ABSTRACT
‘Policy’ is what affects us all in our day-to-day life. During the 1980s Margaret Thatcher pursued a very clear set of policies – privatisation, reduce union power, increase productivity, and reduce taxation – which had a huge impact on Britain, for good or ill. Scholars of policy studies have constructed ‘models’ of how policy is most often made in practice and consideration of such alternatives helps understanding. Some of the models drawn from practice are not exactly compatible with democracy: Westminster model, the ruling-class model, party government model, Whitehall model and rational decision-making. Some political scientists – for example, academic political scientists Jordan and Richardson, and James Rhodes – perceive policy ‘communities’, comprising a range of inter-communicating groups and individuals. Policy studies is quite a crowded field but most of the scholars in it recognise a three-stage policy cycle: initiation, formulation and implementation, with the consequences of the measure, in the jargon, feeding back to influence future inputs.
