A Theoretical Debate and Strategy to Link Structure and Agency in Policy Process Studies: A Network Perspective

Questions of policy formation/implementation are often translated into the language of power, and the policy process is undoubtedly a political issue rather than a technical issue. Studies of the policy process are used to apply either a structural or individual perspective to explain power distribution in policy formation/implementation and have also led to the methodological puzzle of what the real policy process is or what it is made up of. This paper attempts to review previous works on this subject and provide a suitable framework to link structural and individual perspectives in the study of state policy process. Traditional state policy process approaches such as Marxist theory, the Pluralist approach, the Elite approach and the Corporatism approach are discussed to demonstrate the methodological controversy of different analytical levels. In order to grasp a more comprehensive understanding of the policy process, the interests and interactions of the political actors, the institutional rules of game, the distribution of political resources, the power construct of choices, and political judgements should be considered in the research framework. It can be argued that the policy network approach (or network perspective) can be seen as an appropriate strategy to combine microscopic and macroscopic analysis of policy process.