This book evaluates the role of policy analysis over the past three decades in a wide range of urban policy arenas, including community development, education, family support and social welfare, intergovernmental financial relations, drugs, and racial discrimination. The authors take a chronological approach, tracing how key urban problems and their policymaking and research components have evolved since the early 1960s, when confidence in the power of government to develop wise policies based on research findings was at a high point. Within this historical structure, each author traces the links among the analysts' conception of a problem, research related to it, and the ultimate policy responses. The lessons drawn will help analysts, practitioners, and citizens improve the decisionmaking process that leads to effective government.