e 1970s, increasing numbers of political scientists and public administrators have been concerned not only with the process of public administration, but with the content of what is being administrated (Henry, 1995, p. 292).
Some analysts suggest that policy is the output of government; that is, that while governments provide goods and services, they do so according to policies announced previously at some time. Thus a government's foreign policy is assumed to be the sum of actions taken in accordance with statements made by the executive previous to the actions. This view of policy results in the policy-making process being elusive, but may be a more realistic approach than those views which hold that policy making is carried out by politicians under the traditional model of administration or through some other idealized process which can be modeled. This approach to policy assumes that there is no one process which can explain how all policies are created, and that the process may well differ even among the same politicians and bureaucrats when operating in different circumstances. In this way, the process that the president uses to develop foreign policy may change as circumstances change (Shields, 1996, p. 397).
It is also possible to view public policy as a process. Analysis in this area tends to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, although it is possible to use various models to identify how implementation of a particular process might lead to particular policies in certain situations. In this view, public policy is viewed as an effort to apply political science to public affairs, and to examine how politics influences the development of specific government actions. This view is more concerned with the influences, such as lobbyists and special interest groups as well as bureaucrats and politicians, which can be brought to bear in public policy formation. When approached from this view, public policy can be bette...