Policy Narratives and Policy Processes

The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) has influenced a generation of policy scholars with its emphasis on causal drivers, testable hypotheses, and falsification. Until recently, the role of policy narratives has been largely neglected in ACF literature partially because much of that work has operated outside of traditional social science principles, such as falsification. Yet emerging literature under the rubric of Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) demonstrates how the role of policy narratives in policy processes is studied using the same rigorous social science standards initially set forth by Paul A. Sabatier. The NPF identifies theories specifying narrative elements and strategies that are likely useful to ACF researchers as classes of variables that have yet to be integrated. Examining this proposition, we provide seven hypotheses related to critical ACF concepts including advocacy coalitions and policy beliefs, policy learning, public opinion, and strategy. Our goal is to stay within the scientific, theoretical, and methodological tradition of the ACF and show how NPF's empirical, hypotheses, and causal driven work on policy narratives identifies theories applicable to ACF research while also offering an independent framework capable of explaining the policy process through the power of policy narratives. In doing so, we believe both ACF and NPF scholarship can contribute to the advancement of our understanding of the policy process.     

Shift-and-Share Analysis of Spatial Development in Israel

The study of public policy outcomes is one of the major responsibilities of political science. While structure and functioning of political systems have always been a central concern of political science, the content of public policy is also an element of political life which political science must endeavour to explain. T. R. Dye The author is heavily indebted to Professor S. E. Finer of All Souls College, Oxford, for his encouragement and help. Yet he alone bears the responsibility for the outcome.     

The Effects of Beneficiary Targeting on Public Support for Social Policies

We assess the tendency for the public to use group‐centric policy evaluations with evidence from a survey experiment concerning two issues within the social policy domain, health care and aid to cities. By randomly varying target group identity within each issue and using both negatively and positively regarded groups our evidence shows that differences exist in the tendency for members of the public to use group‐centric heuristics. Group‐centric evaluations are related to party identification and political ideology. Across both issues conservatives and Republicans are more likely than liberals or Democrats to adopt a group‐centric heuristic. Partisan and ideological differences suggest that established theories miss the mark by emphasizing how universal policy designs are preferred to designs that target unpopular groups.     

Rescaling citizenship: gendering Canadian immigration policy

Tracing the impact of public consultation on policy development is vital to theories of the state. Without investigating how civic participation is transformed into policy outcomes researchers cannot adequately account for the interaction of state and civil society. In particular researchers need to refine their explanations of policy development by highlighting how identity and scale can alter both policy application and outcome. I develop this approach by tracing how the civic participation of immigrant women in Canada advanced the rights of women in the development of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which came into law in June 2002. By tracing the consultation process between Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) and Sahara and NAC, two women’s advocacy groups, I reveal how public involvement and concern with gender equity transmitted into policy change. The outcomes of this interaction do, however, present some contradictions. In particular policy changes attempt to limit one source of inequality, but in the process enforce greater state control of mobility. Despite this paradox, I conclude that this political involvement represents a partial victory for immigrant women since it succeeded in promoting concerns with gender within the ‘formal’ arena of national policy development.     

Post-war smoking policy in the UK and the redefinition of public health

Current analyses of UK smoking policy within two frameworks--the 'heroes and villains' view of journalist accounts and a political science emphasis on rival 'producer' and 'issue' networks in policy making. It is often assumed that the US experience provides a universal historical model. This paper sees smoking policy in the UK as a case study in the relationship between 'scientific fact creation' and policy, which has also been emblematic of wider changes in public health ideology. The issue of smoking and lung cancer symbolized the post-war shift from infectious to chronic disease and the rise of a new 'lifestyle'-oriented public health. In the 1980s passive smoking brought a revival of environmentalism; in the 1990s the rediscovered concept of addiction symbolized developments in public health in which curative and preventive initiatives were entwined. Despite the rise of a militant 'healthism' within both anti-smoking and public health since the 1970s, British policy retained a dual focus, an emphasis on risk reduction as well as risk elimination in which policy networks were entwined rather than distinct. Some public health scientists worked in policy milieux, notably the expert committee, which crossed this apparent divide and which linked with industry. Connections between government and industry changed as public health 'treatment' brought the pharmaceutical industry into the picture.     

