The Determinants of Public Policy: What Matters and How Much

This article is a research synthesis addressing four questions critical to our understanding of the determinants of public policy. How often and how strongly do hypothetical determinants of policy—public opinion, interest groups, the party balance, and other factors—actually influence policy? Do some hypothetical determinants of policy have more influence than others? Does the way we measure policy affect our ability to explain it? And is there a connection between how strongly particular variables affect policy, and how much effort we devote to studying them? It turns out that variables hypothesized to influence policy more often than not have no effect. When variables do affect policy, researchers very seldom say anything about how much impact they have. Variables that convey the most information to policymakers about what the public wants have a greater impact than other variables, but it is less clear how the measurement of policy affects our findings. Researchers pay much attention to hypothetical determinants of policy unlikely to matter very much, and little attention to those likely to be the most important. Implications for future research are considered. 摘要 本篇文章是一个研究综述, 它所提出的四个问题对我们理解公共政策的决定因素至关重要。第一, 政策的假设性决定因素（包括公众舆论、利益集团、政党间平衡以及其他因素）会在什么样的频度和强度上影响政策的制定？第二, 是否某些假设性政策决定因素会比其他决定因素更有影响力？第三, 我们测量政策的方式是否会影响我们解释它的能力？第四, 在我们评估特定变量对政策的影响力有多大时, 我们的评估结果是否与我们在研究它们时所投入的精力有关？事实证明, 那些更频繁地被假设为影响政策的变量并不起作用。当变量确实影响政策时, 研究人员很少谈论他们的影响有多大。 某些变量会向政策制定者传达大部分关于公共需求的信息, 那么这些变量与其他变量相比, 会对政策有更大影响, 但是关于政策的测量方式会如何影响我们的这些发现, 我们的研究对此并不太清楚。研究人员非常重视那些不太可能有很大影响的假设性政策决定因素, 而很少关注那些可能有最大影响的因素。本文对于未来的研究具有启示性意义。