STUDYING DECISIONS
1. Introduction
A very old British proverb says that “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”. So, the only way to test the
usefulness of a conceptual framework, aimed at representing all the significant elements of a complex
social phenomenon, is to use it to study what happens in the real world.
In our case, the representation of the policy decision as a phenomenon whose basic elements are the
actors, their resources and strategies, the content of the decision, the patterns of interaction and the
decisional context, is only useful if it allows to better understand (a lot better than other conceptual
frameworks) what happened in a specific case, or to predict what will happen in given decisional situation.
Do we have to stress the matter? The model is aimed at understanding decisions and it is good when it
explains a specific outcome – decisional success in the event of a non-incremental transformation of the
way a collective problem is dealt with – which, according to the incremental model discussed in the book, is
quite rare.
This of course does not mean that we can only study successful cases. However, as we often repeated,
there is not a theory able to predict decisional success in solving complex problems. Not only there is not
one best way to decide, but is more than likely that that there are different ways to achieve the same result
depending on the circumstances, or that there is none (for an example in which it was claimed the
decisional impossibility to make the necessary decisions, see Dente 1991).
Notwithstanding strategic or organizational consultants, who have to believe, and make their clients
believe, that all decisional problems do have a solution (that usually refers to the rational model of policy
making, see Scharpf 1997 p. 80) both scholars and practitioners of public policy know very well that this
isn’t always the case.
So, we have to study decisions if we want to learn something about what works, if we want to strengthen
some partial certainty on what are the elements that actually matter, to correlate the decisional patterns
and the general features of political systems in a specific context, and mostly, to be able to express an
informed judgment about the real feasibility of an innovative proposal.
After all, this is a very common activity. A great deal of academic studies (among which many doctoral
dissertations) and of official documents (green papers, white papers, position papers, etc.), start by
reconstructing a decisional process and draw consequences at various levels. In order to explain the main
features of a political system, to elaborate theories regarding the relations among policy actors or to
propose changes in the institutional mechanisms, very often the arguments used refer to real examples of
decisional processes. For example, the vast literature on policy change, that elaborated various contrasting
models to explain the characteristics of public policies' transformations, almost inevitably refers to specific
decisional sequences (see for example Stolfi 2010). The trouble is that good reconstructions are exceptions,
while a representation – often rough and second hand – of “how policy decisions are made” is always
implicit and often explicit in all the politicians, bureaucrats, interest groups and experts’ proposals to
transform the status quo.
The ambition of our analytical framework is to represent a universal “machine” to analyse policy decisions.
After more than fifty years of researches on decisional processes, it is time to extract a “lingua franca” that
is certainly essential to allow enrichments and improvements implicit in the process of building up
knowledge.
1
The heuristic value of the approach consists of the fact that it considers all the important elements in order
to explain the results of decisions, representing the set of “micro-foundations” of policy actions, at an
abstract level that lies between big theories (such as the systematic use of the game theory) and the
historical narratives.
Although the adoption of an analytical framework and of a very flexible model are necessary conditions for
the study of the decision-making process, they are not sufficient. We can make mistakes – actually it is very
easy to make mistakes – if the goals of the analysis are not clear and/or if the methods and techniques used
are not appropriate.
The aim of this chapter is to establish clear relations among the possible goals of decisional analysis in the
field of public policies studies, the possible methodological choices and the investigation techniques to be
used.
The common denominator of this chapter dedicated to the study of decisions is the fact that the analysis of
each decisional process (of the set of actions that lead to the choice between different alternatives) is
considered the minimum unit of observation, the analytical space around which the empirical research is
carried out and the only one in which the various elements acquire a meaning. However, the decisional
process is not always the unit of analysis since, as we will see, the decisional study can also be used to
investigate and compare decisional systems.
In the next paragraph we will discuss the use of the decisional analysis for explanatory purposes, where the
goal is to identify the causes of the results observed. We will review the three most common approaches,
i.e. case studies, comparing decisions and comparing decisional systems. For each of them will try to specify
when the strategy is useful, what methodological choices are necessary and the most appropriate
techniques of analysis. The final paragraph will deal with the use of the decisional analysis for predictive
purposes: that is, if and how it is possible to use the proposed analytical framework to evaluate the
feasibility of an innovative proposal and/or to create successful decisional strategies.
One last remark. This is not a textbook of social and political research methodology. For this reason, we will
only provide brief recommendations, referring to the specialised literature for more technical and
operational aspects.
2. Using the analysis for explanatory reasons
2.1 Decisional case study
Case study has always been one of the favourite approaches in political and social sciences and it is a
strategy that appears to be particularly appropriate in order to study policy decisions.
Most of the first scientific works that focussed on policy decisions are, in fact, case studies. The most
obvious example is Allison’s work (1971) considered a milestone since he proved how the same “story” –
the international crisis deriving from the USSR’s decision to place nuclear missiles in Cuba – can be seen in
different ways depending on the “conceptual lenses”, meaning on the models of analysis used. This is of
course an almost inimitable example, but it is not isolated: both Pressman and Wildavsky (1984) and
Bardach’s (1977) books that actually inaugurated the so-called implementation research were case studies.
However, being such a popular and universal research strategy, it has often been abused and criticized.
Undoubtedly, drawing general propositions (law like, to use the social sciences jargon) from the
reconstruction of one or only a few cases is always dangerous and it can often lead to wrong or partial
conclusions.
2
In order to avoid these risks we should define the specific characteristic of this research strategy, to explain
as clearly as possible what kind of questions we can ask ourselves in the investigation and draw the
necessary consequences regarding the choice of the empirical referent (the case to study).
Afterwards, we will have to ask more technical questions, regarding the type of sources to use the type of
data to collect the structure of research reports and so on. As we already said, a decisional process is
always the minimum observation unit (and often the unit of analysis) of the research, therefore it is useful
to introduce a general methodological framework (a template) that can be used as research protocol to
reconstruct the case. We will focus on this at the end of this chapter.
But let’s go in order. Robert K.Yin, who is probably the greatest authority in the field of case study research,
states that:
As a research strategy, the distinguishing characteristic of the case study is that it attempts to
examine (a) a contemporary phenomenon in its real context, especially when (b) the boundaries
between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident (Yin 1981)
Therefore, it is very different both from the experimental approach, as the latter assumes the full
separability of the phenomenon from the context, and from historical research, since it refers to past
events.
The importance of this approach for decisional analysis stems from the relation between the phenomenon
and its environment, since, as we have seen in many passages of this book, it is essentially impossible to
understand the policy decision, and in particular the non-incremental one, unless we consider the context it
was made in.
This interest grows all the more if we think about the type of research questions for which the case study
approach appears to be particularly appropriate. Literature tells us that they essentially refer to why and
how a specific phenomenon took place. These are the very questions we must ask ourselves in the analysis
of policy decisions.
The set of goals of a research using the decisional case study approach should include:
 to explain through which causal chain the result (decision or non decision) took place,
and/or
 to describe some specific features of the process that are crucial in determining the results and/or
particularly interesting for the development of the policy making theory.
This means that the existence of theories and hypotheses on the causes of decisional results (the why) or
on the elements influencing them (the how) must precede the empirical analysis and not follow it. Nothing
new under the sun, after all it is one of the most obvious postulates of social research and it can be
summed up as follows: the surest way to fail in research is not knowing what questions we want to answer.
