What Should We Do? The Field of Policy Analysis

Policy analysis can be broadly thought of as the attempt to answer a single question: What should we do? Answering that question is a task traditionally dominated by rationalists. That means policy analysis has a strong bias toward quantitative methods and conceptual frameworks taken from the positivist traditions in social science. From this perspective, public policy is conceptualized as a solution to a problem, its central goal is efficiency, and the practice of policy analysis is theoretically and methodologically oriented toward identifying the most efficient solution to a given problem. This approach continues to represent mainstream policy analysis. Post-positivists, however, have consistently leveled important value-based criticisms of the rationalist approach. While these criticisms are widely recognized as containing some merit, there historically have been more challenges in operationalizing a post-positivist approach to policy analysis. The evolution of the Narrative Policy Framework suggests that it may be possible to constructively fuse rationalist and post-positive approaches, though much work remains to be done if such a synthesis is going to displace the rationalist approach as mainstream policy analysis.