The process of creating public policy in the United States can vary widely from one program to the next, even within a single field. The process may be directed by the president in one case, guided by the norms of technical experts in a second, dominated by narrow interest groups in a third, or driven by populist sentiment in a fourth.

Some policies race through the process at breakneck speed, while others become stuck in a policy quagmire for years or even decades. Some emerge fully grown almost overnight, while others evolve in slow incremental stages. Some are shaped in the glare of public visibility, while others are crafted in the shadows of obscure subcommittees and bureaucratic agencies. Conventional treatments of the policy process have difficulty accommodating this variety…

Rather than a single route along which all policies progress, this study argues that the process of creating public policy in the U.S. today can be best understood as a set of four distinctive pathways of public policymaking, each of which draws upon different political resources, appeals to particular actors in the system, and elicits its own unique set of strategies and styles of coalition building. These alternative avenues include: the traditional pluralist pathway, the partisan pathway, an analytic pathway and a symbolic pathway.