Policy Cycle

Policy Process

The emphasis of the policy cycle perspective is on the process of policy actions and interactions involving many different political and bureaucratic players. Hence, it has gone beyond the study of formal political institutions or the input side of politics, such as interest-group activities and political participation, which were once the main concerns of political science. The conception of the policy cycle could be traced to Harold Lasswell's seven prescriptive steps in policy making, namely, (1) intelligence, (2) promotion, (3) prescription, (4) invocation, (5) application, (6) termination, and (7) appraisal. Nonetheless, his prescriptive conception focuses mainly on policy making within government, without taking into account the impact of other political actors and the external environment. Major texts published in the 1970s and 1980s by Garry Brewer and Peter DeLeon, Charles O. Jones, and James E. Anderson have further contributed to the policy cycle framework. While the most commonly recognized stages of the policy cycle include problem definition and agenda setting, policy making, implementation, and evaluation, other formulations have proposed somewhat different, but still largely similar, stages, such as initiation, estimation, selection, adoption, legitimation, implementation, evaluation, and termination. The terms policy cycle and policy stage are often used interchangeably in the literature, hence this is also called the stages approach to the policy process. The cyclical metaphor, however, highlights the role of feedback in linking the input and output phases of policy making, as in David Easton's system model, and hence emphasizes the continuous evolution of the policy process.

Criticisms of the Policy Cycle Concept

The policy cycle perspective is perhaps the most widely adopted and long-standing framework used in organizing major texts on policy making and policy analysis because it simplifies the complicated, amorphous processes into distinct and easily identifiable stages. Its contribution to the conceptual organization of the policy process should not be underestimated. However, despite its widespread usage, it has come under criticism from various angles, ranging from critique of its empirical relevance to its promise as a policy theory. First, one key criticism is that the policy cycle is not a causal theory or model. It does not offer an explanation of the entire policy process, even though the perspective encompasses the most prominent aspects of public policy making. It fails to clearly identify a set of key variables that explains the process, which is considered not conducive to the further development of policy theory. Nor does it specify the relationship between these variables or generate a hypothesis for testing its claims. In the eyes of the critics, the policy cycle at best provides a descriptive account and an analytical framework of the policy process rather than a theoretical explanation of how the policy process proceeds in the way suggested by its proponents. Hank Jenkins-Smith and Paul Sabatier prefer to call it the “stages heuristic,” namely, just a learning device.

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