This new text provides students with a broad survey of public policy theory and history, detailed in plain language. It focuses on distributive, redistributive, competitive regulatory, protective regulatory, and morality policies. It incorporates pluralists, elitists, state-centered, agenda-setting, problem definition, and social movement approaches into a model of policy regimes useful in explaining long-term policy stability and short bursts of policy change. The text covers ten substantive policy areas: social welfare, health care, civil rights, environmental protection, labor, competitive regulatory, fertility control, criminal justice, education, and economics, and provides extensive discussions about recent policy changes and contemporary policy debates.

Carter A. Wilson is a professor and director of the Master of Public Administration program in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at The University of Toledo. He earned his Ph.D. in political from Wayne State University in 1982. He has published several articles in scholarly journals including Administration and Society, the Journal of Public Policy, Urban Affairs Quarterly, the Urban Education Review and many others. He is the author of Racism from Slavery to Advanced Capitalism and a contributing author to Bryan Jones and Lynn Bachelor’s book, The Sustaining Hand.