Introduction

Abstract

It would be a disservice to suggest that my images of policy analysis sprang full blown from imagination, or with the exact order into which these ideas have been pressed here. These conceptions are shaped by what was happening to me—devising a curriculum for a school of public policy, as much in an effort to understand analysis as to teach it—and to the country—the social programs of the sixties, filtered through one to two hundred analyses a year done by students and colleagues. That I came to analysis via the study of budgeting, in which politics and economics are intertwined, may account for my refusal to dissolve one into the other and my preference for trying to keep them together as political economy. Though now I think of myself as a political economist, I was first a political scientist. The capacity to make decisions in the future, to mobilize support for substance—that is, political rationality—is as least as important as generating economic growth so that there will be resources to allocate. Since policy analysis is about people, a category in which I am forced to include myself, my experiences matter.

“What is Policy Analysis? Why do you ask?”

Anonymous