The analytical framework introduced in the previous chapters represents the set of theoretical sentences
and hypotheses that we can test with a case study, or modify and enrich with an empirical analysis. Of
course, the study of a policy decision can also be needed to test the robustness of different medium-range
theories that try to represent different ways in which policy innovation is achieved (Stolfi 2010), but even in
this case a representation of real decisional processes is necessary to understand its development and
results.
So, the case study of a policy decision process cannot be simply the narration of what happened. In order to
be useful and meaningful it needs to be strongly and explicitly based on theory (theory driven) and it needs
to have outcomes at the same level.
3
But how to select the case to analyse? The literature (Yin 1994) says it has to be chosen in the same way
the object of an experiment is chosen: if it appears to be a challenge to existent theories. The analysis of
unique and rare events is, therefore, particularly important, while the representativeness of the policy
decision is significant only if we want to draw consequences at the decisional system level (see later). But,
as we already repeated, the success in making non incremental decisions is a rare event and this is a further
reason to consider the strategy of the case study one of the most appropriate for the phenomena we are
dealing with.
A countercheck of what we are stating is that many of the basic elements of the decisional analysis
emerged during empirical researches, especially of case studies. Just think how Lowi’s first intuition about
the importance of the content of the decision in determining decisional process outcomes and power
relations among actors, derived from a study of the political system in New York City.
The following box shows how it is possible to confirm the importance of an analytical element (the role
played by experts in policy making) through a case study and create a new and important concept
(“epistemic communities”) that can also be used and tested in other empirical researches.
SAVING THE MEDITERRANEAN
The Mediterranean Action Plan (Med Plan), developed under the umbrella of the United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP), is usually considered one of the most successful experiences in
international cooperation for the environment and it was a model for many other cases around the world.
There are two main reasons for its success: a substantive dimension, meaning that without the Plan, today
the Mediterranean would be a lot more polluted, and a process-related dimension, since although it
developed from 1972, it involved all 18 coastal states that were actually very different per political,
economic, ethnic and geographical reasons, generating harsh conflicts and local wars. Just think about the
presence of rich and poor countries, democratic regimes and dictatorships, capitalistic and collectivistic
economies (Yugoslavia, Albania), former colonial regimes and their ancient colonies (France and Algeria, for
instance), but let’s also consider the long hostility between Greece and Turkey and, most of all, the conflict
between Israel and the Arab countries. However, the Med Plan was born, it developed and was successful,
external conflicts had a limited importance and, even more important, there were no defections. Most
likely, it was successful because, besides the fact that formal interlocutors were governments and
diplomacy, the object of the agreement had a very technical nature, surrounded by uncertainty as regards
the consequences of the different actions. In this framework, experts (of different disciplines) had a
fundamental role and they formed an “epistemic community”, that is a professional group believing in the
same relations between cause and effect and sharing common values, a common language and a relational
network in which the results of the research were exchanged and discussed. The existence (and the
development during the process) of this community is the most reasonable explanation for the success of
the Med Plan.
(taken from Haas 1990)
Clearly, this does not mean that it is not possible to study “normal” cases, but the representativeness of the
phenomenon not only is not a requirement of the research strategy based on the case study, but often is
not able to exploit its main added value: the fact that generalizations refer to theory and not to a supposed
population of similar cases.
4
What counts is that the reconstruction of the decisional process is methodologically correct, not so much in
order to guarantee the replicability of the analysis itself (quite difficult since the analyst’s intervention
probably modified the actors’ perceptions and therefore a new study would have partially different results)
but to ensure that the main aspects of the policy process are taken into consideration and therefore
increase the internal validity of the conclusions.
An anecdote will show the importance of using an appropriate research protocol. During an international
seminar, a case study on the importance of the connections between the institutional dimension of politics
and grass roots mobilisation was presented. The object was a comparison between two cases, both
regarding the decision to shut down shipyards in two English locations. The analysis explained how some
features of union mobilisation, and in particular the ability to involve the community and local institutions,
had important consequences since its presence in one of the two locations could explain the ability to force
the Government to abandon the idea of shutting it down, while a lack of involvement made it easier to
defeat union mobilisation in the other case. With great intellectual honesty, at the end of his presentation
the researcher informed everyone that once the research was concluded, it was discovered that the Prime
Minister had received a letter from the Admiralty stating the strategic need for the military fleet to use the
shipyard that had not been closed, since it was the most accessible from the existent military bases.
In analytical terms, we can say that the analysis of the decisional process, centred on the social answer to
the proposal to shut down the shipyards, was not able to identify a key actor, the Admiralty, essential in
order to understand the results of the process. Hence the need to define a research protocol able to
guarantee that similar errors do not happen. In the appendix of this chapter there are guidelines, tested in
the reconstruction of many decisional cases that contain a series of suggestions to minimize the risk of
wrong interpretations of what happened.
2.2. Decisional case study “collections”
The case study approach is not the only possible application of decisional analysis. In fact, it is quite
common to use the aggregation and comparison of different cases to draw consequences (and verify
hypotheses), as regards policy making process characteristics that appear to be particularly interesting for
the student of public policy. And obviously, the possibility of basing the conclusions on various sources
increases their persuasiveness and their external validity, and therefore the potential general nature of
implicit or explicit theories.
The most classic study, or better said, the first real attempt to systematically use the decisional analysis, is
the work carried out in New Haven by Robert Dahl and explained in the book Who Governs? Democracy
and Power in an American City, published in 1961. The goal of the study was to document the rise of
pluralism and polyarchy in the American political system at a local level, contrasting the conclusions drawn
by Lynd and Lynd (1929) and Hunter’s (1953) studies that gave an oligarchic representation of the
distribution of political power in American cities. To do this, Dahl and his collaborators reconstructed a
large number of decisions in various fields (urban planning, public education, choice of candidates for the
elections, modification of the Municipality Charter) in order to identify the distribution of the influence on
the final choice between different alternatives. Even if Dahl was certainly not a public policy analyst, it is
worth emphasizing how the adoption of the decisional analysis method gained legitimacy within classic
political science.
A milestone in the study of decisions is Peter Hall’s Great Planning Disasters (1980). By using a good deal of
the theories and methods described in the previous chapters, the author explicitly tackles the problem of
5
planning – that is, deciding on future decisions – and he does this with the analysis of seven different cases
(from the Sydney Opera House to the Concorde, from London’s third airport to California university
campuses) and by focussing on the behaviour of different actors.
If Dahl’s methodology was extremely complex and somewhat less relevant for the purpose of this book (to
explain decisional success in non incremental transformations), Hall’s work, instead, is very important. It
introduces an investigation strategy, the case study collection, that will be widely used later on to (a)
highlight specific aspects of policy decisions and especially to (b) criticise some theories about the
relationship between general features of the political/institutional system (polity), the dynamics of
electoral and power balance among political parties (politics) and public policy transformations (policy)
that, even being widely used by experts, do not seem to describe and explain what happens in real life.
This is not the place for a complete review of the literature, that would overlap comparative policy analysis,
but a few examples will be enough (deliberately chosen among the most similar studies to the
theory/methodology of this volume) to show the flexibility of a research strategy as the collection of case
studies about policy decisions.
Starting from the first possible goal – to highlight specific aspects of policy decisions – we can for example
quote Angela Liberatore’s work (1999) that analyses the answers to the Chernobyl disaster in Italy, France
and Federal Republic of Germany, highlighting, for example, how the level of institutional fragmentation –
therefore the different importance that the central government and Regions/Lander had in policy decisions
– at least partially explains the different decisional results, not in an obvious way. The more a system was
fragmented, the more radical were the decisions made.
