What Is Public Policy? Research Areas, Funding, and Career Paths

Public policy is the study of how governments and other public institutions decide what to do about collective problems, how those decisions are carried out, and whether they work. As a research field it has two faces. One is descriptive and explanatory: why do some problems reach the political agenda while others do not, and why do similar laws produce different results in different places? The other is applied and evaluative: given a problem, what options exist, what would each cost, who would gain or lose, and what does the evidence say about what actually happened after a program was put in place?

The word “policy” covers a lot of ground. A statute, a regulation, an agency guidance document, a budget allocation, a court-ordered remedy and an organization’s standing practice can all function as policy. Researchers therefore usually define the object of study broadly — a purposive course of action, or deliberate inaction, adopted by a public authority to address a problem — and then narrow it to a particular domain such as health, education, taxation, energy, housing or science itself. This guide is written for researchers and research administrators who want to understand the field as a discipline: what it studies, which methods it uses, how people are trained in it, who funds it and who publishes it, and why it matters to anyone who manages grants, compliance or research programs.

What public policy research actually studies

Public policy research clusters around a handful of recurring questions:

• Problem definition and agenda setting. Why a condition is recognized as a public problem at all, who gets to frame it, and what makes a window of opportunity for action open or close.
• Design and choice. What instruments are available (regulation, taxes and subsidies, direct provision, information campaigns, contracts, grants, nudges) and how their likely effects, costs and distributional consequences compare.
• Implementation. What happens between a decision and its effect on people: the role of street-level workers, state and local governments, contractors, funding formulas and administrative capacity. A well-designed policy can fail in delivery, and a modest one can succeed.
• Evaluation and learning. Whether a policy achieved its goals, at what cost, for whom, and what should change as a result.
• Politics and institutions. How legislatures, executives, courts, interest groups, public opinion and expert communities shape what is feasible.

Public policy, policy analysis, and public administration

These terms overlap and are often used loosely, so it helps to separate them. Public policy is the broad field and also the thing studied. Policy analysis is the applied craft within it: structuring a problem, specifying alternatives and criteria, projecting outcomes, and communicating a recommendation to a decision-maker, usually under time pressure and with imperfect data. The policy process literature is the more theoretical side that explains how policy gets made. Public administration concerns the organization and management of government agencies and the delivery of public services. Schools of public policy, public affairs and public administration often share faculty and curricula, and the policy and administration subfield of political science overlaps with them; see the guide to political science for that neighboring discipline.

A useful rule of thumb: political science asks why governments behave as they do; economics asks how people and markets respond to incentives; public policy research takes both, plus tools from statistics, law, sociology, psychology and management, and points them at a concrete decision.

The policy cycle and its critics

The most widely taught framework is the policy cycle (also called the stages heuristic), which breaks the life of a policy into phases. Textbooks vary in how they label them, but a common sequence is:

1. Agenda setting — a problem gains attention from decision-makers.
2. Policy formulation — options are developed and compared.
3. Adoption — an authorized body decides, through legislation, rulemaking, executive action or a court ruling.
4. Implementation — agencies, governments and partners put the decision into practice.
5. Evaluation — results are assessed, feeding back into whether the policy is continued, changed or ended.

The cycle is valuable as a map of where different kinds of research fit: agenda-setting research draws on political science and communication, formulation on economics and analysis, implementation on organizational studies, evaluation on causal inference. Its limits are equally well known. Real policymaking rarely proceeds in tidy order; stages overlap, loop back or are skipped; and the model says little about why anything moves from one stage to the next. Theories developed to address that gap include John Kingdon’s multiple streams framework (problems, policies and politics flow separately and sometimes converge), Baumgartner and Jones’s punctuated equilibrium theory (long periods of stability interrupted by rapid change), and Paul Sabatier’s advocacy coalition framework (coalitions of actors who share beliefs compete over long time spans). Researchers use the cycle as a vocabulary and these theories as explanations.

