ABSTRACT
Public sector evaluations vary widely in their subject matter. Some are extremely broad in their scope, covering for instance an entire policy area; others exceedingly narrow. An option that evaluators have made too little use of is to characterize the intervention in terms of policy instruments. The policy instruments strategy has been identified as a distinctly new approach to the study of public policy—an approach that identifies a new unit of analysis for policy research. The stick is called regulation, the carrot economic means, and the sermon might be labelled information. Economic policy instruments involve either distributing or taking away material resources. The idea of organizing policy instruments according to the degree of constraint can be criticized from several angles. One allegedly damaging objection to this idea of organizing policy instruments according to the degree of constraint would be that, occasionally, economic means are more constraining than regulation.
