ABSTRACT
Comparative policy research strategy usually defines relevant core questions in advance and specifies the purpose of the investigation. To recognize the crucial relationship between policy and administration is to ask what advantage can be realized through comparative policy analysis. "Comparative public policy illuminates the various ways in which politics works to produce choices of a collective or social nature". To move comparative policy research beyond, while still keeping it in harmony with, historical institutional analysis and the narrow confines of decisionmaking models, a more comprehensive framework is needed, one that clearly addresses change and integrates the managerial factor. In contrast, critics of the rational model regard public decisions as grounded in the tradition of political realities. Voting implies equal participation in public decisions by affected parties and an aggregation of their preferences. Voting is almost always a decisive method for establishing aggregate preferences and hence a consensus for some choice of action.
