This is an excellent textbook to prepare students in public policy programmes for professional roles in the "engine room" of the policy process. It is well-structured and presents the approaches and analytical methods of public-policy studies lucidly. The authors uniquely and most impressively achieve to integrate technical policy analysis with the perspective of empirical political science. They discuss the tools and limits of evidence-based policy analysis brilliantly and combine them with a sophisticated, but non-cynical, awareness of how policy choices are shaped by multi-actor politics, responding to the contingent salience of political scandals, crises, and windows of opportunity. The book effectively conveys the teachable skills for policy analysts with a realistic awareness of the importance and the limits of their role in the irreducible contingencies of political processes.
Fritz W. Scharpf, Emeritus Director, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies