Government And Producing Public Policy

By most accounts, the academic discipline generally referred to as the study of public policy grew out of the approach called the policy sciences. The policy sciences approach has been primarily credited to the work of Harold D. Lasswell, writing in the late 1940s and early 1950s, most prominently articulated in his essay, ‘‘The policy orientation,’’ which was the opening chapter to Lasswell and Daniel Lerner’s The Policy Sciences. The policy sciences orientation was explicitly focused on the rigorous application of the sciences (hence, the plural usage of ‘‘sciences’’) to issues avecting governance and government. As Fischer (2003) has recently observed: Specifically, Lasswell wanted to create an applied social science that would act as a mediator between academics, government decision-makers, and ordinary citizens by providing objective solutions to problems that would narrow or minimize. The need for unproductive political debate on the pressing policy issues of the day. In addition, Lasswell and his colleagues (e.g. Lasswell and Kaplan 1950) articulated a clear understanding of the necessity of overlaying the approach with the democratic ethos and processes, or what he defined as the ‘‘policy sciences of democracy’’, which ‘‘were directed towards knowledge needed to improve the practice of democracy’’. The distinctly democratic orientation grew directly out of Lasswell’s animus towards the totalitarian regimes that were present in the world community during the interwar period.