Seizing the consequences of a policy from its citizens: the reception of public action.

Summary Unlike other sequences such as agenda setting or implementation, political science has been relatively less interested in the moment in which public policies produce consequences for their individual citizens. The processes at stake mix direct effects of public action and appropriation by individuals, and they have both objective and subjective dimensions. We propose to account for them using the idea of the reception of public action. This article specifies the theoretical and methodological implications of this approach. It identifies two complementary ways of studying these reception processes, which differ in their scale of analysis: that of the instrument and that of the public action sector.