Policy analysis: the applied core

Policy analysis follows a recognizable workflow, laid out in well-known training texts such as Eugene Bardach’s A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis and Weimer and Vining’s Policy Analysis: Concepts and Practice:

• Define the problem in a way that is measurable and tied to a decision, and identify the client or audience.
• Set evaluation criteria, typically some mix of effectiveness, efficiency, equity, feasibility and cost.
• Construct alternatives, including the status quo as a baseline.
• Project outcomes for each alternative using existing evidence, models or pilots, and be explicit about uncertainty.
• Weigh trade-offs and recommend, or present the options so that the decision-maker’s own values can drive the choice.
• Communicate in the form decision-makers actually read: briefs, memos, testimony, dashboards.

A defining feature of the field is that analysis is separated, as far as possible, from advocacy. Good policy analysis states its assumptions, reports what it cannot know, and distinguishes empirical claims from value judgments. That discipline is also what makes a non-partisan field possible: the same method applies whether the question is raising a minimum wage, funding a vaccine program or reforming a permitting process, and the findings can be used by people with very different goals.

Evaluation and evidence-based policy

Program evaluation uses social-science methods to judge whether a program is working. Evaluators commonly distinguish several kinds of question: how a program is intended to work (often drawn as a theory of change or logic model), whether it was delivered as planned (process or implementation evaluation), whether it produced the intended change (impact evaluation), and whether the results justify the cost (cost-effectiveness or benefit-cost analysis).

Evidence-based policy is the broader movement to use findings like these systematically in decisions. Its influence has been institutional as well as intellectual:

• In the United States, the bipartisan Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking reported in 2017, and Congress followed with the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 (Public Law 115-435, the “Evidence Act”). It requires federal agencies to designate an Evaluation Officer, a Chief Data Officer and a Statistical Official, and to develop multi-year learning agendas (priority questions and the evidence-building activities to answer them) and annual evaluation plans. OMB guidance on implementation began with Memorandum M-19-23 in 2019.
• Clearinghouses and evidence-synthesis organizations such as the Campbell Collaboration, the Institute of Education Sciences’ What Works Clearinghouse and the What Works Network in the United Kingdom summarize which interventions have credible evidence behind them. The methods behind them are those described in the CASRAI guide to evidence synthesis and review types.
• Randomized evaluations, and increasingly quasi-experimental designs, are used to test policies before scaling them.

The movement has critics worth taking seriously. Evidence about “what works” in one setting may not transfer to another; randomized trials can answer narrow questions better than systemic ones; some important policies cannot be tested experimentally; and evidence is only one input into a decision that also involves values, law and politics. Mature practice treats evidence as informing policy rather than dictating it, which is why researchers also study how evidence is used or ignored. That strand overlaps with the concept of knowledge translation, the work of moving research findings into practice and decision-making.

Research methods in public policy

Public policy is methodologically pluralistic. Common approaches include:

• Causal inference with observational data — difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, instrumental variables, matching and synthetic-control methods, drawn heavily from econometrics. See, for example, the CASRAI pages on fuzzy regression discontinuity and directed acyclic graphs for confounder selection.
• Randomized controlled trials and field experiments — assigning households, schools, clinics or neighborhoods to a policy or a comparison condition.
• Microsimulation and economic modeling — projecting the budgetary and distributional effects of tax and benefit changes before they are enacted.
• Benefit-cost and cost-effectiveness analysis — monetizing or standardizing costs and outcomes to compare options.
• Qualitative and case-study methods — interviews, process tracing, document analysis and comparative cases, essential for implementation and agenda-setting questions.
• Survey research and administrative data analysis — linking tax, education, health or employment records to follow outcomes over time, subject to privacy and data-governance rules. General background appears in the guides to statistics and demography.
• Mixed methods and participatory approaches — combining numbers with the experience of the people a policy affects.

Because policy questions cut across fields, training emphasizes the ability to choose a method to fit a question rather than loyalty to a single tradition.

