The Mixed Approach to Public Policy by Hogwood and Gunn

Every law, government scheme, or public regulation you encounter was once just a problem someone noticed. But how does that problem travel from a concerned citizen’s complaint to an actual policy on the books? The journey is rarely clean or purely logical. It involves data, politics, competing interests, and hard compromises. Political scientists Brian W. Hogwood and Lewis A. Gunn of the University of Strathclyde captured this messy reality brilliantly in their landmark 1984 work, Policy Analysis for the Real World. Their “mixed approach” to public policy remains one of the most cited and practically useful frameworks for understanding how governments make decisions – not in textbook ideal conditions, but in the real world where politics, data, and power collide.

What makes the approach “mixed”? 🔗

The term “mixed” is the key to understanding what Hogwood and Gunn were trying to do. Their framework integrates empirical analysis with the political landscape, rather than leaning entirely on one or the other. Most policy models tend to fall into one of two camps. A prescriptive model tells you how policy should be made – it is rational, ordered, and ideal. A descriptive model tells you how policy actually gets made – with constraints, compromises, and political noise. Hogwood and Gunn argued that you need both. Their model provides structured, rational stages while fully acknowledging that real-world political forces operate at every single one of those stages. The model does not pretend that government decisions emerge from pure logic. Nor does it dismiss analytical techniques as useless in the face of politics. It holds both in productive tension.

This dual quality also makes the model flexible in another important way: it can be used both to describe how policy is made and to prescribe how it should be made. A researcher can use it to map what actually happened in a policy decision. A practitioner can use it as a checklist for what steps should not be skipped. This dual applicability is rare in policy frameworks and is a major reason the model has endured for decades.

The nine-step policy process 🔗

Hogwood and Gunn’s framework is built around a nine-step model, where each stage plays a distinct role in the lifecycle of a policy. Together, these steps map the journey from recognizing a public problem to deciding what happens to a policy once it has run its course. Here is how each step works.

Step 1: Deciding to decide (agenda-setting) 🔗

Before any policy work begins, a problem has to be acknowledged as something the government should address. This is agenda-setting – and it is far more politically charged than it sounds. Thousands of issues exist at any given time, but only a few make it onto the official government agenda, with that selection shaped by public opinion, media coverage, and political interests. Who gets to define what counts as a “problem worth solving” is itself a political act.

Step 2: Deciding how to decide 🔗

Once an issue is on the agenda, the next question is procedural: how will the decision be made? Who will be involved? What process will be followed? Will there be public consultations, expert committees, or parliamentary debates? This step determines the governance structure for the decision itself – and those structural choices can significantly affect the outcome.

Step 3: Issue definition 🔗

Defining the problem clearly is more critical – and more contested – than it appears. Because problems are socially constructed, the way an issue is framed by different stakeholders can vary significantly, and that framing directly shapes what kinds of solutions get proposed. Is a housing shortage a failure of urban planning, a market failure, or a migration consequence? The answer depends on who is framing the problem – and different definitions lead to very different policies.

Step 4: Forecasting 🔗

Policy decisions have long-term consequences, so this step involves projecting future trends and estimating the likely impact of different choices. Forecasting uses technical tools – statistical modelling, trend analysis, scenario planning – to give policymakers a rational basis for anticipating what comes next. But as Hogwood and Gunn were careful to note, predicting policy success is inherently difficult, and unintended consequences are almost inevitable.

Step 5: Setting objectives and priorities 🔗

With a defined problem and some sense of the future, policymakers must now set clear goals. What exactly should the policy achieve, and in what order of priority? This is another step where politics and analysis meet head-on: objectives may be theoretically clear but can become blurred by organisational pressures, competing interests between departments, and the need to satisfy different political constituencies simultaneously.

Step 6: Options analysis 🔗

Here, different policy solutions are compared and evaluated. What are the available courses of action? What are the costs, benefits, and trade-offs of each? This step draws heavily on analytical techniques – cost-benefit analysis, comparative study, expert review – to produce an evidence base. However, relying solely on technical methods can produce policies that are analytically sound but politically unworkable, which is why options analysis must also factor in feasibility within the political context.

Step 7: Policy implementation, monitoring, and control 🔗

A policy decided upon is not a policy delivered. Implementation is its own complex challenge. Hogwood and Gunn acknowledged that perfect implementation almost never happens and that some degree of failure is nearly inevitable, because successful delivery requires clarity of goals, sufficient resources, strong coordination, and the absence of obstruction – conditions rarely all present at the same time. Monitoring during implementation is therefore essential to catch problems early and course-correct before they compound.

