4 - From policy analysis to political management? An outside look at public-policy training in the United States

Summary

US PUBLIC-POLICY TRAINING IN ITS POLITICAL CONTEXT

In the preceding chapter, deLeon examined the effects of external events on the development of the policy sciences in the United States. In this chapter, I continue the focus on the United States and examine developments in public-policy training. The orientations and institutional structures of the universities as well as US political conditions have played a part in the establishment of public-policy schools in recent years.

In analysing the situation in the United States, I am inevitably doing a comparative analysis, because I look at American institutions from the perspective of one who experienced and teaches public-policy analysis in West Germany. Aspects of the US situation thus did not catch my attention arbitrarily but in the form of observation of differences. Differences raise questions. If public-policy training is a much more developed field in the United States than in West Germany, if it clearly puts very different methodological and conceptual emphases, and if it shows different trends of development, these differences call for explanation.

In this chapter I attempt to offer some tentative explanations by trying to locate the development of US public-policy training in its political context, both in terms of the general features of American polity and politics and in terms of political changes over the last twenty years, the period in which public-policy schools emerged and consolidated.