In-Groups and Policy Networks: Flawed Explanatory Models
Keith Dowding (1995) made the case almost ten years ago that the policy network analysis model, then the dominant paradigm used in the study of the British policymaking process, was unlikely to result in any findings or results of substance. Indeed, Dowding (1995) believed that the end result of this approach to assessing and analyzing the policymaking process tends to generate redescription rather than any new information. Dowding (1995) put is this way:
Attempts to provide a 'meso-level' theory, to
connect networks with state autonomy approaches,
or to drive network analysis by introducing 'ideas'
in the form of 'epistemic communities' or 'advocacy
coalitions' will all fail to produce fundamental
theories of the policy process. They fail because the
driving force of explanation, the independent variables, are not network characteristic per se
but rather characteristics of components within the
In other words, Dowding (1995) takes the position that network analysis simply identifies the features, functions and components of networks as entities. Network analysis does not, in this view, identify how policy is achieved, developed, modified, or otherwise addressed. In this essay, the literature will be employed to demonstrate that Dowding's (1995) argument is valid and that the network metaphor has somewhat limited value as an explanatory model for determining how policy is created and structured by those formal and informal actors integral to the system.
Rhodes (1988) suggested that British origins of the network approach should be recognized despite the fact that the earliest discussion of the role played by policy communities took place in the context of American political science. However, it was the effort undertaken by British analysts to make sense of the British post-parliamentary state in the late 1970s by using network a...