Situating policy entrepreneurship in the policy sciences

Michael Barzelay and Evangelia Petridou

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This article argues that the policy entrepreneurship (PE) literature exemplifies and contributes to the new policy sciences, a development that seeks to recover Harold Lasswell’s vision of a contextualized, problem-oriented, multi-method discipline bridging basic and applied research. Using tools from the tradition of practical argumentation and formal debate, the article builds a prima facie case, tracing PE scholarship from collective action theory through Kingdon, Capano and colleagues, and Mintrom to show its emphasis on agency and context, and an extended case identifying two connected research practices: an empirical practice generating generalizable knowledge and a translational practice rendering it usable for practitioners.

Keywords: policy sciences; policy entrepreneurship; policy entrepreneurs; policy process research; translational research; research practice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-09-08
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Published in Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice, 8, September, 2026. ISSN: 1387-6988

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