The field of urban and territorial planning (to which many of the case studies by Peter Hall belong) has
always been a fruitful application field for decisional analysis. Often, the reconstruction of several decisions
is able to show the progressive transformation of the field itself, e.g. to explain how the comprehensive
territorial plan tends to disappear, leaving room to specific interventions, with a more general value (the
so-called urban projects), and how this change is, at the same time, cause and effect of the change of urban
policy actors (see Dente et al, 1990, Morisi and Passigli, 1994, Bolocan et al 1996, Pinson 2009).
Or again, the availability of a relatively high number of cases, all referring to policy making in a specific
decisional context and over a long enough time span, allows the reconstruction of the transformation and
highlight elements that would risk being lost in a synoptic reconstruction. Therefore, for instance, studies
and researches on innovative decisions in the metropolitan area of Milan allowed to verify some
hypotheses about the rise of multi-level governance, i.e. the fact that the important actors were situated at
different territorial levels, while the horizontal integration (cooperation among subjects at the same level)
was progressively weakened (Dente 2005).
But with this last example we moved to the second utility previously mentioned, the ability of the collection
of case studies to question some policy making models that dominate in the doctrine, but that are not fully
convincing. The reconstruction of the policy style (Richardson 1982) through a comparative analysis of the
processes used to decide and implement public policies, is useful to verify if and to what extent some
models proposed by literature (party government, neo-corporatism, technocracy, and so on) are actually
useful to give synthetic and persuasive descriptions of the features of a national political system. In other
words, we can use public policy analysis and, in particular, decisional analysis to verify some concepts
elaborated within comparative politics, the dominant approach for political science until recent times.
These works have very different characteristics, dimensions and interests. The series Policy and Politics in
Industrial States directed by Ashford, Katzenstein and Pempel between 1980 and 1991 produced 7 country
studies (Great Britain, Japan, France, Sweden, Germany, USA and Canada) based on a set of homogeneous
6
policies and a simplified analytical scheme (marked by context analysis, agenda, process and consequences
of each policy). Subirats and Gomà’s work (Gomà, Subirats 1998) highlighted the transition from Francoism
to the full modernization of the Spanish political system, relating the deep change of the content of public
policies (in a little more that 20 years, between 1973 and 1996, the ratio between public expenditure and
gross domestic product went from 22% to 50% closing the gap with the rest of Western Europe) with the
changes in the political system. In Deciding Factors in British Politics, Greenaway, Smith and Street (1992)
question the same possibility of reconstructing a single interpretation or theory able to take reality into
account and they conclude that the dominating image of Great Britain as the archetype of the
parliamentary system is deeply misleading, since when we try to explain public policies in many areas, the
role of the Parliament almost never emerges.
In the following Box we shift the attention to the Italian case, where the cleavage represented by the birth
of the so-called “second republic” offers a particularly fruitful observation field.
PUBLIC POLICIES IN ITALY
The so-called Italian first republic was usually described as a typical case of party government, a system
where all dimensions of political life – and in particular the selection of the ruling class and the ability to
control the decisional process of public policies – were directly or indirectly controlled by political parties.
A study (Dente 1990) on Italian public policies was organized to question this paradigm, which included the
analysis of 17 different policies, made by sector experts, only one third of which were political scientists.
The chapters followed a similar framework in order to highlight the content of the policies and, especially,
their main actors. The final result was a picture in which some current considerations were confirmed, like
the weakness in policy making processes of permanent bureaucracies with very few exceptions, (the Banca
d'Italia and to a lesser degree the military and the diplomatic corps). On the contrary, the hypothesis of a
party government was seriously questioned since not only was it unlikely for policy decisions to see strong
conflicts between political parties, but also and mainly the policy initiative of political parties was very
limited. From the analysis two categories of key actors emerged: organized interests and experts, both able
to influence the most important policy decisions and in the first case, even able to exercise veto powers.
The book, which appeared soon before the great 1992/94 political crisis, did not immediately create a
particular debate. Some political scientists, ignored its conclusions, while others re-affirmed the
dominance of “party government” in Italy (with the immediate consequence that without an institutional
transformation, especially of the electoral law, it would have been impossible to improve the policy making
process): only some observers acutely perceived, in the middle of the crisis, how the “policy irrelevance” of
political parties was actually an aggravating circumstance, since they only occupied positions of power
without making concrete and precise proposals (Cavazza 1993).
A debate later emerged (Cotta-Isernia 1996) with the aim to find an explanation to the sudden
disappearance of many political parties of the first republic, and in particular those that dominated
government coalitions for most of the previous 40 years. But the transformation of the Italian political
system, and in particular the birth of a strong bipolarism, made the 1990 analysis obsolete and it was not
repeated for the great reform cycle of the 1990s nor for the start of the new millennium.
Concluding this brief examination of the use of case study collections, we can confirm that it is a
particularly fruitful and flexible research strategy, able to give answers to many and different research
7
questions, both at the micro and macro level. Clearly, also in this case the internal value of the conclusions
depends on the fact that research protocols are methodologically correct and used in an appropriate way:
the template presented at the end of this chapter is therefore important, since it also guarantees that each
decisional process has been analysed in a homogeneous way.
A different problem is the selection of the phenomena to analyse. As we have already seen,
representativeness is not a necessary condition in the study of the single case: the analysis of unique and
rare decisions is frequent, and often more useful, compared to the analysis of typical cases. As regards case
collections, however, the existence of similarities among the units of analysis seems to be a necessary
condition if we want to draw general conclusions. It is a matter of giving reasonable descriptions of the
mechanisms through which some results were determined, in order to generate hypotheses on what were
the factors – regarding the process – that determined them and/or discuss models and representations
that are common in literature. Therefore, the external validity of the conclusions is strengthened by the
fact that the cases analysed are not (too) heterogeneous, in order to avoid criticisms regarding the research
design, that take attention away from the fact that this strategy, like in the previous case, aims at
generalizations at the level of the theoretical framework and not at the level of the extension of
conclusions to a specific population. Therefore, even the high number of cases is an element to consider:
not because 15 case studies can be a representative sample while 4 cannot, but in order to strengthen the
persuasiveness of conclusions and to avoid the debate from focussing on the fact that there is not enough
empirical evidence.
2.3 Comparing decisional case studies
Things change quite deeply if decisional analysis wants to use the comparative method.
Both in the single case study as well as in case study collections, the goal is to highlight one or more
theoretical propositions that appear persuasive at an argumentative level and whose validity is
strengthened by the empirical evidence collected.
On the contrary, the use of the comparative method implies the research of regularities between the
presence of certain characteristics of the phenomenon (the independent variables) and some changes in
the real world (the dependent variable). These regularities are believed to be generalisable to a population
of similar cases. The idea is that through a comparative analysis of decisions it is possible to identify causal
connections among certain features of the decisional process (the presence of certain types of actors,
different density levels of the network, different concentrations of costs and benefits and so on) and the
ability to achieve certain results as regards some attributes of the decision (typically: its non-incremental
character). It is therefore necessary to have a high co-variation level among the two sets of variables in a
relatively high number of analysed cases. Therefore, if the methods to measure the dependent variable are
discrete (success/failure) the same must occur at the level of the independent variables (presence/absence
of the investigated feature), while if they are continuous (the innovative level of the decision) the same has
to happen for independent variables (for example, the density level of the decisional network).
This theoretical and methodological approach is very common in social and political sciences, where the
use of the experimental method is basically impossible. In fact, we find various examples of this research
strategy also in decisional studies.
