⇒ Remember that all the actors in the policy process interact all the time, otherwise policy would not be advanced

⇒ A policy domain is the components of the political system organised around substantive issues. In other words, the policy domain is policy making focused on the largest issues with various competing vies, such as health care policy

• Within the policy domain are smaller subdomains, such as mental health policy would fall within health care policy, perhaps – but issues from one domain quite often blend into issues in another domain

⇒ Within the policy domain is the policy community

• A policy community is mainly a loose connection of civil servants, interest groups, academics, researchers, and consultants (the so-called hidden participants), who engage in working out alternatives to policy problems of a specific policy field.

⇒ The actors within the policy community often interact and form connections, such as can be seen with iron triangles

⇒ Iron Triangles are the closed, mutually supportive relationships that often prevail in the United States between the government agencies, the special interest lobbying organizations, and the legislative committees or subcommittees with jurisdiction over a particular functional area of government policy.

⇒ Baumgartner and Jones calls iron triangles “policy monopolies”

⇒ There are iron triangles to be found in agriculture and big water projects

⇒ Iron triangles often involves logrolling too

• Logrolling is a practice common in the U.S. Congress and in many other legislative assemblies in which two (or more) legislators agree for each to trade his vote on one bill he cares little about in exchange for the other's vote on a bill that is personally much more important to him.

⇒ Iron triangles usually focus on distributive policies - distributive policies provide considerable benefits for a few people and relatively small costs for many

⇒ Ripley and Franklin: “subgovernments are clusters of individuals that effectively make most of the routine decisions in a given substantive area of policy”

• In other words, subgovernments means a group of actors that work to direct and advance policy within a particular domain

⇒ Hugo Heclo coined the term ‘issue networks’ (or policy networks), which are business-led coalitions of leading companies that work together to harness their collective power to advance progress against specific issues they care deeply about.

• The term describes a more open policy-making system that contains more actors and relationships than the older iron triangle concept

⇒ An even broader way to think about how interests are organised is though the concept of policy regime

• A policy regime is a system of policies intended to achieve broad policy goals, such as homeland security.

⇒ Sometimes a group will be unable to influence a government institution directly, so they will find alternative routes to exert their influence

⇒ As, theoretically, the power of government comes from the consent of the people, many groups will try to appeal to the public at large

• This can be done though mail campaigns, the internet, and media coverage etc.
• MoveOn.org have used these methods quite successfully