Abstract
Policy-making and public policy in general are at the core of the major issues that political economy addresses. Market regulation, balance between private interests and common good, resource allocation, provision of goods and services by non-market and state-funded public bodies are indeed inseparable from the policy process and shaped through it. In addition to accounting for their outputs, political economy “opens the black box” of these processes by analysing the role of institutions, of interest groups and of ideologies, by identifying the factors that influence decision-making and by accounting for the technical aspects of implementation through policy instruments.
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Notes
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In Bourdieu’s framework, the notion of “agent” reflects this structural definition of social individuals, who “act” (as “actors” do), but also “are acted” by social structures determining their possible actions (Bourdieu 1977).
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Dubois, V. (2018). The Fields of Policy-Making. In: Cardinale, I., Scazzieri, R. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44254-3_2
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