealing with types of policy recommendations, the interest lies with the answers to three questions: Who does “it”? What is “it”? What is the intended result? Certainly, few policy decisions are left to private individuals, so the most likely “who” in any analysis of policy types would be the federal government itself. The combined, three-digit codes of actor-action-end resulted in 390 discrete classifications of policy type. The major problem with the derived policy types is that the information is dispersed too finely. Manipulability strongly suggests the decision costs of the policy models presented; vastly different political costs and monetary costs surely would affect a president’s decision on whether to approach Congress or to change the activities of a federal agency under the executive branch in order to implement a given policy.
