Knill, Christoph and Jale Tosun. "Policy-making". In Comparative Politics, edited by Daniele Caramani. 335-348, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Knill, Christoph and Jale Tosun. "Policy-making". In Comparative Politics, edited by Daniele Caramani. 335-348, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

• Policies are traditionally divided into ideal types of policies: distributive policies, redistributive policies, regulatory policies, and constituent policies, which modify or create state institutions. This typology was created by Theordor Lowi in a 1964 article (336).
• Other alternative typologies have also been created. One proposed by James Wilson divides policies based on their cost and benefit allocations. Policies with broad costs and broad benefits are majoritarian; policies with concentrated costs and benefits are subject to interest groups; policies with concentrated costs and broad benefits are entrepreneurial, because they require political action to pass; and policies with broad costs and concentrated benefits are clientistic, for their likelihood to promote select interests at common expense (336).
• Political scientists have proposed a number of models for explaining the influence of politics on policy formation, five of the most popular models are explored below:
• The institutional model looks purely at how structural factors affect the policy-creation process, the actual nature of which remains a 'black box' (337),
• The rational model looks at legislators as rational actors responding to individual costs and benefits imposed by other actors, like interest groups, voters, and fellow legislators, responding to their own best interests (337). This model is often expressed in terms of game theory (338).
• The incremental model is based on rational choice assumptions of human behavior, but does not contain an assumption of perfect knowledge. Instead, it assumes that policy-makers depend on hearsay and international experience to come up with policy ideas, limiting and biasing their range of policy choices (338).
• The group model looks *shocker* at groups as the primary unit of analysis, with individual action being explained by the strength of various groups in which policy-makers are present (338).
• The elite model explains policy-making as an elite-driven process in which a small group of individuals influence policy via their personal opinions (338).
• Policy-making takes place under extreme limitations on time, resources, and knowledge, and occurs in response to previous policy decisions in a continuous process of response. Additionally, policy-making does not occur in a single area, but at the intersection of multiple levels and branches of government (338).
• Policy-making is often conceived of in terms of the policy cycle, consisting of agenda setting, policy formation, policy adoption, implementation, and evaluation (339).
• Countries frequently emulate or copy ideas and policy solutions from other countries (345).