New Directions: Revisiting Models of Policy Change

This chapter reviews research from multiple fields, including biopolitics, psychology, social psychology, and evolutionary psychology to argue for a more interdisciplinary approach to the study of public policy. Some of the dominant theories of the policy process, including punctuated equilibrium theory and policy windows, rest on assumptions about how decision makers and citizens respond to external events. Those models would be well served to adopt findings from other fields. The “policy sciences” were intended to improve upon the quality of public policy as a way of improving upon the human condition. The chapter discusses several well-established patterns in human decision-making that the authors believe have the most relevance for explaining change in the policy process, notably the “intuitive” or automatic nature of most decision-making. The chapter also suggests several new directions for policy theory. Special attention is given to research from biopolitics on the “society works best” index, moral psychology, and “cheater detection” from evolutionary psychology. These frameworks have clear implications for theories of agenda setting and policy design.