Temporality in Public Policy Studies

Abstract

Policy scholars are increasingly applying a temporal perspective to explain policy stability and change. Temporal analysis has a strong focus on the timing and order of policy events in order to identify the dynamics of policy making. Policy stability can be explained and understood within the context of a historical sequence of policy events in which each event reinforces the policy path established in a past formative phase or critical juncture. The notion of path dependency is often used to describe this trajectory of policy development. Policy change can also be understood from a historical perspective. As the sequence of events develops over time, driven by internal dynamics, policy development may increasingly be out of synch with the broader socio-economic, technological, political or institutional contexts within which it is developed. At some point this may trigger a critical juncture and a change of direction of the policy sequence. An alternative, but related, approach to explaining policy evolution over time is process sequencing. It focuses on the temporal and causal connections between policy events and attempts to establish how previous events enable and shape subsequent events in a sequence. While analysis of path dependency focuses on the mechanisms reproducing the policy path, allowing for bounded change, the process sequencing approach focuses on the way in which policy evolves without assuming that the sequence would be predetermined by path dependency. A particular challenge in temporal analysis of public policy is to develop a research methodology which enables scholars to establish the causal connections between events in a policy sequence. This panel explores the recent theoretical, methodological and empirical developments in temporal policy analysis with the aim of improving our understanding of policy stability, change and controversies.

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