Maria Tullia Galanti (University of Milan)

Maria Tullia Galanti is Associate Professor in Political Sciences at the University of Milan, where she teaches public policy and policy evaluation at the BA and MA level. She is editor of the Rivista Italiana di Politche Pubbliche and member of the editorial board of Policy and Politics. Her research interests are on the theories of the policy process and on the role of agency, with particular reference to policy entrepreneurship, policy leadership, policy advice and brokerage. She is currently principal investigator of a funded research project on the role of the experts in the localisation of the SDGs at the local level. She has published on the policy dynamics in the field of local public services, urban planning, labour and education policies. Her recent work is published in Policy Sciences, Policy and Society, International Review of Administrative Sciences.

 Course: Studying agency and structure in the policy process

In the policy sciences, the very essence of public policy is its processual nature. By viewing politics as a process, the researcher is able to observe how actors deal with problems of public concern, how decisions and choices affect the redistribution of resources in society, and ultimately the power in institutions.

While scholars as Lasswell concentrated on the moment of the decision, other founders in the discipline as Wildavsky and Lindblom discussed how each moment in the policy process can reshuffle the goals and the means of a policy, opening spaces for a variety of agents to promote change (or stability). Subsequently, sociologists and institutionalists emphasised the role of institutions in influencing decisions and constraining agency, while leaving room for gradual change triggered by structural conditions. Thus, attention to the processual nature of policy reveals that policy change takes on different faces and, most importantly, manifests itself as a dynamic interplay between structures (including formal rules and social norms) and agency (with purposive actors seeking to shape these rules and norms). This course will help students understand how theories of the policy process interpret policy change in light of the structure versus agency dilemma. What theoretical and methodological skills are needed to take the interplay between agency and structure seriously and to make sense of policy change in challenging times? How do different agents interpret these problems and match them with solutions? How do agents build coalitions to gain decision-making power within political institutions? The course will provide answers to these questions by introducing the main frameworks for studying the policy process, unpacking their theoretical and epistemological premises, and discussing how these frameworks address the dilemma between structure and agency. The lectures will provide an introduction to public policy and its main epistemologies; an understanding of policy decisions as developed by Dente (2011); an illustration of the main theoretical frameworks and related methodologies for the study of the policy process, such as Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (Baumgartner and Jones 1993), the Multiple Streams Approach (Kingdon 1984), the Advocacy Coalition Framework (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993), the Narrative Policy Framework (Jones et al. 2014); and a critical discussion of these theories in light of the Agency vs. Structure dilemma. The course will also offer the opportunity to discuss the research projects of the participants, also in light of their potential for publication in international journals and reviews.