Major subfields and policy domains

Public policy research is usually organized by domain as much as by method:

• Health policy — insurance coverage, payment, quality, prevention and regulation. Related guides: health services research, health economics and public health.
• Education policy — school finance, accountability, teacher labor markets, higher-education access and student aid.
• Social and labor policy — income support, employment programs, family policy, immigration, housing and poverty.
• Economic, tax and fiscal policy — public finance, regulation, trade, and competition. See economics for the parent discipline.
• Environmental, energy and climate policy — pollution control, resource management, and the design of carbon and energy programs.
• Urban and regional policy — land use, transportation and local government, closely tied to urban planning.
• Technology and science policy — covered in its own section below.
• Criminal justice and public safety — policing, sentencing and corrections, an area where the relationship to criminology is close.
• International and comparative policy — how countries learn from, copy or resist one another’s approaches, and how international bodies set standards.

Science policy and research funders

Science policy deserves separate treatment because it is policy about research itself, and it is where public policy as a field touches everyone who works in a university, laboratory or grants office. It is conventionally divided into two parts: policy for science (how governments fund, organize, regulate and assess research: budgets, priorities, peer review, research integrity, data sharing, research security, immigration of scientists, intellectual-property rules) and science for policy (how scientific advice and evidence feed into decisions in health, environment, technology and other domains, through advisory committees, chief scientific advisers, academies and agency scientists).

Public funders are both subjects and users of policy research:

• Funders as policy instruments. A research funding agency is itself a policy: its mission, eligibility rules, review criteria and reporting requirements encode public choices about what research is worth supporting. Reforms such as requiring data management plans, public access to results or persistent identifiers are science policy decisions implemented through award terms. The distinction between basic and applied research is a classic policy category that shapes budgets and agency missions.
• Funders of policy research. In the United States, the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences has supported work on how science itself operates through its Science of Science program line (previously Science of Science and Innovation Policy, renamed Science of Science: Discovery, Communication and Impact in 2019); check the current NSF funding opportunities page for the program’s present status and solicitation. Federal mission agencies, such as those funding health, education and labor research, support evaluation and policy-relevant studies in their domains, and the Evidence Act has made evaluation a formal agency function. Private foundations also fund policy-relevant research in specific domains; for example, the William T. Grant Foundation and the Spencer Foundation support research on the use of research evidence and on education.
• Outside the US. National research councils and international bodies do similar work: the OECD collects and compares science, technology and innovation policy information across countries and maintains the Frascati Manual, the long-standing international guideline for measuring research and development activity, and the former Research Councils UK and the European Research Council illustrate different national and supranational funding models.

The relevant academic literature is sometimes called the science of science or research on research: empirical study of how funding mechanisms, peer review, team structure and incentives affect scientific output. Findings from this literature increasingly inform changes to review and funding practice.

A short history of the field

People have advised rulers for as long as there have been rulers, but the modern field is generally traced to the 20th century. In 1951 Daniel Lerner and Harold Lasswell edited The Policy Sciences, in which Lasswell called for an interdisciplinary, problem-oriented, contextual and explicitly value-aware approach to the study of policy. The expansion of government programs in the United States in the 1960s, including large social programs and the use of systems analysis in defense planning, created demand for analysts and for evaluations of whether programs worked. Graduate schools of public policy appeared in the late 1960s and 1970s, and professional organizations followed. Later decades brought the growth of benefit-cost analysis in regulation, the spread of randomized evaluation, the rise of administrative data and computational methods, and, since the 2010s, formal institutionalization of evidence use in government, as with the Evidence Act described above.

Training and career paths

Professional training is usually delivered through a master’s degree, often called the Master of Public Policy (MPP), Master of Public Administration (MPA) or Master of Public Affairs. Core curricula typically combine microeconomics, statistics and quantitative analysis, policy analysis, program evaluation, public management, and politics and institutions, followed by a specialization and an applied capstone or client project. In the United States, the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration (NASPAA) is the accrediting body for many MPA and MPP programs. Research careers typically run through a PhD in public policy, political science, economics, sociology or a related discipline, with dissertations built around one policy domain and one methodological toolkit.