Topping Off and Bottoming Out: Setting Budget Priorities Through Executive Power

This article examines the role of the institutional power of executives in public budgeting; specifically, how executives change spending on particular budget items. Leveraging extant theories of the policy process concerning preference expression, attention, and institutions, we argue that executives deepen large cuts and boost large increases in budgetary change. The strictures of the budgetary process force trade-offs for executives in preference expression such that increases to preferred categories typically require decreases in other categories. Literatures in public policy and political representation suggest that all executives would like to express fiscal preferences, thereby contributing to categorical budget oscillations; however, not all executives are created equal. We employ quantile regression to examine whether the institutional strength of governors determine cuts, stasis, and expansion in spending across all budget functions in the American states between 1985 and 2009. Our model includes a host of political and economic variables found in the literature of fiscal policymaking, such as partisanship and divided government. The desire to change policy may be widely shared across executives, but we find that the ability to “top off” categorical increases and bottom out categorical decreases is a function of an executive's capacity to call attention to preferred categories via agenda-setting power and to secure those changes via veto power. The findings show strong governors are well positioned to influence public policy through the budgetary process.     

The Implementation of Public Policy: Still the Missing Link

Although theories of public policy and theories of governance both seek to establish relationships between policymaking and its consequences, they do not complement each other very well. Public policy models tend to de-emphasize that which governance theories tend to emphasize: the influence on government performance of implementation, broadly described as the actions taken by those engaged in administration (including managers at all levels, those engaged in service delivery, and third-party agents) after a policy has been lawfully promulgated by elected officials and interpreted by the courts. A comparison of a recently developed theory of public sector performance with several prominent theories of policymaking suggests that multilevel governance theories can supply what continues to be the missing link in public policy theories. At the same time, governance theories might be enriched by the process modeling of public policy theories.     

The Effect of Persuasive Messages on Policy Problem Recognition

Prior theories of individual behavior in recognizing public problems have centered on the role of policy entrepreneurs; institutional effects; information; and cultural, political, and social pressures. Our extension of these theories suggests that policy problem recognition is an attitudinal evaluation process. If the information is considered valid and the new attitude is negative in valence, then a policy problem is recognized. To test this theory, we use an embedded experiment in a national survey to measure the effect of persuasive messages on the concern for global warming. We find that the negativity of the message and the credibility of the source of the message both affect the level of increase in concern for global warming. Further, the impact of the message from the source is conditional based upon the recipient's ideology. This suggests that policy problem recognition is attitudinal and thus incorporates both analytical and affective components.     

Robustness of Social‐Ecological Systems: Implications for Public Policy

We conceptualize social‐ecological systems (SESs) as complex adaptive systems where public policy affects and is affected by the biophysical system in which it is embedded. The study of robustness of SESs combines insights from various disciplines including economics, political science, ecology, and engineering. In this paper we present an approach that can be used to explore the implications for public policy when viewed as a component of a complex adaptive system. Our approach leverages the Institutional Analysis and Development framework to provide a platform for interdisciplinary research that focuses on system‐wide outcomes of the policy process beyond just policy change. The main message is that building robustness can create new vulnerabilities. Fail‐free policies cannot be developed, and instead of a focus on the “right” policy, we need to think about policy processes that stimulate experimentation, adaptation, and learning.     

