Theories of the Policy Process

by Christopher M. Weible

Herbert Simon (1957, 1977, 1983, 1985) developed the notion of bounded rationality to explain how human organizations, including those in business and government, operate. He distinguished between parallel and serial processing. Individuals devote conscious attention to one thing at a time, so decision making must be done in serial fashion, one thing after the other. Organizations are somewhat more flexible. Some decision structures are capable of handling many issues simultaneously, in parallel. Political systems, like humans, cannot simultaneously consider all the issues that face them at the highest level, so policy subsystems can be viewed as mechanisms that allow the political system to engage in parallel processing (Jones 1994).