It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what policy analysis was.
I recall sitting in an economics class in my first semester of my public policy analysis graduate program and asking myself “what exactly is ‘policy analysis’?” At the time, our program did not have an introduction to public policy analysis class until the second semester of the program, so first-years spent a lot of time with microeconomic models and inferential statistics but did not quite know why they were learning them. Suffice it to say things started to come together in the second semester.
The most straightforward definition is put forth by David Weimer and Adam Vining in their textbook Policy Analysis: Concepts and Practice:
Policy analysis is “client-oriented advice relevant to public decisions and informed by social values.”
By taking this definition apart, we can get a pretty good understanding of what “policy analysis” really is.
Client-oriented
Policy analysis is about helping a client. The most direct form of policy analysis is analysis conducted for policymakers themselves. This could be a legislator, a regulator, an administrator, or anyone else in the public sector. It also could be a think tank, a foundation, or even a company. The key here is that policy analysis is conducted for someone.
The client could even be yourself: if you are a policymaker who is trying to decide what decision to make and you are analyzing information, you are conducting policy analysis. But one thing that sets policy analysis apart from, say, academic research, is that it is practical: it helps someone make a decision for a pressing problem.
Advice
Public policy analysis is not a directive, it is advice. Its goal is to increase the quality of policymaking, but it is ultimately different from a process designed to discover a conclusive answer for a policy problem. Policy analysis aims instead to bring more information to the policymaking process.
Misunderstanding this aspect of policy analysis can cause people to come to misguided conclusions about policy analysis. For instance, some people fixate on the concept of “net present value” of a policy in cost-benefit analysis, a type of policy analysis, thinking this one number purports to tell whether a policy is good or bad. Net present value, though, only gives insight as to whether a policy is economically efficient. This should be useful to policymakers, but hardly gives a policymaker all the information she needs to make a decision, and even less compels her to necessarily adopt or reject a policy.
Relevant to Public Decisions
Policy analysis is not about private problems, but about public ones. Specifically, policy analysis is about problems that are faced by the public sector.
While an analysis measuring the public impact of private electricity generation by a power company could inform a policy analysis, that analysis does not constitute policy analysis unless it asks how a public actor could impact that problem. Rather, policy analysis is concerned with the tools of the public sector like regulation, taxation, subsidies, and bodies that can use them, like public agencies and federal, state, and local governments.
Informed by Social Values
Ultimately, policy analysis has a social bent. It is about trying to solve problems in the public sector with society’s values at its core.
This is why policy analysis focuses on effectiveness, efficiency, and equity so often. It is in the public interest that policies are effective: that they work as they are intended to. Policies should be efficient: they should maximize the use of social resources. Policies should be equitable: they should promote fair outcomes among different groups impacted. Policy analysis is about trying to figure out how well a given policy promotes these social values.
“Policy analysis” can be a slippery, vague phrase. I try to keep the above definition from Weimer and Vining close and dear so I can remember why, how, and especially what work we’re doing here at Scioto Analysis. I hope it will be a helpful guide for you as well.