Top-down and bottom-up approaches to implementation research

The last fifteen years have witnessed an enormous amount of research on policy implementation. While the early work was primarily American – motivated in part by perceived failures in Great Society programs – much of the most interesting recent work has been done in Western Europe. For general reviews, see Yin (1980), Barrett and Fudge (1981), Alexander (1982), and Sabatier and Mazmanian (1983a).