ABSTRACT
The preceding chapters laid the foundation that will help you understand the current theories of the policy process that I describe in this chapter. These theories have dominated public policy theory for the past 25 years, and remain influential because scholars have found them to be useful for explaining important aspects of the public policy process. However, like most social science theories, they do not explain all the phenomena that comprise the policy process. This is not, of course, an indictment of this theory. Rather, it suggests that the search for a “unified theory of the policy process,” or, logically, a unified theory of politics may be an impossible goal. These challenges to theory building are described in this chapter. But, as you will learn from this chapter, the scientific study of the policy process-and of building models and theories of how public policy is made-is one of the most challenging endeavors in social science, and while no “final” theory of the process has ever been developed, we can say that remarkable progress in theory building has been made since the early 1980s.
