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Journal of Policy History 17.1 (2005) 34-51



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The Study of Policy Development

University of California, Berkeley

What do we mean by the term "policy history"?1 In conventional usage, "history" refers to one of two kinds of investigation: the study of something that happened at some point in the past, or the study of how something came to be what it is. It is this second usage—the idea of policy history as an unfolding story of policy development—that I want to examine in this essay. Understanding the sources of policy often requires that we pay attention to processes that play out over considerable periods of time.

Thinking systematically about how social processes unfold over time has fallen into disfavor in much of the social sciences. Contemporary social scientists are more likely to take a "snapshot" view of political life, especially in areas of inquiry where "large-N" statistical methods and the analytic tools of microeconomics and game theory have been ascendant. Although it is not inherent in the use of these techniques, in practice they lend themselves to inquiries that focus on the "moves" of particular "actors" at a moment in time.

Recent scholarship on policy development, by contrast, reveals the very high price that social science often pays when it ignores the profound temporal dimensions of real social processes. Attentiveness to issues of temporality highlights aspects of social life that are essentially invisible from an ahistorical vantage point. Placing politics in time can greatly enrich the explanations we offer for social outcomes of interest. Indeed, it can expand our vision of what is worth explaining in the first place.

Of course, the social sciences have had a rich tradition of historical research. Scholarly communities devoted to extending such traditions flourish in parts of the social sciences. Indeed, some claim to witness a "historic turn" in the human sciences as a whole.2 Yet in spite of this activity there has actually been surprisingly limited attentiveness to the specifically temporal dimensions of social processes. In contemporary social [End Page 34] science, the past serves primarily as a source of empirical material rather than as the site for serious investigations of how politics happens over time.

Too often, the adoption of a historical orientation has failed to exploit its greatest potential contribution to the more systematic understanding of social processes. Especially in the field of American political development, the turn to history has been a turn to the study of what happened in the past. Here analysts study particular historical events or processes, with a focus on offering convincing explanations of specific outcomes of interest. Such investigations often greatly increase what we know about particular facets of American political history. What is less clear, however, is how particular studies fit into some broader research program. Little effort is made to suggest what, if anything, might "travel" from one investigation to another. Indeed, many historically-oriented analysts are uninterested in this question, assuming the stance of most historians—that the rich particularities of each event or process render it unique. Alternatively, these analysts seem to assume (usually implicitly) that a discussion of, say, how social movements contributed to policy outcomes in the 1930s, generates clear implications for our understanding of contemporary policymaking. Such an assumption is highly problematic. Moreover, this kind of "historical" analysis can be profoundly ahistorical in practice. Inquiry may focus on the past but nonetheless zero in too narrowly on a particular moment of time. In doing so, it risks replicating many of the limitations of social science work that ignores the past entirely.

We do, however, have another basis for connecting history to the social sciences. We can turn to an examination of history because social life unfolds over time. Real social processes have distinctly temporal dimensions. Exploring these dimensions can lead us to assess prominent areas of inquiry and conventional practices in new and fertile ways. Often we will be led to new hypotheses regarding important subjects and exciting possibilities will be opened for extending existing theoretical work in new directions. Focusing on how...

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