ABSTRACT
Whether policy outputs emerge from an orderly and predictable rather than a chaotic and unpredictable process is one of the main debates among public policy analysts. In that debate, the role of political parties is paramount. Via the electoral cycle, parties present their preferences to the electorate, gather public support, enter government (or not) and carry out their promises (or not). Thus, a functioning party democracy implies a planned policy process leading from party preferences to policy priorities. As party programmes aggregate citizens’ demands, external pressures are not ignored but endogenized at pre-election time. Yet many policy scholars argue that sudden focusing events, changing policy images, shifts in advocacy coalitions, new available solutions, issue expansion – in sum external pressure – can bring about unforeseen and often major policy changes without political parties having an initiating role. The latter follow rather than steer an externally-induced disjointed change process. In this paper we evaluate these two approaches: the ‘party model’ leading to intentional policy choices and the ‘external pressure model’ predicting abrupt policy change.
