This final chapter is composed entirely of the results of my teaching activities, over the course of which my students carried out various empirical studies on public action resources in relation to freely selected, and therefore very wide-ranging, public policies with a view to analysing the relations of power between the policy actors. Between five and eight different federal or cantonal policies were analysed in the courses held over each year. Given the limited time available and the desirable comparability of the results, the proposed process necessitated a certain standardization of the empirical approach to facilitate the feasibility of the work. Obliged to choose between conceptual ‘purity’ and practical feasibility that would enable the students to experience the pleasure of discovering new issues, I opted for pragmatic guidance. This concerned the units of measurement used for qualifying the observed resources, a comparative model for the visualization of the actors’ resource portfolios and a simple method for identifying exchanges of resources. This chapter ends with a checklist to enable the explanatory role of the actor games to be identified in terms of public policy results.

Units of measurement and indicators

Table 17.1 presents the units of measurement adopted, on the basis of our practical experience, for each of the 10 resources, specified, if required, for each of the three actor groups. It also presents a sample of particular indicators that may, however, vary considerably in reality.

The utility of the units of measurement suggested here is intentionally generic. The indicators also enable the analysis of power relations between public policy actors for descriptive purposes, for example, for discussing the relevance of strategies for changing these power relations with a view to instigating administrative or political reforms in a particular political system.

Identification of the resource portfolios of public policy actors

It is imperative that both the policy analyst and those who hold strategic positions within the actor groups are aware of all of the resources at their own disposal and that of the two other groups. We refer to this as the portfolio of resources, for which an inventory may be carried out for a given moment in time using different tools.