Pepperoni or Broccoli? On the Cutting Wedge of Feminist Environmentalism

Feminist environmentalism has become a significant intellectual and social policy force across fields as diverse as public health, political economy, philosophy, science, and ecology. Feminist environmental theory and activism together are challenging and redefining foundational principles, from animal rights to the environmental economy of illness and well-being, from global political economy to the role of Big Science as the primary arbiter of the state of the environment. Animal rights is one of the most intellectually challenging and innovative areas of intellectual activity and social activism, and within feminist environmentalism is one of the most radical subfields. This paper provides an overview of activity in this subfield, starting from the observation that feminist environmental scholarship and grassroots activism on animal rights pivot around three concerns: elucidating the commonalities in structures of oppressions across gender, race, class, and species; developing feminist-informed theories of the basis for allocating "rights" to animals; and exposing the gendered assumptions and perceptions that underlie human relationships to nonhuman animals. At the same time, the serious contemplation of animal rights makes a considerable contribution to destabilizing identity categories and adds new dimensions to theorizing the mutability of identity.     

Political Science and U.S. Health Policy in the Era of the Affordable Care Act

Few laws have a profound and lasting impact on an entire political system. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), despite its incremental nature and bipartisan heritage, has been one of those remarkable landmarks. Even a decade after its passage, the political struggle is far from over, as the ACA is still facing near constant threats from the incumbent president, Congress, the courts, statehouses, attorneys general, and governors across the nation. How have political scientists responded to the continued struggle? This article provides an overview of the effects of health reform and the ACA on political science research since 2008. While political scientists have written much about the subject, coverage has been distinctly uneven within the discipline. Indeed, it has almost been entirely confined to scholars of public and health policy. Nonetheless, there have been important contributions across disciplinary fields. This article provides an overview of contributions embedded within the study of federalism, policy feedback effects, and political framing. It concludes by emphasizing the need for more engaged scholarship on health policy issues from across the entire discipline, and by highlighting other areas of study that could benefit from broader attention by political scientists.     

The Potential Impact of Disability Studies on Political Science (as well as vice-versa)

The conjunction of two seemingly disparate fields of research such as disability studies and political science creates the potential of yielding results that are either familiar or unexpected. On the one hand, it is probable that the merger of these subjects might contribute insights that could expand the scope of investigations about disability and add one more important element to policy analysis. On the other hand, it is also possible that the reciprocal impact of these areas of research could expose significant anomalies in the dominant paradigms of either or both fields that might have a lasting effect. The first portion of this paper examines the impact of political science on disability studies; the second part assesses the potential effect of disability studies on political science; and the final segment explores the prospects for a new paradigm in political science that would permit an increased analysis of social movements and political identity, theories of social change, the phenomenon of paternalism, and the implications of differences in physical appearance.     

旅游规划公众参与的核心内容初步研究

本文从旅游规划的公众参与角度入手,系统地梳理了国内外旅游规划公众参与研究进展;围绕谁参与、为什么参与、参与方式、参与行为及参与时间等问题,初步探讨了旅游规划公众参与核心内容,即包括识别利益主体、分析参与决策行为、明确公众参与模式、确定主体参与阶段、选择合意参与方式等。通过这些问题的研究,以加强和推动公众参与旅游规划的深入研究。     

Testing Policy Theory with Statistical Models of Networks

This article presents a conceptual framework for clarifying the network hypotheses embedded in policy theories and how they relate to macrolevel political institutions and microlevel political behavior. We then describe the role of statistical models of networks for testing these hypotheses, including the problem of operationalizing theoretical concepts with the parameters of statistical models. Examples from existing theories of the policy process and empirical research are provided and potential extensions are discussed.     

ALTERNATIVE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS IN HAZARDOUS WASTE REGULATORY POLICY

The articles in this collection serve to illustrate that problems of hazardous waste disposal are amenable to analysis from a variety of theoretical perspectives. Understanding the interplay between high-risk policy problems, changing political and economic circumstances, and actions taken by political actors with a stake in decisional outcomes should yield information of substantial value to public administrators as well as students of the public policy process.     

