As Thatcher[2]: 391 notes, policy network approaches initially aimed to model specific forms of state-interest group relations, without giving exhaustive typologies.
[2] In contrast, issue networks – a concept established in literature about United States government - refer to a looser system, where a relatively large number of stakeholders are involved.
An important characteristic of issue network is that membership is constantly changing, interdependence is often asymmetric and – compared to policy communities – it is harder to identify dominant actors.
[3] New typological approaches appeared in the early 1990s and late 1980s with the aim of grouping policy networks into a system of mutually exclusive and commonly exhaustive categories.
[1] An approach developed from the literature on US pluralism, policy networks are often analyzed in order to identify the most important actors influencing governmental decision-making.
[6] A third direction of descriptive scholarship is to describe general patterns of policy-making – the formal institutions of power-sharing between government, independent state bodies and the representatives of employer and labor interests.
[7][8] The two most important theoretical approaches aiming to understand and explain actor's behavior in policy networks are the following: power dependence and rational choice.
legal, political or financial in nature) and individual capacities to deploy them in order create better bargaining positions and achieve higher degrees of autonomy.