Re-Visiting Meltsner: Policy Advice Systems and the Multi-Dimensional Nature of Professional Policy Analysis

Over thirty-years ago Meltsner (1976) observed in the case of the U.S. that analysts undertook a number of roles in the policy-making process, most of which did not involve neutral technical information processing. Contrary to the picture of carefully-recruited analysts trained in policy schools to undertake specific types of micro-economic-inspired policy analysis, investigators have continued to find little evidence of a predominance of ‘technicians’ employed in public policy bureaucracies. Page and Jenkins (2005) and Fleischer (2009) for example provided some empirical evidence that British and German policy-making typically features a group of ‘policy process generalists’ who rarely, if ever, deal with policy matters in the substantive areas in which they were trained and who had, in fact, very little training in formal policy analysis techniques such as cost-benefit analysis or risk assessment. However only very weak and partial, usually anecdotal, information exists on the situation found in most countries (Colebatch and Radin 2006) and taxonomies as a result remain thought-provoking but lacking empirical referents (see for example, Mayer, Bots and van Daalen 2004). This paper draws on a large-scale survey of provincial and territorial policy analysts in Canada to re-examine the duties and nature of professional policy analysts and analysis and reveals a complex and multi-sided set of practices which constitute contemporary policy work.