ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the role of policy analysis in policymaking. Policy analysts create, critically assess, and communicate knowledge about and in the policymaking process. The distinction between about and in marks an essential difference between policy analysis, on one hand, and political science and economics, disciplines that specialize in developing and testing empirically theories about policymaking. In nineteenth-century Europe, producers of policy-relevant knowledge began to base their work on the systematic recording of empirical data. Earlier, philosophers and statesmen had offered explanations of policymaking and its role in society. The primary function of social scientists in the 1930s was to investigate broad sets of potential solutions for general policy problems and, and not, as in later periods, to employ economic modeling, decision analysis, and policy experimentation to identify and select specific solutions to well-defined problems. The purpose of policy analysis is to improve policymaking.
