The literature on policy analysis practice suggests that its emerging ethos was progressive, critical, pragmatic, optimistic, and reformist. Never monolithic in its methods, policy analysis practice has evolved in response to the political and social realities that shape public policy agendas. Policy analysis has been fueled by intuition, argument, and ethical promptings, clearly associated with the world of political action, both normative and prescriptive, often identified with interests otherwise unrepresented. A Clash of Ideologies Lynn stresses that because policy analysis is an administrative technology with uniquely significant consequences for the direction of the state, controversies over its means and ends are inevitable. Moreover they are bound to be intense.
Policy analysis exists in a multi-dimensional Euclidian political space.
Indeed, to make their point, critics attempt to maximize the perceived distance of policy analysis. Thus it is often difficult to believe that supporters of policy analysis practice and their critics inhabit the same reality, much less to understand what they are arguing about. In recent years, scholars who identify themselves as post-positivists have emerged as the most strident critics of mainstream policy analysis. Their critique has its foundations in postmodernism theory, and various post-positive epistemologies. Lynn argues that the post-positivist animus toward unreconstructed policy analysis has two primary goals.