The development of public policy analysis studies in Spain began in themid-1980s and especially in the 1990s, essentially in the academic sphere.In those early years of democracy, the institutional dynamics were stillvery much marked by an administrative structure that had emerged during theyears of political reform under Franco, which sought to combineadministrative effectiveness and efficiency with political authoritarianismand state hierarchy. Public administrations therefore focused their actionson the legal processes of decision-making, from a logic centred onprocedures and guarantees. Decision-making mechanisms combined informalmechanisms for consulting the main stakeholders with regulatory processeswithout any tradition of consultation, transparency, or accountability.

The interest in public policy analysis in Spain resulted from the rapidincrease in public spending by administrations, greater institutionalcomplexity, and the emergence of a public sphere of communication in whichpublic problems, measures taken by institutions, and the outcomes of allthis were debated, with the usual controversy between the differentpolitical actors. Giandomenico Majone said that public policy analysis ismore interested in producing evidence and arguments to be used in thepolitical and institutional debate than in turning its work into strictlyacademic material. It is therefore not surprising that, with a certain speedand in the midst of the process of ‘administrativemodernisation’, the interest in seeking instruments of analysis morefocused on the capacity for transformation of public action than on strictcompliance with the law, led in the 1990s to the appearance of texts,journals, and courses in universities and civil servant training centreslinked to the ‘policy analysis’ approach.

As we know, the way public authorities act is highly regulated. From theprocedure for taking the relevant decisions, to the procedures to befollowed to bring those decisions to a successful conclusion, or the statusof the personnel in their service or the means of recruitment, all theseaspects are regulated in some way or another. The institutional rules thathave accompanied the public authorities since the distant times of theliberal (re)founding of modern states were very much focused on scrupulouscompliance with legality, understood as a direct expression of the generalwill, within a context that placed public administrations in a clearsubsidiary role and in defence of the internal and external order that wouldenable the market and social interactions to function properly.