The Policy Cycle
What is a policy cycle?
The policy cycle is an idealized process that explains how policy should be drafted, implemented and
assessed.
A policy cycle consists of the many constituent phases of a policy’s existenceThe phases are cyclical
because the final phase is not necessarily the end of the matter, but rather an analysis of the policy to
provide information that can be used in the first phase of a subsequent cycle. The cyclical or continuous
nature of the policy cycle is one of the three main characteristics that theorists ascribe to it. The second
characteristicis linearity: the phases of the policy cycle always occur one after another and in the same
order: the phases are chronological and mutually exclusive. Third, policy cycles are fractal in that each
phase can be divided into sub phases that are representative of the whole cycle.
-Scholars have long divided the policy cycle into different stages (Howlett et al. 2009). These stages may
vary in number but they typically include:
● Agenda setting,
● formulation,
● decision-making,
● implementation,
● evaluation.
-In practice, such stages do not always follow one another in strict temporal order and the boundaries
among them are sometimes fuzzy (Howlett et al. 2009).
-Despite its limitations, the policy cycle approach allows us to break down the policy process into
distinct moments and to explore the role of ideas within each of them.
Agenda-setting
-First, during the agenda-setting stage, actors such as experts and journalists define certain problems
and push them in and out of the policy agenda (for a recent, comparative discussion of agenda-setting,
see Green-Pedersen and Walgrave 2014).
-As a consequence, within the limits of the policy cycle, problem definition plays its most central role
during the agenda-setting stage (Howlett et al. 2009).
-This is something that students of agenda-setting such as John W. Kingdon (1995) recognize.
-There is an extensive literature on problem definition in social science research, much of which is
ideational in nature (e.g. Mehta 2011; Rochefort and Cobb 1994; Stone 1997; White 2002).
-Yet agenda-setting is not only about how problems are defined and understood.
-Agenda-setting involves a competition for attention among different actors and the problems they seek
to move onto the policy agenda.
-This ‘politics of attention’ (Jones and Baumgartner 2005) is crucial across policy areas because the
number of issues policymakers can consider at one point in time is necessarily limited (Kingdon 1995).
-Drawing attention to particular problems is largely a discursive and ideational process, in which actors
seek to depict specific social problems as both pressing and requiring state intervention, through the
creation of new programmes or the expansion of existing measures.
Policy formulation
-The second stage, policy formulation, is probably the stage the most traditionally associated with the
role of ideas.
-This is the case because designing policy solutions to address various economic and social problems
often takes the form of an explicit competition among particular ideas and proposals (Kingdon 1995;
Mehta 2011).
-Policy formulation involves the mobilization of numerous actors, which range from academics and
consultants to think tanks and international organizations.
-These actors may draw on concrete policy paradigms to legitimize and make sense of their policy
proposals (Daigneault 2014; Hall 1993).
-Simultaneously, these actors may become part of ‘instrument constituencies’ that promote a specific
policy instrument, such as social insurance or personal savings accounts (Béland and Howlett 2016; Voss
and Simons 2014).
-Such instrument constituencies identify with a particular policy solution, which they adapt to emerging
problems, a situation consistent with the claim that sometimes solutions ‘chase problems’ (Kingdon
1995), rather than the other way around.
-For instance, over time, supporters of pension privatization have tied this policy solution to different
problems, such as demographic ageing and financial sustainability, which were not clearly on the radar
screen when the idea of privatization first emerged in economic and social policy circles (Béland and
Howlett 2016, forthcoming).
Decision making
-Third, during the decision-making stage, elected officials, policy entrepreneurs (Kingdon 1995) and
advocacy coalitions (Sabatier 1988) fight over the enactment of concrete policy solutions.
-Here framing processes become particularly relevant for the ‘construction of the need to reform’ (Cox
2001) and for bringing the general public and key constituencies on board(Bhatia and Coleman 2003;
Schmidt 2002).
-Framing battles over social policy are likely to involve broader political ideologies (Berman 2011;
Freeden 2003), while drawing on existing cultural categories (Steensland 2008) and public sentiments
(Campbell 2004).
-To use Campbell’s (2004) terminology, the analysis of decision-making can take into account ideas
located in the foreground of policy debates into account and, simultaneously, connect such ideas with
ideational realities located in the background of these debates.
-Such an analysis can help explain why policy entrepreneurs gather support to pass or prevent the
enactment of major reforms but also, more generally, how embedded beliefs located in the background
of social policy debates may facilitate or stand in the way of change.
-This is exactly what Brian Steensland (2008) does in his analysis of the failed efforts to reform federal
social assistance in the USA during the 1970s. For him, ‘welfare’ as a pejorative cultural category made it
harder for President Nixon to sell his reform initiative, which created much misunderstanding and,
ultimately, strong political opposition.
-Two decades later, however, US conservatives used a two-century-old rhetoric about the ‘perversity’ of
state action to pave the way and gather support for the radical 1995 federal social assistance reform
(Somers and Block 2005).
-This example suggests that the frames and narratives available to promote or mobilize against concrete
reforms can have a long political life, a situation that once again calls for a historically-informed
ideational analysis (for another example of this, see Berman 2011).
Implementation
-Implementation, the fourth stage, is probably the most neglected of the policy cycle as far as
ideational research is concerned.
-This is a pity because implementation is a crucial aspect of policy development, and has received
direct attention from policy scholars (e.g. Bardach 1977; Lipsky 2010; for an overview, see Béland and
Ridde 2016, forthcoming).
-The policy implementation literature suggests that what happens to a programme after its legislative
adoption is crucial in determining its success or failure on the ground.
-For instance, street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky 2010) can reshape policies as they implement them. At
the same time, particular constituencies, such as labour unions and professional organizations,
sometimes have the power to shape the implementation of a policy.
-There is strong evidence that ideas can play a direct role in implementation processes (Béland and
Ridde 2016, forthcoming).
-For example, in sub-Saharan Africa, the existing belief among medical doctors and other health
practitioners that patients only value care they pay for directly can weaken the support on the ground
for policies aiming at gradually lifting the user fees imposed several decades ago as part of structural
adjustment programmes (Béland and Ridde 2016, forthcoming).
-More research is needed on the potential impact of different types of ideas on policy
implementation.
Evaluation
-Lastly, in contrast to implementation, evaluation is a stage of the policy process explicitly connected to
ideational analysis.
-This is the case because, although policy evaluation can take the form of rigorous and systematic
analysis, contested interpretations of existing policy legacies are likely to emerge during the evaluation
process.
-Such interpretations are typically embedded in the assumptions of actors about what constitutes good
or bad policy.
-For instance, progressive welfare actors strongly committed to equality are likely to respond much
more negatively to social programmes that increase poverty than neoliberal experts who see inequality
as the unavoidable outcome of economic progress.
-In this context, it is not surprising that policy learning and evaluation is central to the literature on
paradigms, according to which the lessons drawn from existing policies are shaped by the assumptions
of the actors drawing such lessons (Hall 1993).
-In a more general way, policy learning is not a purely objective endeavour but a political reality that is
not without ideological and political struggles (Fischer 2003).
-This is the case within a particular jurisdiction but also at the transnational level, as actors draw lessons
from other countries (Rose 1991).
-From this perspective, lesson drawing is a significant aspect of the ideational processes through which
policy ideas travel from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, with the help of both international organizations and
domestic actors, who typically adapt them to local context (Campbell 2004; Jenson 2010; Mahon 2009;
Orenstein 2008).
