Kent Weaver (Georgetown University)

R. Kent Weaver is Professor of Public Policy and Government at Georgetown University. He has also been an affiliated faculty member of Stanford University’s Leadership Academy for Development (LAD) since 2014.  He teaches graduate courses on the Comparative Policy Process, Comparative Public Management and Promoting Behavior Change, as well as Executive Education classes on Strategic Management of Policy Reform, Public Policy & Private Sector Development, and Case Writing and Case Teaching for Public Policy.  Weaver's major fields of research interest are comparative political institutions, comparative social policy (with a particular focus on public pension programs), policy implementation, and multi-level governance.  He is the author and co-author of many books, including The Politics of Industrial Change, Do Institutions Matter?, Ending Welfare As We Know It, and Policy Feedbacks, and has published in political science and public policy journals including the Journal of Public Policy, Political Science Quarterly, Public Administration Review, and Governance. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University.

Course: Macro and Micro Perspectives on Policymaking

This course attempts to build participants’ skills in analyzing policymaking from two distinct but complementary perspectives. The “Macro Perspective” (also known as the “Structural Perspective”) focuses on broad structural causes of and constraints on policymaking. These influences include the level and timing of economic development, political culture and ideas, patterns of interest organization and interaction with government, feedback effects from past policy choices, and globalization. In addition, we examine political institutions as venues for and influences on policymaking. 

A second, “Micro Perspective” (also known as the “Agency Perspective”) on the policy process focuses on the interests and strategic choices that political and societal actors (party leaders, interest groups, heads of government departments, etc.) make in trying to achieve their political and policy objectives while responding to a variety of political and social constraints. We examine strategies such as issue framing, agenda setting, building coalitions among diverse societal interests, and building legislative governing coalitions in multi-party systems.