Step 8: Evaluation and review 🔗

Evaluation is the process of assessing whether the policy achieved what it set out to do, whether it was implemented correctly, and whether it produced the expected results. Crucially, evaluation is not a neutral, technical exercise. Policy evaluation can be just as political and divisive as any other stage, because different interest groups use evaluation findings to either extend the life of a policy or push for its modification or termination.

Step 9: Policy maintenance, succession, or termination 🔗

Based on evaluation findings, policymakers face three broad options: keep the policy as-is (maintenance), replace it with an updated version (succession), or end it entirely (termination). Policies are rarely maintained exactly as adopted, because change begins to occur almost as soon as implementation starts, driven by the inherent ambiguity of legislation and shifting political conditions. Outright termination is the rarest outcome; succession – modifying or replacing a policy – is far more common. Importantly, this final step feeds back into the first: the lessons of one policy cycle seed the agenda for the next.

Process-focused, not just technique-oriented 🔗

One of the most important – and often overlooked – insights in Hogwood and Gunn’s model is the distinction they draw between a process-focused approach and a purely technique-oriented one. A purely technical approach to policy analysis assumes that if you apply the right tools – the right data, the right model, the right forecast – you will arrive at the right answer. Hogwood and Gunn rejected this as an incomplete picture of how policy actually works.

In reality, data and analytical techniques do not operate in a political vacuum. Hogwood and Gunn noted that the dividing lines between various stages of the policy process are artificial, and policymakers are unlikely to perform them consciously or in strict logical order. Different stakeholders – lobby groups, civil society organisations, rival government departments, media outlets – all feed competing interpretations of data and competing definitions of success into the political arena. This is what Hogwood and Gunn referred to as the advocacy role of information: data is not just a neutral input; it is actively used by different actors to support their preferred policy positions.

Their model’s response to this reality is not to abandon analytical techniques, but to situate them correctly. Policy advocacy involves analysts pressing specific options within the policy process, either individually or in association with others such as pressure groups – and the model accounts for this role. Techniques like forecasting, cost-benefit analysis, and systematic review supplement the political process; they do not replace it. The model essentially argues: use the best analytical tools available at every stage, but never mistake the tool for the whole workshop. The decision will ultimately be made through political negotiation, and the analyst’s job is to make that negotiation as well-informed as possible.

Why this model still matters 🔗

Hogwood and Gunn’s Policy Analysis for the Real World was published in 1984, but its central argument has only grown more relevant. In an era of data-driven governance, algorithmic decision-making, and “evidence-based policy” as a political slogan, the temptation to treat technical analysis as the final word on policy questions is stronger than ever. Hogwood and Gunn’s framework is a corrective to that temptation. It insists that the political process is not a bug in the policy system – it is a feature. Democratic policymaking requires negotiation, representation of multiple perspectives, and responsiveness to shifting public values. No analytical model, however sophisticated, can substitute for that.

At the same time, their nine-step model serves as a practical discipline. The policy cycle approach is simple, applicable across political systems, and highlights the fluid, iterative nature of policymaking – where the evaluation of one policy feeds directly into the agenda-setting of the next. For students, journalists, and policy practitioners alike, it provides a structured lens through which to examine any government decision: not just what was decided, but how the decision travelled from a public problem to an official response, and what political forces shaped it along the way.

What do you think? When you read about a new government policy in the news, can you identify which of Hogwood and Gunn’s nine steps the coverage is actually focused on – and which steps are going unreported? And given that data is used as an advocacy tool by different political actors, how confident should citizens be that a policy labelled “evidence-based” is truly driven by evidence rather than by political interests dressed in analytical clothing?

References

1. https://archive.org/details/policyanalysisfo0000hogw
2. https://pubadmin.institute/public-policy-and-analysis/mixed-approach-policy-analysis
3. https://www.studocu.com/in/document/university-of-delhi/public-policy-and-administration-in-india/model-of-public-analysis/26657434
4. https://www.ukessays.com/essays/politics/concept-of-the-policy-cycle-politics-essay.php
5. https://paulcairney.wordpress.com/2013/11/11/policy-concepts-in-1000-words-the-policy-cycle-and-its-stages/
6. https://www.atlas101.ca/pm/concepts/hogwood-gunns-elements-for-successful-implementation/
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_policy
8. https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/welcome/plsc490/lesson05_14.html
9. https://eaesp.fgv.br/sites/eaesp.fgv.br/files/u68/chapter_01.pdf
10. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Policy-Analysis-For-The-Real-World-Hogwood-Gunn/a80f76349e449f9043f961d848d10f6f42f097b8
11. https://paulcairney.wordpress.com/tag/policy-cycle/