Comparing What You Need as a Policy Analyst with Policymaking Reality

This chapter challenges a tendency to equate what policymakers and analysts need, to do their job effectively, and what they can actually expect to happen. It revisits Lasswell’s distinction between policy process research, as the analysis of policy, and policy analysis as the analysis for policy. Both provide different answers to key questions such as: does policymaking actually proceed through a series of steps or stages?