8
PRODUCTIVE STRUCTURE AND FIGHT AGAINST AIR POLLUTION
Why was the fight against air pollution stronger and more effective in certain places than in others? M.A.
Crenson (1971) tried to answer this research question by comparing two places (East Chicago, Illinois and
Gary, Indiana) that had the same level of industrial pollution but reacted very differently. After a long
debate, East Chicago adopted an ad hoc legislation, while in Gary, air pollution never seemed to appear on
public decision makers’ agendas. Crenson believes the difference lies in the fact that East Chicago’s
production system was characterized by a plurality of small enterprises, while Gary was dominated by one
big company, a steel plant, responsible for most of the polluting emissions. The role of the US Steel at the
political and social level was so strong that its power was “outside the range of observable political
phenomena” (p.107). The hypothesis of a bi-univocal link between the absence of great polluters and the
birth of an environmental policy was confirmed with an extension of the analysis to fifty other American
cities.
Besides the conclusions it reached, Crenson’s study is important since it proves it is possible to carry out a
(sort of) analysis even when there is no decisional process, since not only a decision is not made, but the
policy issue is not even on the agenda.
However, the comparative analysis of decisions is undoubtedly particularly difficult, since we have to prove
the statistical validity of the comparison to affirm the correlation between the independent variables and
the dependent variable, between the process features with an explicative value and the result of the
process. Since in almost all cases the sample is rather small (this is the so-called small-N problem), this is
almost impossible and one can always say that the case studied were not representative and/or that the
correlation is spurious since there are other significant variables that the analyst did not consider.
The main problem in research design is the selection of the cases, of the decisions to analyse. The most
common and suggested solution is to choose cases that maximise the variance on the considered
independent variable (the factor that is believed to influence the result), making hypotheses that are as
precise as possible on the combination of this factor with other decisional process features.
The study reported in the following box is an example of how to treat a particularly complex research
question with a rather simple research strategy. By analysing only eight decisional processes in four
different European countries the authors wanted to investigate the conditions under which the
decentralization of powers and competences as regards environmental policies was able to generate an
effective protection.
SUBSIDIARITY PRINCIPLE AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION
The research, carried out in France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland had the goal to investigate the
consequences of the decentralization and/or federalization of powers on environmental policies. The
methodological decision was:
1. to keep constant the dependent variable, only investigating successful cases of environmental
protection;
2. to analyze both approaches to environmental protection, therefore proactive actions (creation of
natural reserves in particularly valuable wetlands), and reactive protection (mitigation of negative effects
on the natural environment in the event of road infrastructures);
9
3. to maximise the variance on the role of the actors, studying cases where the protection initiative
came from central authorities and cases in which environmental defence promoters were local
administrations.
Two case studies in two different countries were carried out for each of the four categories created by
crossing criteria 2 and 3, in order to minimize the risk of excessive interference of the general features of
the political system.
After this decision was made, hypotheses were formulated and were mainly based on the existent
literature: two hypotheses had to do directly with the relationship between central state and regional and
local bodies. The first hypothesis specified that the capacity of the main protection promoter to intervene
at all government levels should be associated to success in terms of effective environmental protection
(hypothesis of multilevel governance). The second hypothesis linked success to the presence of a subject
able to act as an intermediary between local interests and more global issues.
As we said, since there wasn’t variance on the dependent variable, because the cases analysed were always
successful, (although conflictual), the fact there was always a high degree of multilevel governance, and in
seven cases out of eight, the presence of a go-between, allowed to confirm the initial hypotheses on the
relation between decentralization and environmental protection.
We should note that other hypotheses were also partially confirmed or not confirmed at all as in the case
of the relation between the existence of the right of environmental associations to officially take part in the
decisional procedure and success of the policy.
(Larrue-Knoepfel 1998)
The research conducted by Corinne Larrue and Peter Knoepfel shows that the selection of cases to
investigate and the definition of a set of hypotheses to verify are absolutely essential if we want to carry
out a formal comparison among different decisional processes.
Even if this is not the place for a complete examination of scientific literature about comparison in small-N
cases, we must remember that there are other and more sophisticated methodologies that the analyst can
take into consideration. The most well-known is probably the so-called Qualitative Comparative Analysis
(QCA) proposed by Ragin (1987) that uses Boolean algebra to reach satisfactory conclusions in the
comparison of a limited number of cases.
2.4 Comparing decisional systems
In the previous paragraphs, the decisional process was the unit of observation – the analytical space around
which the empirical research is carried out and the only place in which the elements mean something – and
also the unit of analysis, namely the entity to which both research questions and conclusions refer.
The study of decisions, however, can also be useful to compare political systems. They can be
conceptualized as decisional systems, as the spaces where it is possible to find solutions to collective
problems, with the activation of interaction among the relevant actors. A political system, regardless of
how its boundaries are drawn, obviously goes beyond the public policies produced within it, because it also
deals with collective identities and the production and reproduction of values. However, public policies are
an essential element, so it is a plausible research goal to identify some important features of the political
system and/or the measurement of its performance through the reconstruction and the aggregation of
policy decisions.
10
If this is the goal of the research, decisional processes are unit of observation, but they are no longer the
unit of analysis, since research questions refer to the whole system.
We actually already implicitly analysed this type of research when talking about the collections of case
studies. They usually tried to draw indications and propose theoretical propositions, regarding the features
of the political system where the analysed decisional processes are.
These cases highlight the complexity of the comparative analysis, as proved by the fact that, the more
general the research questions and conclusions are, the more sophisticated the analysis of decisional
processes and accurate the ways to measure their features should be. The example is represented by
Dahl’s seminal book about who governs in New Haven, where a big appendix is dedicated to the
methodological and measurement issues.
However, the question becomes more complicated when it is used to compare different political systems,
and in particular to verify hypotheses on their performance, under any profile.
The following box describes the design used by a big team of researchers to measure and possibly explain
the different levels of innovation of four Italian cities, using a reconstruction of decisional processes as the
main source. The chosen theme, urban innovation as a factor for competitiveness, was perfect for the
application of the analytical framework presented in this volume, since the definition of innovation
corresponds to the choice of an action course that leads to the non-incremental transformation of the
status quo. The problems were more analytical and in particular they regard the measurement of the
dependent variable (innovation) and how to choose the independent variables.
GOVERNANCE AND URBAN INNOVATION
The research aimed at verifying the following hypotheses: is there a direct relation between the fact that a
city shows a high level of innovation in the solution of collective problems and the fact that the policy
making system shows a high level of governance, defined as the full inclusion of a wide variety of economic
and social actors in decisional processes?
The analytical problems were the following:
1. how to define and measure the level of innovation of a city
2. how to define and measure the level of governance of a city
3. how to design a research strategy that allows to test the hypothesis
The answer to the first issue was given as follows. A city is innovative (and more innovative than another) if
there are non-incremental transformations in a wide number of policy sectors and if they regard the ability
to put new issues on the agenda, the capacity to create new solutions to problems, the capacity to
experiment new processes able to produce solutions, and finally the capacity to communicate a new
internal and external image. A matrix containing the types of innovation (agenda, product, process and
communication) in the columns, and the intervention sectors of Italian cities in the rows was therefore
created. With a large number of interviews with privileged witnesses it was possible to map all the
innovation processes started or concluded in the 1993-2003 decade in the 4 cities investigated (namely
Florence, Milan, Naples and Turin). The number of the cells in the matrix filled with significant experiences
was used to score the level of innovation of the cities. We should add that the final ranking was highly
persuasive for all urban policy observers in Italy.
