Becoming an Interdisciplinary Discipline? An Analysis of the Development of the Policy Sciences, 1975–2020

This study combines bibliometric meta-analysis with secondary literature and expert interviews to unveil a five-stage narrative of the development of policy sciences: (1) It has grown and globalised from a North American orientation towards European scholarship; (2) Lasswell’s classical subfield provided an epistemic foundation up to the 1980s; (3) Three further subfields – change and power, institutions, and post-positivist epistemology – spearheaded diversification from the 1980s to the 2000s; (4) Since then, policy sciences has Europeanised and complexified; (5) Despite some fragmentation in the 1990s, policy sciences in the 2020s remains coherent and institutionalised. It may today be considered an “interdisciplinary discipline”.