ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the political analysis while enquiring of the practical and intellectual advantages of the policy sciences for policy analysis and public administration generally. Distinguishing features of the policy sciences are recognizable in even earlier writings of Harold D. Lasswell. The supposed theoretical and empirical limitations of the policy sciences stem from partial deployment of Lasswell’s framework and a misunderstanding of the basic premises of the contextual, problem-oriented, and multi-method approach. Theories of the Policy Process is the attempt of editor Paul Sabatier and contributors to offer more descriptively accurate, theoretically grounded, and empirically testable alternatives to the so-called stages model of the policy process. Policy scientists approach problem orientation as an effort to synthesize rather than to sequence. Complaints about the supposed inadequacies of the decision process wither on recognizing its organic role in policy analysis. Policy scientists recognize that though political myths represent stable perspectives, they are nevertheless mutable.
