A Guide to Writing a Capstone Public Policy Report

In my 10 plus years of teaching, I have found that students struggle with two major challenges in writing a quality capstone paper. First, they have difficulty creating a rigorous analytical framework. Too often, the papers tend to be more descriptive in nature, which means that the final policy recommendation may be flawed. This book attempts to fill that gap by discussing in detail the various components of the framework as well as their interdependence. Second, most public policy books are theoretical or conceptual, but it is difficult for students to make the transition from understanding the concepts to performing the actual quantification of the metrics so necessary to do the analysis. This book provides detailed instructions on how to do the quantification.

For the last 11 years, the author has been a professor of Public Policy at the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. Prior to this, he was the executive director of the National Governors Association (NGA) for 28 years. This bi-partisan organization represents the nation’s governors and state governments on domestic policy issues that come before the U.S. Congress. Prior to NGA, he worked for seven years at the non-partisan U.S. Congressional Budget Office, serving the last two years as the Deputy Director.He has written numerous professional articles and authored or co-authored four public policy books. The author received his master’s and Ph.D. degrees in economics from the University of Connecticut.