This new text provides students with a broad survey of public policy theory and history, detailed in plain language. It focuses on distributive, redistributive, competitive regulatory, protective regulatory, and morality policies. It incorporates pluralists, elitists, state-centered, agenda-setting, problem definition, and social movement approaches into a model of policy regimes useful in explaining long-term policy stability and short bursts of policy change. The text covers ten substantive policy areas: social welfare, health care, civil rights, environmental protection, labor, competitive regulatory, fertility control, criminal justice, education, and economics, and provides extensive discussions about recent policy changes and contemporary policy debates.