In order to answer the second question, the starting point was network analysis, on the basis of the
following governance definition: a situation where one or more public actors are able to steer dense and
complex decisional networks towards the solution of collective problems. Therefore the measurement of
11
governance consists of the complexity, density and centrality shown by decisional processes, using the
definitions given in chapter 2 of the book.
In order to answer the third question, the process was the following: for each city, 30 attempts at
innovation were chosen among the ones mapped in the previous phase, selecting the sample in order to
guarantee homogeneity among the different fields of intervention, the different types of innovation used,
and the ratio between success and failure processes. Each of the 120 processes was analysed to identify the
actors that played an important role, the role of promotion or of direction of the process that some had, as
well as their connections. On the basis of these data it was possible to reconstruct the complexity of the
decisional system at the city level (given by the complexity average of the 30 analysed processes), its
density (given by the simultaneous presence of the actors in the different processes) and the level of
centrality of the network (given by the proportion of cases in which local institutions had a directing role).
With a simple arithmetic operation, these three indexes were combined in a global governance index.
Comparing the ranking created on this last index with the innovation ranking, we found that the first
hypothesis was not falsified and that, unlike what is often stated in legal and managerial literature,
innovative capacity is not linked to the simplicity of decisional processes, but it tends to require the
involvement of a wide number of political and social actors, that interact with each other and not only with
the public authorities, even if it is very important to have a leadership able to implement an effective
management of the processes.
(Dente Bobbio Spada 2005, Dente Coletti 2011)
The study summarized in the previous box is simply an example of the possible use of the conceptual model
described in the book in order to answer research questions dealing with the policy making system and its
features. Actually, it is possible that a larger use of these conceptual tools to investigate such issues leads to
the transformation of some concepts and to new analytical modalities.
3. Using the analysis for predictive reasons: building strategies
If, as we were saying at the beginning of this chapter, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, inevitably
the main evidence of the quality of a conceptual framework aiming at explaining the possible elements that
influence the outcome of a decisional process lies in the ability to predict the outcomes of the process.
And, as we often repeated, because the explanation of each process is always somewhat contextual,
meaning it is influenced by the relation with the surrounding environment, this inevitably means being able
to design decisional strategies that maximise the innovator’s chances of making a non-incremental change
in the real world, namely to generate a new solution to a policy problem in a specific context.
The question that we have to ask ourselves regards the effective usefulness of the analytical tools identified
in order to explain the outcomes of a decisional process, also in order predict the outcomes of an ongoing
process.
Even with the warnings and the precautions that we will see, the answer is positive.
We have already introduced in the last pages of the book a protocol for the design of a decisional strategy,
trying to show the steps through which a policy entrepreneur should go in order to assess the political
feasibility of a specific policy innovation and design an appropriate strategy. The assumption is that the
proposed conceptual framework is both necessary and sufficient to answer the questions implicit in the
protocol itself. Its various steps have to be considered as sequential, even if at the end of each one it will be
12
necessary to go back to the previous one, to understand if the conclusions still appear satisfactory in the
light of the new acquisitions.
The two basic conditions necessary to start the analysis are:
1. the existence of a proposal, even in an embryonic stage (the lesser detailed it is, the better), and
2. the existence of a promoter whose characteristics are well known
The research question is if and how the policy decision the proposal refers to is feasible.
Some of the steps foreseen in this protocol need information that is probably not available yet. Therefore it
will be necessary to be particularly careful in acquiring it, in order to avoid that the research activity has the
undesired effect of modifying the decisional context, activating, for example, the early interest of some
actors.
The following box reports a quite interesting example of the creation of a successful strategy in a real world
case.
THE DALMINE POWER PLANT
Tenaris is a multinational company in the steel industry, a world leader in the pipe sector that is part of the
Techint group. It has 5 factories in Italy, where and at the time of the event, were employed about 4000
workers. The biggest factory that also gives the name to the Italian subsidiary, is Dalmine, that occupies
more or less one and a half million square metres in a highly urban area, in a town that developed after the
1906 industrialization and that, not by chance, takes its name from the plant. In 1996 the group bought the
Italian company after the privatization process in the steel industry.
One of the first strategic decisions of the new owners was to follow the liberalization process in the energy
sector, and create a new company, Dalmine Energie, specialized in energy trading (wholesale purchase of
natural gas and electric energy and resale to subjects operating on the free market, meaning industries
bigger than a certain size). Of course, since the steel sector is a high energy consumption industry, the
company and its biggest factory are among the main customers of the trading company.
This is the situation in which in 2001 the opportunity arose to build a thermoelectric power plant to lower
the industrial company’s supply costs and to increase income for the trading company, that could thus
count on its own production (this actually would never happen, since in 2006, when the plant was not yet
working, Dalmine Energie was sold to a multinational company).
A first analysis of the decisional process showed that Dalmine had various opportunities to make the
investment: the availability of an area within the factory, the possibility to connect to the energy network
without additional costs, the presence of the engineering skills needed for the design and construction of
the plant, the availability of natural gas for the power plant thanks to long term supply contracts, the
guarantee the production factory would absorb the energy produced (and the existence of an unsatisfied
demand rate in the Italian market). To this, we can add the important political influence of the group, at all
territorial levels (local, regional, national) also due to its role within entrepreneurial organizations.
This does not mean that there were no important obstacles to overcome. The main ones were the
following:
- the factory was in an already highly polluted area and the regional authorities put considerable
limits to the development of further environmental impact initiatives;
- in the same years, the energy liberalization process contributed to the generation of a great
number of new projects in the surrounding territory, even promoted by local governments, therefore
there was big competition to obtain the necessary authorizations;
13
- at the local level, a strong opposition was likely, since the memory of a harsh conflict on a similar
issue was very recent (the construction of a waste incinerator authorized by the Municipality of Dalmine)
that led to a political change, with the victory of the opposition at the following elections.
The creation of an appropriate decisional strategy had to exploit the opportunities on one side, and on the
other it had to overcome possible objections. After this brief analysis, the choice made was to intervene at
two levels: in the definition of the content of the decision (that is, the characteristics of the power plant
and of the other investments to make) and in the manipulation of resources (that is the construction of a
successful coalition especially at a local level, also with a series of communication and process management
initiatives).
Five main decisions were made.
The first decision was about the size of the plant, that was immediately defined under 300 MW of installed
power to keep the authorization process at a local level, where the group had most influence, and was later
set at 120 MW on the basis of a calculation of the maximum power absorbed by the factory in the peak
period, so to qualify the plant for self-consumption, thus overcoming the objections of the regional
environmental authorities. As regards the technology to use, ever since the beginning they actually chose a
combined-cycle gas turbine, being the most convenient technology from an economic point of view and the
most environmentally friendly.
The second decision regarded the economic and political opportunity to use the heat produced by the plant
for the remote heating of houses and some public services, like the swimming pool, in order to improve the
global environmental impact and increase economic income, partially compensating the higher costs
deriving from the relatively small size of the plant.
The third decision was to look for alliances at the local level, involving other companies that used energy
and that particularly influenced the local political system, thus weakening the competitors and the
Provincial Administration opposition, which pursued their own electric power plant project on the same
territory.
