VALUE-CRITICAL POLICY ANALYSIS 303motivates those sympathies? What are your own core values about the public policy issue at
hand? Identifying and articulating these core values will be helpful when the analyst attempts to
develop and articulate a “balanced” and “complete” overview of the policy context, the primary
arguments of protagonists, and their core values. It will also be helpful when the analyst begins
his critical analysis of the protagonists’ core value positions, as it will put him on guard against
his own biases.^2 I will come back to this issue again near the end of the chapter.
Step One: Identifying the Issue and the Protagonists
Once the data-collection process has produced results, the first step in the analytical process is to
describe the policy issue in focus in the study and to identify the primary protagonists engaged in
the policy conflict. This sounds simple, but in fact it is often quite difficult because the terrain of
public policy conflict is inherently overlapping and contestable. The aim at this stage is to de-
scribe the basic contours of the policy issue and the protagonists engaged with it. For example,
what is the problem or situation that protagonists are arguing about? How do the competing
camps in the policy struggle identify themselves in relation to each other?
Typically it takes several iterations before this initial part of the process is settled enough for
further analysis. In the case of my language policy book, for example, I began with the under-
standing that the issue was a conflict over the appropriateness of bilingual education in the public
schools as a way of improving the schools’ effectiveness in educating children whose native
language is not English. As I studied bilingual education more closely, however, it became clear
that there were other, closely related conflicts that raised the same kinds of questions and gener-
ated political involvement from the same set of protagonists, even though the issues did not
always land on the agendas of the same policy makers. Although a study focusing only on the
bilingual education conflict would be quite legitimate, I decided that—given the underlying value
conflicts in this issue—it would be more useful to take a broader view. Accordingly, I broadened
my perspective to include other issues that had generated involvement from many of the same set
of protagonists that I found involved in the conflict over bilingual education (e.g., the Voting
Rights Act amendments requiring voter officials to provide ballots and other election materials in
languages other than English under certain circumstances, and “official English” policies making
English the sole “official language” of the United States or one of its sub-jurisdictions). In any
case, through much reading, discussion, thinking, and writing, I came to believe that the core
issue in this controversy is how the United States should respond—through public policy—to the
fact that an increasing number of the country’s people usually speak a language other than En-
glish. In short, I came to believe that this is really the core policy question mobilizing the same
protagonists in all three debates: bilingual education, non-English ballots and election materials,
and “English-only” official language policy.
What the policy analyst needs to do at this early stage, then, is to provide a description of the
core issue that drives protagonists to be at odds with each other over a particular policy or set of
interrelated policies. And arriving at such a description is a reiterative process because frequently
the analyst’s understanding of the issue deepens and broadens after moving further into the analy-
sis (i.e., the steps outlined below). When that happens it becomes useful to return to the descrip-
tion of the core policy issue, to rethink and rewrite how it might best be understood and described.
Intertwined with, and in dialectical relationship with, this process of describing the policy’s
core issue is another: identifying the main protagonists in the conflict. That is, value-critical
policy analysis presupposes a significant conflict of values between two or more camps that are
opposed to each other in relation to the policy issue. In doing this type of policy analysis, there-