Graduates work in universities and research institutes; legislative and executive branches at the federal, state and local levels; international organizations; think tanks and evaluation firms; nonprofits and foundations; and increasingly in the private sector in regulatory, data and strategy roles. Within universities, policy-trained staff also hold positions in research offices, institutional research and sponsored programs.

Journals and professional societies

The Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) was established in May 1979 at Duke University by representatives of 15 policy schools and research institutes, with a stated mission of improving public policy and management by fostering excellence in research, analysis and education. It publishes the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (JPAM), which first appeared in 1981, and holds an annual fall research conference; APPAM describes its membership as roughly 4,600 individuals and about 100 institutional members, including graduate and undergraduate policy programs, research organizations and think tanks. Other well-established outlets include Policy Sciences, the Policy Studies Journal, the Journal of Public Policy, Science and Public Policy and Research Policy (the last two focused on science, technology and innovation policy), and evaluation journals tied to the American Evaluation Association and similar bodies. As elsewhere, check each journal’s current scope and indexing before submitting.

Why public policy matters to research administration

Research administrators work at the point where public policy becomes a set of rules on a specific award. Federal cost principles, data-sharing expectations, public-access requirements, research-security and foreign-influence provisions, human-subjects protections, conflict-of-interest rules and open-science mandates are all policies with identifiable origins, rationales and revision cycles. Understanding the policy process helps an office anticipate change: a requirement that appears in a legislative report or an advisory-committee recommendation often reaches award terms years later, and comment periods and agency learning agendas are the places where institutions can contribute. It also helps interpret why requirements differ across agencies and countries, and why guidance gets revised or paused when administrations, budgets or priorities change.

For researchers, the same understanding clarifies how to make findings useful to decision-makers: identifying who has the authority to act, framing results as options and trade-offs, and recognizing that timing and institutions matter as much as the quality of the evidence. For institutions, it supports building the capacity, such as data infrastructure, evaluation expertise and partnerships with government agencies, that policy-relevant research requires. For a view of how this field sits among its neighbors, see the overview of the branches of science and the guides to political science and sociology.

Frequently asked questions

What is public policy in simple terms?

Public policy is the set of laws, regulations, programs and funding decisions that governments adopt to address public problems. As a research field, it studies how those decisions are made, carried out and evaluated.

What is the difference between public policy and political science?

Political science is a discipline that explains political behavior and institutions. Public policy is an applied, interdisciplinary field that draws on political science, economics, statistics and other disciplines to analyze and evaluate specific decisions. The two overlap heavily, and many scholars belong to both.

What is policy analysis?

Policy analysis is the applied practice of defining a problem, comparing alternatives against explicit criteria, projecting their consequences, and recommending or framing a choice for a decision-maker.

What is evidence-based policy?

It is the practice of using systematic research, such as program evaluations, experiments and data analysis, to inform policy decisions. It does not mean evidence alone decides; values, law, cost and politics also shape outcomes.

What is the policy cycle?

A teaching framework that divides policymaking into stages, commonly agenda setting, formulation, adoption, implementation and evaluation. It is a simplification; real processes overlap and loop back.

What is science policy?

Science policy covers both policy for science (funding, priorities, peer review, integrity and data rules for research) and science for policy (the use of scientific advice and evidence in government decisions).

What does an MPP prepare you to do?

A Master of Public Policy trains students in economics, statistics, policy analysis, evaluation and public management, preparing them for analytic and management roles in government, nonprofits, research organizations and the private sector.

How is public policy research funded?

Through a mix of federal research agencies, mission agencies that commission evaluations, private foundations, and university and institutional funds. The specific programs change over time, so applicants should verify current solicitations with each funder.

Related CASRAI guides

See also the guides to economics, political science, sociology, health services research and statistics, and the comparison of basic and applied research.