The fourth decision was to put the project in a global investment plan, that also included actions aiming at
decreasing the polluting emissions of the production factory (environmental compensations), and
interventions for the development of the technological centre along with the local university, in order to
“wrap up” the energy investment within a medium term action aimed at consolidating the presence of the
company on the territory. It is interesting to note that part of the possible environmental compensations
were not included in the authorization request, they were kept in reserve, like mitigation interventions to
be negotiated during the environmental impact evaluation.
The fifth and decisive decision, closely linked to the previous one, was to precede the start of the
authorization procedure with a semi-public presentation (upon invitation, but open to the press) by the
group’s CEO in February 2002, during which the plant project was included in the general goal of
guaranteeing the presence of the factory on the territory, with the guarantee of energy self-sufficiency and
as an essential part of a wider investment plan. The meeting involved all the relevant actors at a political
and social level and it produced important comments in the press. The message they were able to pass on
was the company’s ability to influence society (increasing their reputation of being powerful) and especially
the redefinition of the problem. Not only was the project connected to the economic interest of the
company (low cost energy) and was not part of a diversification process (as the fact that Dalmine Energie
was sold will prove), but it was also defined as the extension of the interest of the territory that guaranteed
the continuity of the heavy industry also because, in this specific case, the very collective identity of the city
of Dalmine was involved.
14
After this first public presentation, in the second half of 2002 the project and authorization process began
and ended in January 2004 with a positive environmental impact evaluation and with the definitive
authorization of the provincial administration in the following months. The construction site opened in June
2005 and the plant started working in 2007.
Some final considerations.
Our first consideration is that, despite the efforts, they could not fully overcome oppositions, since the
official position of Dalmine city council and of the surrounding municipalities remained negative, even if
there was no real local conflict and, later on, the political parties changed opinion on the issue. The process
management, which involved a great deal of public and semi-public events to introduce and discuss the
project, almost certainly contributed to avoid the radicalization of the positions.
The second consideration is that the Dalmine plant was the only project carried out among the many ones
that had been proposed in the area, that all failed or had very long authorization processes. On the
contrary, the authorization procedures of the plant concluded in a very short amount of time, for Italian
standards (about 18 months).
Finally, and going to prove the fact that sometimes fortune favours the brave, we cannot forget that after
the 15 productive interruptions that had occurred during the summer (due to a lack of electric energy), on
28th September 2003, because of a disruption on the international network, a huge black out hit a big
portion of Italy for more than 12 hours. This happened during the smelting process and if the workers
available at the time hadn’t immediately done something about it by going to the factory in the middle of
the night and emptying by hand the machinery of the liquid steel, the plant would have probably been
seriously damaged and the production would have been compromised. If a proof was needed of the need
to guarantee energy self-sufficiency in the plant, the September 2003 event certainly provided it even to
the most sceptical. But at the time, the formal process had already begun more than a year before and was
coming close to an end.
The case described is quite simple. The promoter was a private company, whose goals were very clear, with
almost full freedom in the choice of the strategies to use and no significant internal conflict. Moreover, the
decisional context had geographical and functional borders that were well defined, and there were various
similar processes that provided a sufficiently precise representation of the main dynamics to be expected.
There was also a great availability of resources and, in particular, a very strong connection with the
territory, that gave credibility to the statement of the promoter, that it was an investment destined to
guarantee the continuity of the industrial factory, and not a diversification in the sector of public utilities as
stated by some critics. Finally, and most of all, the strategy design took place before the opening of the
process, before the opposition to the initiative came out.
But, things get extremely difficult if the creation of the decisional strategy takes place when there is already
an open conflict. In this case, it is a matter of being able to change a situation where the relations among
actors are already deeply compromised and the mutual trust is at its lowest. In this case, even if it is worth
carrying out at least part of the analysis contained in the protocol previously introduced, it is probably
appropriate to consider the strategy, which is certainly risky, of an extreme simplification of the decisional
problem, for example favouring relations with only some actors. But it is obvious that without a careful
analysis of the conflict’s origins and features, it is impossible to define an action course that has real
chances of success.
We meet the same difficulties when the innovative proposals are so radical that there is nothing like them
in past experiences, at least for the great difficulty of foreseeing which actors will mobilize and what their
15
reactions will be. Moreover, in this case the promoter cannot simply assume the rest of the world will
understand the features and consequences of his proposal. The possibility of cognitive dissonances is as
high as the uncertainty of the problem.
On the contrary, deciding to adopt strategies that oppose to transformations is much easier; first of all
because the set of actors is well-known – we know who the promoters and their allies are – and secondly
because it is quite easy to increase the perception of uncertainty of the consequences, for example
highlighting minor aspects and/or mobilizing alternative experts, and so on. Typically, in cases of
environmental conflicts, the huge difficulty in overcoming objections that have no scientific basis is one of
the major causes of frustration for the promoters, and it often leads them to reactions that make the
conflict worse. For example, although it is absolutely clear for technicians, on the basis of mathematical
methods and even experiments, that some of the alternatives suggested for solution of the flooding of
Venice, were totally ineffective, they were repeatedly proposed, to the point that some of them were
actually promoted by the municipal Council, thus increasing the public opinion’s uncertainty all the more
and interfering with the possibility to make the necessary choices for a very long time.
Summing up, and consistently with what we said in the previous pages, the conceptual framework we
introduced is also useful to predict the outcomes of decisional processes and create strategies, since it
attracts the attention of analysts and innovators on the elements that can determine the success or the
failure of the proposal. This allows making informed judgements on the political feasibility of the proposal.
However, neither this framework nor others can be completely fool-proof. Besides any other consideration,
some of the events that will certainly have an impact on the outcomes have not taken place yet, and
sometimes it is totally impossible to calculate their probability. More in general, the complexity and the
uncertainty that characterize policy problems, and the inevitable resistances to non-incremental decision
making, cannot be overcome not even by the most careful analysis.
The art and craft of public policy analysis, that we often recalled, can certainly be improved by the
awareness of the key elements of the decisional process, but this does not make the innovator and
analyst’s work a mechanical activity, just like the availability of clinical exams does not turn doctors into
computers when formulating the diagnosis and prescribing the therapy.
