Clio's Lost Tribe: Public Policy History Since 1978

Abstract

Policy history has straddled two disciplines—history and policy analysis—neither of which has taken it very seriously. What unites those who study policy history is not that they are ”policy historians“ per se, but that they organize their analysis and narrative around the emergence, passage, and implementation of policy. Rather than a subfield, as the historian Paula Baker recently argued, policy history has resembled area studies programs. Policy history became an interdisciplinary arena for scholars from many different fields to interact. While founders hoped that policies would become an end in themselves, rather than something used to understand other issues, scholarship since 1978 has shown that the two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, some of the most innovative scholarship has come from social or political historians who have used policy to understand larger historical phenomena. In the process, the work provided a much richer understanding of how policymaking evolved.