Exploring the Contributions of Cultural Theory for Improving Public Deliberation about Complex Policy Problems

In this article, we argue that the Cultural Theory pioneered by Mary Douglas can help resolve two pressing issues in the study and practice of public deliberation. The first of these issues concerns how best to structure deliberative processes (or “minipublics”) that have increasingly been implemented around the world. We use Cultural Theory's analysis of social relations to derive a hypothesis concerning the ideal design of minipublics, and outline research strategies to test the hypothesis. The second issue pertains to scaling out minipublics. We describe John Dryzek's and Simon Niemeyer's influential proposal for deploying discourses to make public deliberation more representative, and discuss the limits of their proposal. Furthermore, we show how Cultural Theory's analysis of people's cultural biases (i.e., collectively shared perceptions, beliefs and norms) may help overcome these limits and how the design of minipublics can generate trust in and legitimacy of public deliberation.     

Belief System Continuity and Change in Policy Advocacy Coalitions: Using Cultural Theory to Specify Belief Systems,Coalitions, and Sources of Change

This paper evaluates the prospects for application of the “grid/group” cultural theory (CT), as advanced by Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, to the Advocacy Coalition Theory (ACF). CT would seem to be relevant to several key aspects of the ACF: the content of the core beliefs that provide the “glue” that binds coalitions; the resilience of core beliefs and associated implications for belief change and learning; and the structure of coalitions and the mechanisms for coordination and control within them. The paper considers the compatibility of the ACF's account of deep core beliefs and coalition structure with that of CT; surveys an array of empirical studies based on variations of CT; and extends accounts of change in cultural identities from CT to the ACF. In addition, we highlight some of the ways in which the ACF may offer important theoretical insights for scholars of CT, potentially clarifying hypotheses concerning the relationships among basic worldviews, more specific beliefs, and behaviors.     

Cultural Theory and the Measurement of Deep Core Beliefs Within the Advocacy Coalition Framework

Deep core beliefs represent an important yet theoretically underspecified concept within the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). This underspecification can (in part) be attributed to the ad hoc way in which ACF scholars have defined and measured the concept over time. To overcome this, we advocate the development and future use of a standardized metric for measuring deep core beliefs in ACF studies. Such a measure, we contend, should be multidimensional, generalizable, measurable using multiple techniques, and broad enough in scope to operate across virtually all policy domains. Using these criteria as our benchmark, we evaluate the viability of cultural theory (CT) as one such metric. In short, we find that CT meets all of these criteria, and therefore provides ACF scholars with a way to measure deep core beliefs across enduring public policy disputes that are demarcated by conflicting belief systems. Accordingly, we advocate its use in future studies.     

Cultural policy as mythical narrative

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we argue that policy assumptions are shaped by mythical narratives carrying underlying beliefs and values. Drawing on narrative studies, organisational theory and Gramsci’s cultural hegemony theory, we examine how sense-making narratives create consensus, how they imply causation and individual agency, and finally how narratives fragment to reveal alternatives to hegemonic ‘common sense’ assumptions. Applying this framework to cultural policy we examine the place of mythic, sense-making narratives in the historical development of foundational national cultural policies in the UK and Mexico – respectively, narratives of ‘the civilising mission’ and ‘social transformation’. We then consider narrative emplotment and individualisation underpinning assumptions about individual creativity in the UK creative industries policy. Finally, we address the postmodern turn in narrative studies, showing how fragmented, polysemous narratives fracture cultural policy into ‘personalised truths’ and give voice to other, counter-hegemonic perspectives. We conclude by proposing an agenda for narrative research in cultural policy.     

The "Mouse That Roared": Agenda Setting in Canadian Pesticides Politics

Issue redefinition and venue shopping have been identified as key strategies for enacting agenda and policy change, but much work remains to be done in elaborating these processes. I argue that an important aspect of issue redefinition involves shifting not only the image of an issue but also the bases for considering those issues—what I call policy principles. Policy principles are the core values, beliefs, or guidelines attached to policies that help direct decision making. The emergence and acceptance of new principles by the public and policymakers can be a vital source of policy change, at times having far greater consequences for policy than redefining an issue. Venue shopping is also a multifaceted undertaking involving efforts by policy entrepreneurs and advocacy groups to keep issues out of venues they would rather not participate in as well as move decision making to new arenas. Moreover, while the literature suggests that shifting venues is usually a sensible strategy, sometimes venue shopping can backfire. A case study of the municipal movement to restrict the nonessential use of lawn and garden pesticides in Canada illustrates these theoretical points and shows the applicability of agenda setting models to contexts outside the United States.     

