ABSTRACT
The policy process is best imagined as a complex phenomenon of continuous interactions involving public policy and its context, events, actors, and outcomes. These interactions are the source of major questions defining policy process research. A large portion of policy process research is implicitly or explicitly comparative. One indication of the comparative approach is the hundreds of empirical applications of policy process theory that now span the globe and cover a wide range of public policy topics. Within the field of public policy, scholars have approached broad impacts differently. One way to begin to grasp the issue is to understand the partition of public policy studies into policy analysis and policy process research. Policy process research has traditionally emphasized the theoretical, focused more on describing and explaining a policy issue rather than on making a recommendation about a particular policy decision, and has often been conducted without a client.
