Understanding Key Dimensions of Public Policy Leadership: A Conceptual Framework for Typology of Various Approaches

Despite the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary nature of the phenomenon of public policy leadership, being one of the topics of interest among statesmen and researchers in the fields of public administration, public policy, international relations and political science, on the one hand, which has increased the various aspects of this phenomenon from different perspectives, on the other hand, the state of accuracy of descriptions has been cut off from this term.Therefore, in order to avoid confusion among the flood of various and sometimes unrelated aspects, it is worthy to have a guideline to distinguish between studies in terms of scope, definition of the boundary and how to address the subject. In this study, four overarching themes: 1) Theme of public policy leadership, 2) Level of analysis, 3) Scope of influence of the public policy leader; and 4) Mechanism for obtaining legitimacy, were extracted from previous research.Then a matrix of these overarching themes was created which was the basis for the typology of previous studies. Each of different modes of this matrix, which were variations of overarching themes based on integrative themes, was considered as a pattern, and the most frequent patterns were considered as “types”.The survey showed that some patterns have not yet been studied, though they are reasonable and feasible.On the other hand, some of the patterns are of great interest to previous scholars. Four types were identified in this study.