Causation in Policy Science Knowledge, Power, Meaning, Agency and Context

The policy stage model and its successor, the policy cycle heuristic, understands the policy process as a series of activities which are assumed to follow each other linearly, with each activity influencing the next one. This obviously makes it a model of causality. Yet, as it was originally conceived as a prescriptive model and hence its assumptions are at least as much normatively induced as analytically. Hence, when it was used as a framework for empirical analysis of the separate activities (‘stages’), these assumptions appeared to be untenable.
This claim will be illustrated and elaborated on the basis of a review of the literature on agenda setting, policy formation and policy implementation. Their collective upshot has been a very different, dialectical (i.e. iterative and interactive) depiction of causation between these different activities, as well as between their material, institutional and ideational structural context and the agency within and between them. Actors’ interpretations of these structures, issues and policy options in light of each other and of political expediency, thus are the key factors in the causation of change in agendas, policies or outcomes. The final section, drawing on an example from health care, discusses the nature of the ‘policy work’ implied in such agency.