The Contributions of the neo- institutionalism to Public Policy Analysis

Abstract

With the crisis of sequential model, opened in the 1980s, there have been many theoretical approaches
to public policy analysis. Currently, three paradigms dominate the field of study: the rationalist, the
cognitive and the neo-institutionalist. The text presented here presents the conceptual and
methodological advances of neo-institutionalism, which analyse public policies as dependent
variables. We care about the way in which this thesis analysed the state's role in public policy. We
first ask how and why the neo-institutionalism is likely to be replaced by rational, dominant paradigm
through early 1980, to explain the importance of institutions in the political process. We analyse in
particular the latest contribution of rational choice theory to the analysis of public policies and to
what extent this approach distance of the rationalist paradigm to join the neo-institutionalist.