Economic reasoning has thus far dominated the field of public policy analysis. This new introduction to the field posits that policy analysis should have both a broader interdisciplinary base--including criteria from such fields as political science, sociology, law, and philosophy, as well as economics--and also a broader audience in order to foster democratic debate.

To achieve these goals, MacRae and Whittington have organized their textbook around the construction of decision matrices using multiple criteria, exploring the uses of the decision matrix formulation more fully than...