Methods for Applying Policy Feedback Theory
The goal of policy feedback research is to ask how policies can influence subsequent politics, and how that process ultimately affects future efforts at policy reform. This chapter considers how to conceptualize and design feedback studies, discusses the major empirical challenges facing policy feedback researchers, explores different methodological strategies employed by feedback scholars, and considers future directions for policy feedback inquiry. As scholars of policy feedback approach an expanding range of new and important inquiries, advancing knowledge in this arena will require continued and growing understanding of best practices with respect to research design and methods. A first-order task in this regard is to delineate the basic contours of theoretical conceptualization that form the bedrock of policy feedback scholarship. One major goal scholars of policy feedback sometimes have is to demonstrate the cause and effect relationship between attributes, implementation, or use of a public policy and a particular political outcome.
