ABSTRACT
Readers are thrown right into the experience of doing policy analysis. Chapter 1 provides an important overview to the book’s argument that policy analysis and implementation is about much more than rationality, numbers, and economic efficiency. Those elements are important, and we advocate and teach a mixed methods approach, but the chapter focuses on the importance to good policy analysis of understanding: value conflict, power, democracy, political systems, linkages mechanisms, political means, political storytelling, and problem definition. Utilizing four boxes on topics ranging from needle exchanges to a policy battle about importing sugar, two mini-cases (one involving a prison warden proposing a controversial new policy), and a full-length case study about the gig economy, you learn by applying. Importantly, you will come to a clear understanding of the power of political narratives, the centrality of politics and value conflict, and will know how, when, and why to do stakeholder analysis.
