ABSTRACT
Public policy is a course of action adopted and pursued by government. Public policy analysis is the study of how governmental policies are made and implemented, and the application of available knowledge to governmental policies for the purpose of improving their formulation and implementation. The evolution of public policy analysis has two very separate tracks. One is practical, the other academic. Woodrow Wilson was the first president to hire social scientists. Academia was left in the wake of governments' progress in policy analysis. The incrementalist paradigm, favored by political science, is substantive, descriptive, objective, and process-focused. The elite/mass model, often credited to C. Wright Mills, contends that a powerful policy-making elite, whose members share common values, governs a passive, apathetic, and ill-informed mass. The institutionalist model, personified in the writing of Carl J. Friedrich, focuses on legalities and organization charts. The institutionalist model has experienced a resurrection, of a sort, that might best be described as neo-institutionalism.
