Policy alienation of public professionals: Structural factors at the governmental level

__Abstract__ Previous research that used the policy alienation framework to understand why or why not public professionals identify with policies, applied the framework to analyze the experiences with one specific policy. The present paper complements these studies by adopting a different stance towards policy alienation, namely by analyzing the feelings of strategic (national), tactical (organizational) and operational (personal) powerlessness and societal and client meaninglessness of public professionals towards policies more generally speaking. The main reason for this is entangled in processes such as policy layering and policy succession, that suggest that new policies should not trul