volved in carrying public laws into action. Public laws are in no way self-en-
forcing; instead, they must be executed by a wide variety of actors working in
and through a number of institutional arenas. Understanding the dynamic pro-
cess by which laws are translated into administrative guidelines and are then
enforced is the key to understanding successes and dilemmas associated with
implementing disability rights laws.

Implementation is a complex political and administrative process, which
conceptually covers the period from legislative passage through policy evalu-
ation. This process can be broken into components that are distinct concep-
tually but interact in practice. Policy refinement refers to those activities aimed
at clarifying procedures, processes, and guidelines relevant to the administra-
tion of programs. Public laws set the statutory framework for implementation,
but this broad policy outline leaves many questions about execution unan-
swered. For this reason, executive agencies are required to refine and clarify
policy objectives and practices as a precursor to effective implementation
efforts.

A second component of implementation is policy diffusion, the communi-
cation of the refined objectives and practices to the administrative agents
charged with providing services, benefits, or protections. The outcomes of im-
plementation are likely to closely match program objectives only if administra-
tive agents understand policy intentions and the strategies and mechanisms
selected for implementation. Diffusion is particularly important in an intergov-
ernmental system, such as that of the United States, where both political and
administrative authorities are widely distributed through thousands of public
and private institutions.

Policy execution is the final component and represents the transformation ac-
tivities performed by administrative agents for the purpose of distributing ser-
vices, benefits, and regulatory protections. It is at this level that public and
private agents interact with citizens, corporations, or other governments in an
effort to achieve implementation objectives. Studies that focus on policy exe-
cution tend to take a "bottom up" approach to analysis of implementation,
analyzing transformation efforts and influences on those efforts in order to un-
derstand how programs work to produce outcomes.

The analysis of disability rights policy pursued in this book will place heavy
focus on the policy refinement phase of implementation. The reason for this
emphasis is empirically based: in the roughly twenty-year period since the pas-
sage of disability rights laws by the federal government, the most prominent
activity has been the development and refinement of guidelines, criteria, and
obligations for implementation. Many of the laws raised more questions about
implementation practices than they answered; they were heavily symbolic and
thus imprecise as to strategies and objectives for policy execution. Public sec-

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