Agents of Change: The Role of Public Managers in Public Policy

Our article outlines a number of ways that theories of public management can contribute to the work of public policy scholars. We first outline some of the ways in which public managers have been incorporated into previous work on public policy, and the limitations faced by previous treatments. We then discuss the role that public management plays in the policy process, with a specific focus on managerial quality, networking, and performance evaluation.     

ANALYZING POLITICAL FEASIBILITY: POLITICAL SCIENTISTS1 UNIQUE CONTRIBUTION TO POLICY ANALYSIS

Political feasibility analysis examines the actors and events involved in each stage of a political policy-making process and anticipates the likely resolution of a policy problem as it works its way through the policy process. Despite the prominence of policy analysis in the social sciences over the past decade or so, there has been virtually no scholarly work concerning the analysis of the political feasibility of policy proposals. Political scientists, because of their central concern with the design and effect of the policy-making process, have a unique responsibility to contribute a way to evaluate systematically political feasibility. While all policy analysts, regardless of their disciplinary backgrounds, need to be concerned with assessing political feasibility, political scientists should be particularly mindful of its importance in improving public policy. While anticipating the likely outcome of a dynamic policy process is necessarily a difficult task, an analysis of the political feasibility of a proposed alternative can provide insight into the nature of the policy process as well as identify the criteria that must be met for an alternative to be successful. This article discusses a variety of factors that need to be considered in assessing political feasibility. After arguing the need to design political feasibility analysis frameworks, this essay reviews political scientists' current treatment of political feasibility analysis and outlines a general way to undertake such efforts.     

Importing Concepts from Biology into Political Science: The Case of Punctuated Equilibrium

From the 1950s to the 1990s, the “incrementalist” model dominated theories of policymaking. Since Baumgartner and Jones's Agendas and Instability in American Politics was published in 1993, however, the “punctuated equilibrium” model, borrowed from evolutionary biology, has supplanted the incrementalist model. But what do such alien models do to the discipline of political science, and what does the discipline do to the models, when they are thus imported? In this article, I first discuss the functions of concepts in political science, then discuss and analyze the creation and meaning of the concept of punctuated equilibrium in biology, then trace its transformation as it was initially adopted by political scientists, then analyze the manner in which its meaning developed and altered as it grew in popularity within the discipline, and finally assess its value to political science now. I will conclude with some general observations about the process of importing concepts from outside the discipline.     

Agency Evolution, New Institutionalism, and 'Hybrid' Policy Domains: Lessons from the 'Greening' of the U.S. Military

Neoinstitutionalists applying the logic of rational choice institutionalism have leavened our understanding of public agency design and evolution in the domestic and national security policy domains. This paper seeks to advance theory building in empirically grounded ways by assessing the explanatory power of an important theoretical perspective (rational choice institutionalism), in an understudied "hybrid" policy domain where domestic and national security aims interact (domestic environmental policy and national security policy), and in an organizational type (the U.S. military) that has drawn scant attention from students of bureaucracy in political science, public administration, or public management. Analysis of three major efforts to green the U.S. military suggests that the patterns of politics accompanying agency evolution involving hybrid policy domains differ from domestic and national security domains in ways that limit the generalizability of rational choice institutionalism.     

Collaborating with the Machines: A Hybrid Method for Classifying Policy Documents

Governments produce vast and growing quantities of freely available text: laws, rules, budgets, press releases, and so forth. This information flood is facilitating important, growing research programs in policy and public administration. However, tightening research budgets and the information's vast scale forces political science and public policy to aspire to do more with less. Meeting this challenge means applied researchers must innovate. This article makes two contributions for practical text coding—the process of sorting government text into researcher-defined coding schemes. First, we propose a method of combining human coding with automated computer classification for large data sets. Second, we present a well-known algorithm for automated text classification, the Naïve Bayes classifier, and provide software for working with it. We argue and provide evidence that this method can help applied researchers using human coders to get more from their research budgets, and we demonstrate the method using classical examples from the study of policy agendas.