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We call on policy scholars to take seriously the role of policies as governing instruments and to consider more fully the factors that shape their political impacts. We suggest the lens provided by regime perspectives is a useful way for advancing the understanding of these considerations. As a descriptive undertaking, the regime lens can be used to construct a conceptual map that considers the constellation of ideas, institutional arrangements, and interests that are involved in addressing policy problems. As an analytic lens, regime perspectives can be used to understand how and with what effect policies set in place feedback processes that shape policy legitimacy, coherence, and durability. Together, these provide new insights into policy implementation and the interplay of policy and politics in governing. Regime perspectives provide avenues for asking and answering the "big questions" about the quality of governing arrangements and the sustainability of policies that were important considerations for the development of the field of policy studies in the 1960s, but have since waned as foci for policy scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political processing of policy problems that span multiple policy areas is distinctive for American politics because the issues and their solutions crosscut the traditional bases for policymaking. We analyze the political processing of a dozen such problems. These include the thorny problems of the financial crisis, global climate change, health care, and immigration; the persistent problems of K-12 education, drug abuse, and food safety; and the looming problems associated with critical infrastructure, the obesity epidemic, ocean health, terrorism, and the national debt. Based on secondary accounts of the contours of these problems, we identify different patterns of policymaking that we label disintegrative, integrative, bureaucratic, and anemic policymaking. We discuss how the underlying political properties limit opportunities to fashion cohesive policies and the prospects for overcoming these limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars have proposed legislative behavior may be explained with a simple ideological dimension by which legislators economize demands on their attention by relying on party and ideological cues to make decisions. Research in this area culminated with the publication of Poole and Rosenthal's landmark analysis of congressional roll call voting, where they found just one dimension, political ideology, explained the vast majority of votes for most of U.S. history. Yet this work ignores one of the most important aspects of legislative activity: the content of the issues being considered. Given the importance of multidimensional issue structures for understanding legislative behavior, more attention needs to be paid to the dimensional structures of different policy domains. This research reconsiders the dimensionality of roll call votes in Congress in order to better understand decisionmaking and legislative behavior. Utilizing a new dataset on congressional roll call voting that documents congressional action across time and issues, we assess the dimensionality of roll call votes in nineteen distinct policy contexts. Every vote from 1946 through 2000 is coded based on its policy content according to the Policy Agendas Project's established guidelines. Using these data, we consider how dimensionality varies across different policy domains. This project introduces this new dataset, one of the most reliable of its kind, while revisiting a long-standing debate in political scienceâ??the dimensionality of legislative decision-making. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]