ABSTRACT
Policy study has a strong element of art and craft (as opposed to science), but this is to be expected in a field whose core research questions have such clear applied implications. To stand on its own it must make a positive claim to unique conceptual, theoretical, methodological, epistemological, and empirical contributions. If policy studies conceives of itself as a decentralized patchwork of a discipline, content to borrow bits and pieces of whatever is useful or fashionable in other social sciences, it deserves its already-commented-on inferiority complex. Typologies and the stages framework, in short, have made and continue to make useful contributions toward helping scholars understand the complex world of public policy. More to the point, these conceptual frameworks were produced and developed primarily within the policy field. It is true that policy studies has not produced a single generalizable framework that ties together all the causal relationships that fall within its area of interest.