REFERENCES
Allison G. 1971, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bew York, Harper and Collins
Bardach, E. 1977, The Implementation Game, MIT Press, Cambridge
Bolocan M., Borelli G., Moroni S., Pasqui G. 1996, Urbanistica e analisi delle politiche, Milano, Franco Angeli
Cavazza F.L. (ed) 1993, La riconquista dell'Italia: economia, istituzioni, politica, Milano, Longanesi
Cotta M. e Isernia. P (a cura di) 1996, Il gigante dai piedi d’argilla, Bologna, il Mulino
Crenson M.A. 1971, The Unpolitics of Air Pollution: A Study of Non-Decision Making in the Cities, Baltimore,
Johns Hopkins University Press
Dahl R.A. 1961, Who governs?: Democracy and Power in an American City, New Haven, Yale University
Press
Dente B. (ed) 1990, Le politiche pubbliche in Italia, Bologna, Il Mulino
Dente B. 1991, Politica, istituzioni e deficit pubblico, in Stato e mercato 33, pp. 339-370
Dente B. 2005, Governare l’innovazione, in M.Magatti et al, Milano, nodo della rete globale – Un itinerario
di analisi e proposte, Milano, Bruno Mondadori, pp. 313-335
Dente.B, Bobbio.L, Fareri.P., Morisi.M 1990, Metropoli per progetti, Bologna, Il Mulino
16
Dente.B, Bobbio.L, Spada A. 2005, Government or Governance of Urban Innovation? A Tale of Two Cities, in
DISP, vol 3, 162, pp.41-52
Dente B., Coletti P. 2011, Measuring Governance in Urban Innovation, in Local Government Studies, 37(01),
pp. 43 – 56
Gomà R., Subirats J. (eds) 1998, Politicas publicas en Espana – Contenidos, Redes de actores y niveles de
gobierno, Barcelona, Ariel
Greenaway J.R., Smith S., Street J. 1992, Deciding Factors in British Politics: A Case-studies Approach,
London, Routledge
Haas P.M. 1990, Saving the Mediterranean: The Politics of International Environmental Cooperation, New
York-Oxford, Columbia University Press
Hall P. 1982, Great Planning Disasters, Berkeley-Los Angeles, University of California Press
Hunter F. 1953, Community Power Structure: A Study of Decision Makers, Chapel Hill, University of North
Carolina Press
Larrue C., Knoepfel P. 1998, Environmental Protection, Subsidiarity Principle and Spatial Related Policies –
Final Report, Observatoire de l’Economie et des Institutions Locales – OEIL, Université Paris XII, mimeo
Liberatore A. 1991, The Management of Uncertainty: Learning from Chernobyl, Amsterdam, Gordon and
Breach Publishers
Lynd R.S., Lynd H.M 1929, Middletown, New York, Harcourt Brace
Morisi M., Passigli S. (a cura di) 1994, Amministrazioni e gruppi di interesse nella trasformazione urbana,
Bologna, il Mulino
Pinson G. 2009, Gouverner la ville par projet: urbanisme et gouvernance des villes européennes, Paris,
Presses de Sciences Po
Pressman J.L., Wildavsky A. 1973, Implementation , Berkeley-Los Angeles, University of California Press
Ragin C.C. 1989, The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies,
Berkeley-Los Angeles, University of California Press
Richardson J.J. 1982, Policy Styles in Western Europe, Winchester, George Allen & Unwin
Scharpf F.W. 1997, Games Real Actors Play: Actor-Centered Institutionalism In Policy Research, Boulder,
Westview Press
Stolfi A. 2010, Testing Structuralist and Interpretative Explanations of Policy Change: The Case of Italy's
Budget Reform, in Governance, vol. 23, 1, pp. 109–132
Yin R. K. 1981, the Case Study Crisis: Some Answers, in Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 26, pp. 58-65.
Yin, R. K. 1994 2nd ed., Case study research: Design and methods, Newbury Park, Sage
17
APPENDIX – GUIDELINES TO WRITE A CASE STUDY
The reconstruction of a decisional process should be divided in four main phases, to be developed
sequentially, the completion of the previous phase being a condition for the development of the following
one. Each phase is independent, since it uses different sources and techniques.
The four phases are:
1) creation of the decisional process chronology;
2) analysis of the actors involved;
3) analysis of the interactions and of the causal chain leading to the final results;
4) writing of the final report.
1. Creation of the chronology
The creation of the chronology basically consists in preparing the “history” of the decisional process. This
implies the identification of all the events that, according to the analyst, have somehow influenced the
development of the process, from the initial proposal to its conclusion.
This goal of this phase is to establish the boundaries of the case, and of the public policy we are dealing
with, along two main dimensions.
 The first dimension is historical, including the timeline, the beginning and ending dates of the story
and, as we will see, of the key passages influencing its development. This basically involves the
selection of the significant elements, therefore not only of actors’ intentional actions, but also of all
the other events that had (or could have had) consequences on the outcomes: elections, economic
crises, developments within other policy sectors, but also publications of research reports, creation
of new organizational subjects, and so on.
 The second dimension refers to the network of actors. The identification of events also
automatically implies the identification of the actors involved in the process. Therefore this phase,
together with the chronology, also produces a list of the actors, the essential input for the second
phase.
In general, the technique used to create the chronology is to go backwards starting from the outcome, the
event more easily known at the beginning of the research, and through the chain of events reach the
moment in which the policy problem to be solved emerged. At least at the beginning, it is very important to
adopt a comprehensive approach, in order to reduce the risk of missing significant aspects of the process:
there will always be time, during the subsequent phases, to discard the information not relevant.
It is important to remember that the chronology is an instrument used by the analyst for the development
of the following phases. Therefore it should not contain any interpretation, but only the raw facts, as
described by the source. This clearly does not mean we expect total objectivity: the analyst makes his own
interpretation by selecting the events both in this phase and later on.
Chronology can be treated as a sort of draft: it only contains a series of events, separated from each other
and identified by the date in which they occurred. It will be constantly integrated, if necessary, with further
information in the following phases, since we often identify important events only once the first phase has
ended. For this reason it is useful to keep track of each event, since we will need to go back to the source to
integrate information.
There are three types of sources used to create the chronology.
 First of all, written official and unofficial documents of the policy process. This obviously includes
all formal documents, but also minutes of the decisional bodies meetings, electoral programmes of
18
political parties, research reports, previous studies and so on. The collection of written documents,
as we already said, needs to be inclusive: the analyst is not only interested in the documents closely
linked to the decisional process, but also to all the ones that can be useful to understand each actor
better. The collection of documents is probably the first activity to be carried out, at least because
many official documents contain a summary of what previously happened, and are therefore useful
to create the chronology.
 The second particularly useful source in case of controversial decisions is the press review. Since
we are in complex processes about non-incremental transformations of the status quo, it is more
than likely that the public debate was reported by the media. It is an easily accessible source – and
even more nowadays, using the internet – that has many advantages among which the fact that it
often offers different points of view, or even different versions of the same event, enlarging the
scope of the analysis.
 The third source in the creation of the chronology are in-depth interviews with observers or
witnesses of the events that form the decisional process. The goal is the integration of the different
sources and the identification of the missing parts that the process. As a consequence, the
interview’s structure is very simple: it is about asking the informer to tell how the process
developed, possibly in a chronological order. In order to maximise the results, the analyst should be
familiar with the process before the interview, or at least with its basic coordinates, in order to
facilitate the interaction with the person interviewed. It is however necessary to avoid giving
directions and to let the informer say everything he knows and thinks is important, without being
tempted to use it as a confirmation of our own interpretations.
The selection of the possible informers has to be done using two fundamental criteria: first of all, the fact
that the identified persons have a good knowledge of the significant events and, secondly, the fact that
they should not have played any role in the process, meaning that they should not have been actors of the
process. One of the factors that can easily lead to interpretative errors is the fact that the analyst counted
on the actors’ interviews to reconstruct significant events. The interviews with the observers are needed,
on the contrary, to collect the information about the aspects that cannot be found in written documents.
From this point of view, there is a trade-off that we have to consider: the more the interviewed observer is
critical or enthusiastic about the process’ outcomes, the more likely he will gladly talk to the researcher,
but in these cases we must pay attention in separating data and information from explicit or implicit
judgements.
In almost all processes there is at least one key observer with a detailed knowledge of the event, and often
a collection of documents. It is sometimes a journalist who wanted to publish an interesting story,
sometimes a political activist that unsuccessfully tried to involve his organization, sometimes a public
officer working in another sector that followed the event in order to be sure it would not interfere with his
projects, sometimes a member of one of the a professional communities interested in the problem. The
search of key observers is one of researchers’ most important tasks.
2. Actors analysis
The second phase of the research starts exactly from the conclusion of the previous one, from the
identification of the list of actors involved in the decisional process, and it consists of writing a – brief –
monograph for each of them, or at least for the most significant ones.
