A Systematic Literature Review of the Relationships Between Policy Analysis and Information Technologies: Understanding and Integrating Multiple Conceptualizations

Part 3: Policy Modeling and Policy InformaticsInternational audienceResearchers and practitioners are increasingly aware of changes in the environment, broadly defined, that affect the policy process and the current capabilities for policy analysis. Examples of these changes are emergent information technologies, big and interconnected data, and the availability of computational power to perform analysis at a very disaggregate level. These and other forces have the potential to significantly change multiple stages of the policy process, from design to implementation and evaluation. The emergence of this phenomenon has led to the use of a variety of labels to define it. Potentially, a variety of labels might contribute to some conceptual confusion, but most importantly to concept stretching. This article aims to provide a conceptual space by identifying the attributes that compose the phenomenon. Based on a systematic literature review, this paper identifies the terms that have been used to refer to this phenomenon and analyzes their associated attributes. Based on Gerring & Barrosi’s Min-Max strategy of concept formation, we propose two sets of attributes to define the phenomenon