The Ostrom Workshop and Its Contributions to a Second Generation Research Agenda in Policy Studies

Abstract

"A growing number of notable scholars are arguing recently that the policy studies literature has seen its 'salad days'. Political science in particular, Peters argue, has not made significant theoretical and empirical contributions to the policy studies literature in the 1980s. Peters attribute this decline to 'the dominance of methodological individualism and to a lesser extent with behavioralism' in the political science literature. He notes that policy scholars have been turned off by the '(seemingly) simple assumptions of rational choice models which are insufficient to capture the complex processes through which policies are formulated and then implemented.'"