Policy Community

Developments

The term policy community appeared in the literature independently in several sources in the 1970s (e.g., Jeremy John Richardson & A. Grant Jordan, 1979), and this timing reflected the shift in focus in political science away from formal legal and legislature-based study to tracking empirical policy biography. Empirical research found that the effective locus of decision making was not the legislature, cabinets, or politician-led committees but group/bureaucrat arenas. The term recorded the conclusion that much policy evolution was not the result of ideological struggle between conflicting political parties with distinctive ideologies and agendas but of apolitical (or at least nonpartisan) discussion and information exchange.

It was thus one of a family of concepts capturing segmented policy-making features—for example, group subgovernment, corporate pluralism, and iron triangles. The characteristics of a generic subsystem approach include the following: the expectation of bargaining in stable (sectoral) environments, the evolution of stable coalitions, the low visibility of decisions, well-defined and uncontested policy jurisdiction, the narrow and low scope of conflict, a small number of participants, and some restriction of access to the process.

In real-life settings, policy communities are not black-and-white arrangements with gatekeepers and badges of admission. The policy community was not intended as a one-size-fits-all policy explanation. What it intended to capture was a sense of surprise (reflecting a wave of case study research) that policy making was to a substantial degree the result of non–legislature-based bargaining.

Whereas in party and parliamentary venues policy differences are exaggerated in adversarial fashion for political advantage, in policy subsystems, there is a premium on minimizing differences and underplaying the apparent significance of the outcome. Participants resolve issues within the network in the belief that it is counterproductive to highlight grievances (attracting other competing perspectives). The suppression of competing interests is reinforced by presenting issues as humdrum or technical. Trumpeting the importance of one's concerns might just attract attention. So it would be difficult to get an impression of the number and importance of these arrangements from, say, a sampling of press articles or ministerial speeches. The policy community premium is in avoiding such attention.

The Main Critiques

The concept has found little empirical application and instead has generated debate about what it [Page 1903]implies rather than demonstrations of its usefulness or otherwise.

Its original usage in the United States and the United Kingdom (UK) was remarkably congruent. In the UK, Richardson and Jordan's Governing Under Pressure sought to reorient attention in policy-making studies toward a