Political Analysis

The ability to analyze political situations is of paramount importance to any of the diverse actors who have a stake in governance. Whether it be the head of a government agency who must make an important decision, or a lobbyist seeking to influence government agents and politicians, or a politician seeking reelection, or any other situation that is based on, affects, or is affected by politics, political stakeholders must be able to effectively analyze political situations in order to arrive at the most beneficial course of action and to protect their interests. In an ideal world, governance would be based solely on the technical details of the problem at hand or, in other words, governance would involve finding the best and most efficient solutions to public policy problems. In the real world, however, political power structures control the way that public policy decisions are made. It is for this reason that being able to analyze political situations is the key to any actor seeking to understand how government works.

Political analysis, in its most basic form, involves untangling the underlying political power structures in place around an event, a government, an agency, or an individual. There are a wide variety of intellectual tools and analytical methodologies that have arisen in an attempt to explain and predict the behaviors of political actors. This paper will explore the febrile field of political analysis. We will first examine the broad question of what,

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he sense of its resource allocation and productivity, is what makes up the policy sub-system in question (Ward, 68-69). The external stakeholders in the organization can vary widely. Some will be vehemently opposed to certain aspects of the organization in question (for example, chemical companies are not generally fond of the Environmental Protection Agency), while others may be boosters who support the organization's mission implicitly (for example, the Sierra Club and the Environmental Protection Agency). These external stakeholders may expend different amounts of their resources, or political capital, in order to influence the actions that occur and the decisions that are taken within the policy subsystem. The various stakeholders' effectiveness in affecting the ultimate decisions that are taken depend on a variety of factors, including their willingness to expend the sufficient amount of political capital in order to effect change, their skill level with regards to their ability to effectively manipulate the system or the bureaucracy, and their level of access to the decision makers within the organization (Ward, 69) As Figure 2 clearly shows, the external political actors include the wide array of stakeholding group

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