Introduction

Policy research has developed several perspectives, with scholars influenced by international developments in the discipline as well as their own respective political environment. To cover the global view, it is common practice to trace back recent research to the founding fathers of the discipline, with their competing ontological, epistemological, normative and political views (Bandelow and Schubert, 2009; Schubert, 2002, 2009). National traditions can be classified within different types of global perspective, and they depend on national constellations that are often discussed at the beginning of national textbooks (see, for example, von Beyme, 2009). However, the notion of intellectual traditions does not mean that they are not hybrid and interacting, and consequently open to and often influenced by external ideas (Sager et al, 2012). There are also regional schools of the discipline beyond these global and national traditions. For example, a ‘European perspective’ on policy analysis has been developed in periodicals such as the Journal of European Public Policy, West European Politics and the Journal of Common Market Studies. In addition to national and European traditions, however, there are also clusters of regional traditions that have so far gained less attention from state-of-the-art reviews. This chapter aims to fill this gap by focusing on the peculiarities of policy analysis in the three German-speaking countries, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Policy analysis in these countries shares scientific and political traditions, and has established common journals such as German Policy Studies as well as regular joint conferences. There has been an extensive exchange of researchers between Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and the common language has contributed to the use of similar analytical frameworks and methods. Nonetheless, each of these countries has established a substantial uniqueness relating to their respective political and higher education environment, which leads to the question, in what way does policy analysis in these countries differ from the Anglo-Saxon models and, moreover, what are the similarities and differences of the three cases and how they can be explained?

This chapter starts by highlighting the shared traditions and peculiarities of policy analysis in the German-speaking countries of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. This is followed by a separate analysis of the institutional environment and specialties of policy analysis in each of the countries, in order to contribute to a general understanding of influences on national styles of policy analysis.