ABSTRACT
The consequences of policies are never fully known in advance. For this reason, the policy-analytic procedure of monitoring is essential to policy analysis. Monitoring permits the production of information about the causes and consequences of policies. Information on policy outcomes is regularly collected at various points in time at considerable cost to federal, state, and local governments, private research institutes, and universities. In monitoring policy outcomes there are several kinds of policy-relevant effects. Policies and programs may be characterized in terms of the organizational and political activities and attitudes that shape the transformation of policy inputs into policy outcomes and impacts. Monitoring may be broken down into several identifiable approaches: social systems accounting, social auditing, policy experimentation, research and practice synthesis, meta-analysis, and case studies. A graphic display can be used to depict a single variable at one or more points in time, or to summarize the relation between two variables.
