ABSTRACT
As the introduction to this volume indicates, the comparative study of agendas links to broad political science concerns, such as power, representation, and party organization. The comparative lens may give more analytical edge to those who desire more systematic research to help answer the classic questions of the discipline. In that sense there is little difference in theoretical concern and method of the comparative study of policy agendas from other branches of comparative politics, and the contributions in this volume are a good representation of countries, and deploy a range of familiar tools and methods to understand the cases. Even with these similarities in mind, it would also be fair to say that, in contrast to the study of elections, parties and political institutions, public policy has tended to lack integrated research programmes, with common theories, questions, data, methods and applications outside the experience of one country, and where the extensive use of the same data allows the acquisition of evidence to be cumulative. Not that political science has ever had dominant or unchanging paradigms, even in the 1960s; but public policy has not yet produced one resembling the comparative study of electoral systems, for example, where scholars have created comparable data sources and work closely in teams across countries. The typical mode of study owes much to the nature of policy-making itself, which encompasses a diverse set of activities, and where the boundaries between policy formulation, decisionmaking and implementation are unclear. The sheer difficulty of defining exactly what is public policy can act as a bar to systematic study and place obstacles to the reliable collection of data and the development of common measures, especially quantitative ones. Public policy tends to be often specific to country contexts, dependent on the sets of institutions and practices in place; but it is often not as well defined as the classic units of political behaviour, such as voting and participation. These features encourage specialization and detailed case studies. Students of public policy are also a varied group of scholars ranging from sectoral specialists, practitioners of different disciplines and country experts, which encourages a pleasing diversity, but again can limit common frameworks. Particularist methodologies, such as ethnomethodology, have been supportive of research into the detail and contexts rather than the investigation of common patterns. So too the post-positivists, popular since the early 1990s, encourage rejection of more science-like research activities 1 .
