Understanding the policy-making process should be a central concern of political scientists as it links politics to the content of policies that affect people and the economic, social, and political environments in which they live.  Policy analysts, and others seeking to influence the content of policy, want to draw on knowledge of the policy process to apply it in the policy process.  This translation has received relatively little explicit attention from policy scholars.  Several challenges to the creation of useful policy process frameworks, theories, and models impede the translation: the diversity of institutions that make policy, professional incentives for claims of generality, and perhaps fatalism about the mutability of the policy process.  In this essay, we begin by exploring these limitations and setting out the major comprehensive perspectives for understanding the policy process: institutional rational choice, incrementalism, path dependence, the advocacy coalition framework, the social construction framework, the multiple streams framework, and punctuated equilibrium.  We then consider the lessons each of these perspectives offers for policy analysts and advocates.