Comparing Policy Work in Bureaucracies in Belgium and Canada: Is Decision-making Rational or Incremental?

Many actors conduct policy work both within and outside governments, but the literature is rather silent about the involvement of civil servants. How do civil servants conduct policy analysis? Do they use formalized analytical techniques (e.g. brainstorming) or more incremental methods based on experience and feedback? We conducted an original large-scale e-survey in the federal and regional Belgian ministries which replicates the questions of the Canadian surveys on policy analysis (Howlett et al. 2014). The survey was submitted to about 9,000 civil servants with a response rate of 30%. The analysis shows that formal policy analysis is not much in policy work. These results are systematically compared with the results of the Canadian surveys. We expect that a longer tradition of teaching policy analysis has a positive influence on the use of systematic analytical tools by civil servants in ministries.