19
This phase’s goals are to give a description, as clear as possible, of the behaviours of each actor and identify
the reasons that explain them. Therefore, it is first of all necessary to define the decisional problem from
each actor’s point of view and the possible redefinitions of the problem during the decisional process. This
will allow us to understand what is the stake for that actor, so how he perceived the expected costs and
benefits for each of the possible alternatives. This leads us to ask ourselves what are the – general and
specific – goals that he pursued during the process, what was his role, what were his available resources
and which ones he mobilised, what actors he interacted with and how. This is the phase where we have to
define all the actors’ characteristics as we examined them in chapter 2 of this book.
The main technique of this research phase is to use, whenever possible, direct, in-depth and semistructured interviews with the main actors of the decisional process. The absolute impossibility to carry out
these interviews usually prevents the possibility to carry out the research. Of course there are exceptions,
but before starting an analysis each researcher should control the accessibility of the main actors, in order
to avoid the risk of getting a refusal in an advanced phase of the analysis.
Having said that, the interview could be divided in four main parts, not necessarily to be carried out in
sequence.
The first part (the story) is a set of open questions to be asked to all the actors and that have to be general
enough, in order to allow very different answers. Typically, it is worth to start asking to describe the
development of the policy process, and to go on asking to describe the problem they wanted to solve, the
obstacles to a satisfactory solution and the elements that facilitated the final result.
The second part (the actor in the story) includes a set of questions referred to the single actor involved and
to his role in the process. Questions here refer to the actions carried out, to the positions assumed, to the
motivations that determined them and so on. The interviewer’s ability consists of bringing the actor to talk
about himself or herself, about his/her relations with the other participants, his/her thoughts, even selfcriticisms (mistakes made, missed opportunities, etc). It is important to ask the actors to critically rethink
what happened in the process: sometimes this makes it possible to grasp significant and unexpected
aspects, able to decisively contribute to the interpretation of the case.
The third part of the interview (the actor’s identikit) is about the subject interviewed, with no explicit
reference to the investigated process. It is necessary to fill in all the empty boxes of the monograph and in
particular – especially if it is an organizational actor – its structure and activities. This helps understand his
behaviour in the specific case within his general goals and to understand what resources he had available
and which ones he mobilised in the specific case.
The fourth and last part of the interview (the relationship with the other actors) can consist of one single
question: "Who do you think I could talk to in order to complete the case analysis?". This question has two
goals: first of all, it is a sort of insurance policy that during the analysis we did not miss other important
subjects. Secondly, mentions and omissions in the list of subjects to interview can contain important
information on the level of the actor’s involvement (the network’s perception) and his relations with the
other actors.
This last remark is needed to remember that the analyst, in the interview phase, already has a knowledge,
as complete as possible, about the event. The fact of asking substantive questions to the actors does not
mean to search for new information about the event (even if this will inevitably happen), but to use the
“selective memory” of the interviewees to better understand their goals, their reasons and their
perceptions. We should emphasize that the aim is the creation of the “monograph” able to answer the
above mentioned questions, not to find a single objective truth. On the contrary, what we are looking for is
20
exactly the opposite: different representations of the process, in order to identify all its different
dimensions, exploiting the different actors’ perceptions about the event and about their role within it.
A further warning, which is probably unnecessary. It is totally clear that it is not possible to ask an actor the
question: "What were your goals and your strategy?". There are direct questions that it is essential to
avoid, also because they could embarrass the person interviewed and often lead to ex-post rationalizations
that do not help the analyst at all in his interpretation. Therefore the answer to those essential questions
has to be gathered from the discussion of the general issues contained in the reconstruction of the story,
strategically using the second part of the interview to highlight these aspects.
Finally: the main source of the second part of the research is represented by the actors’ interviews. This
however does not mean that the written documents do not play any role in this phase, for two reasons.
First of all, because actors often possess documents that were not collected in the previous phase and the
interview is a good opportunity to ask for their availability. Secondly, because the use of some documents –
for example, public statements at a specific moment of the process – during the second part of the
interview is also needed (apart from verifying the accuracy of the media’s representation) to overcome a
possible “cognitive dissonance” of the actor, who risks to “remember” his behaviours in the light of the
following events and in particular of the global result of the process.
3. Analysis of the interaction and of the causal chain that leads to the final results
In the third part of the research, no new information is collected, but instead we analyse the chronology
and the monographs of the actors (that represent the intermediate products of the whole exercise) to
define a global interpretation of the analysed decisional process.
The goals are basically the following:
a) identifying the problem that has been tackled during the policy process from the analyst’s point of
view; this problem can change throughout the process and it is therefore necessary to show its
transformation from the beginning to the end of the process;
b) understanding the roles of the actors during the event; this means to define the relation of each
actor with the problem and with the other actors during the process;
c) analyzing the evolution of the patterns of interaction, especially in case of conflicts fully or partially
solved, we need to understand when and how the change in the relationship between the actors
occurred;
d) clarifying the factors able to explain the outcome with reference to all the elements of the
decisional process described in the previous chapters; especially in case of successful nonincremental decisions, it is necessary to verify if and how much this is due to the explicit or implicit
strategies pursued by the director or to strategic errors by the opposers, or if it was just by chance.
In order to reach these goals, an important preliminary operation is to divide the process into different
phases. This means to identify the time thresholds that represent real changes in the process. In other
words, the phase of the decisional process is the time segment that appears to be homogeneous from the
point of view of the treated problem and therefore of the content of the decision, of the set of actors that
intervene and their characteristics, including their relations and the resources they are able to mobilise, as
well as the dominant interaction patterns. The identification of the different phases is an essential step in
the development of the analysis: not only is needed to verify the completeness of the collected
information, but stimulates the analyst to ask himself or herself which are the reasons for the changes
from one phase to the next one, contributing to the creation of the global explanation.
21
It can be therefore useful to create a graphical representation, comparing the main process elements in
time. As a template, we can use the structure of the exercise contained in the next appendix, or we can just
use a chart like the one below.
PHASE 1
From...
To....
Definition
problem
of
the
of
the
PHASE 2
From...
To....
PHASE 3
From...
To....
List of actors
Structure
network
Interaction patterns
The interpretation activity is simplified by the division into phases, as well as by the identification of the
“plot” of the story we want to tell. In particular, on the basis of the sequence of phases, it is easier to point
out which elements are central to understand the process and which ones are marginal and can be
eliminated from the analysis. As historians have always known, periodization is an interpretative activity,
the heuristic value of which should not be underestimated.
In this part of the analysis, the researcher needs to reach a somewhat synthetic conclusion about the
factors explaining the outcomes (that, let’s remember, represent the starting point of the research). It can
be therefore useful to briefly go back to the oral sources used in the first two phases (witnesses and even
actors, in some circumstances) in order to give them a concise version of the conclusions reached and
verify their plausibility.
4. Writing the final report
The conclusion of the work is the narrative reconstruction of the event, mixing the collected empirical
evidence about the events and about the actors that participated. Clearly, style, length and structure
depend on the goal of the research and on the destination of the final report.
The only warning that is necessary to consider is that, when it comes to articles for scientific journals or
academic publications (master or doctoral thesis), we must distinguish the story we want to tell and that
has to contain its interpretation, from the discussion of the research implications at a theoretical level. The
theoretical analysis has to follow and, in many cases, precede (at least to justify the choice of the analysed
case) the actual narration, that should be understandable without using more or less sophisticated models.
But, as we already said, all depends on the type of research carried out and it is impossible to formulate
universally valid prescriptions.
22