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The Study of Policy Development

Part of: JPH 30th Anniversary Most Cited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2009

Paul Pierson
Paul Pierson
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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What do we mean by the term “policy history”? 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.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 17 , Issue 1: Special Issue: New Directions in Policy History , January 2005 , pp. 34 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 2005

References

Notes

1. This essay presents an introduction to issues explored in much more depth in Pierson, Paul, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton, 2004)Google Scholar. I would like to thank Julian Zelizer for very helpful comments on an earlier draft.

2. McDonald, Terrance J., ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor, 1994)Google Scholar; Bates, Robert et al. , Analytic Narratives (Cambridge, 1998)Google Scholar.

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9. Huber and Stephens, Development and Crisis of the Welfare State, 32.

10. Ibid, 28–29, emphasis added.

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29. Hacker and Pierson, “Business Power and Social Policy.”

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34. Keyssar, Alexander, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York, 2000), 107–116Google Scholar

35. Ibid, 107.

36. Ibid.

37. John Myles and Paul Pierson, “The Comparative Political Economy of Pension Reform,” in Pierson, ed., New Politics of the Welfare State, 305–33.

38. Skrentny, John D., The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2003)Google Scholar; Mettler, “Feedback Effects of the G.I. Bill”; Hacker, The Divided Welfare State.