Introduction

Abstract

In the first roundtable focusing on contemporary approaches to public policy at the 2013 International Public Policy Conference, one of the participants described the field of policy sciences as populated by “warring tribes.” While the degree of conflict among different approaches to policy can easily be exaggerated, a number of important, and at times contradictory, approaches are commonly used when studying public policy. These approaches offer alternative explanations for policy choices and provide a range of means for understanding the consequences of those policy choices. The approaches have different intellectual backgrounds and epistemological assumptions associated with different ideas about the dynamics of policy, so that the same set of data about policymaking may be perceived in quite different ways.