6.1 Policy cycle and its products

Based on the keys to the analysis presented in the previous section, we interpret a public policy as a set of decisions and activities resulting from the interaction between public and private actors, whose behaviour is influenced by the resources at their disposal, the general institutional rules (that is, the rules concerning the overall functioning of the political system) and specific institutional rules (that is, the rules specific to the area of intervention under scrutiny).

The adoption of such an approach leads us to differentiate our analysis variables as follows:

• • the specific scope and content – both substantive and institutional – of the different policy products constitute the dependent variables, that is, the social phenomena to be explained,

while

• • the actor constellations and behaviour, which are themselves directly influenced by mobilisable resources and the general institutional context, constitute the independent variables, that is, explanatory social phenomena.

In order to concretise this meta-hypothesis by means of an analytical model that can be applied in the context of practical studies ‘in the field’, we must first identify the nature of the substantive and institutional results of public actions. In order to operationalise these dependent variables, we adopt the concept of the policy cycle (see Section 2.4 in Chapter Two). Thus, we interpret the unfolding of a policy process in terms of the following four main stages: (1) the placing of the problem to be resolved on the governmental agenda; (2) the legislative and regulatory programming of the public intervention; (3) the implementation of the political-administrative programme (PAP) by means of action plans (APs) and formal acts (outputs); and (4) the evaluation of the resulting effects (impacts and outcomes).

Figure 6.1 presents the six products of a public policy as a function of these different stages.

Thus, the analyst must try to identify these six types of products for all policies in accordance with the following characteristics:

• • The political definition of the public problem (PD) not only includes the decision on political intervention, but also, and above all, the delimitation of the perimeter of the public problem to be resolved, the identification of its probable causes by the public actors and the kinds of public intervention envisaged.

• • The PAP includes all of the legislative or regulatory decisions taken by both central state and public bodies and necessary to the implementation of the policy in question.