Cultural policies for sustainable development: four strategic paths

Abstract

In the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015, the role of culture is limited. We argue that culture’s absence is rooted in the longue durée of interplay among theoretical and policy debates on culture in sustainable development and on cultural policy since the mid-twentieth century. In response to variations in concepts and frameworks used in advocacy, policy, and academia, we propose four roles cultural policy can play towards sustainable development: first, to safeguard and sustain cultural practices and rights; second, to ‘green’ the operations and impacts of cultural organizations and industries; third, to raise awareness and catalyse actions about sustainability and climate change; and fourth, to foster ‘ecological citizenship’. The challenge for cultural policy is to help forge and guide actions along these co-existing and overlapping strategic paths towards sustainable development.     

Displacing Barthes: Self,Other and the Anxiety of Theory

This article explores the relationship between the other and the writing self in three of Barthes's works and shows how the anxious and changeable state of the ‘je’ unsettles conceptions of ‘theory’ and its analytical object. Barthes attempts to conceptualise cultural otherness in Mythologies, L'Empire des signes and Incidents, and, on one level, his fantasies of encounter serve to displace or unground the writing ‘self’. On another level, however, the theorist's persona in these works turns out to be disorientated and unnerved by these displacements, and he couples his jubilant self-dissolution with a longing for a sense of origin or ground. Barthes as a result remains undecided about his positioning within his own discourse, and his works demonstrate the necessary interpenetration of theories of alterity with the contradictory subjective and affective desires of the writing self. The aim of the piece is ultimately to argue that, for its very flaws and inconsistencies, Barthes's writing about otherness may help us to understand the challenges and deficiencies of postcolonial conceptions of cultural difference.     

The strange case of ‘John Black’ and ‘Mr Hyde’: constructing migrating Jamaicans as (un)worthy nationals

This paper examines how migrating Jamaicans were constructed as ‘worthy’ or ‘unworthy’ of Jamaican diasporic membership in the early years of statehood, to demonstrate the role of nationalist cultural repertoires in constructing particular diasporic imaginaries. I conduct a discourse analysis of Jamaica's national newspaper, The Daily Gleaner, between 1962 and 1966, a period encompassing crucial transitions in Jamaican migration movements and from colony to statehood. I argue that tropes of respectability present in Afro‐creole nationalist ideology form the cultural repertoires used to distinguish migrants' actions as worthy or unworthy of national membership. These distinctions specify who ‘counts’ as part of the diaspora and how migrants of different social positions may claim and articulate their membership.     

Policy Knowledge, Policy Formulation, and Change: Revisiting a Foundational Question

Understanding the influence of policy knowledge (analysis, evaluation) on policy change represents a long-standing quest in the policy sciences. Despite attempts of Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) scholars, the first to embark systematically on this quest, utilization and policy process literatures still run parallel. Through a critique of ACF and utilization studies, we argue that the inability of policy theory to include how and which information decision makers use is the foundational issue hindering efforts to link process and substance in policy theory. Situating utilization studies in the policy design approach offers an improvement in conceptualizing relationships between policy knowledge, process, and change.     

Trans-Subsystem Dynamics: Policy Topography, Mass Opinion, and Policy Change

We argue that the treatment of trans-subsystem change, and particularly the role of public opinion in fostering such change, within the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) has been underspecified. We propose a model of "policy topography" that combines the concepts of public opinion, clusters of linked subsystems, and policy issue venues. While the ACF has characterized subsystems as relatively self-contained, we argue that they are more usefully understood as operating in a relatively permeable fashion among evolving clusters of subsystems linked together by networked relations, strategically overlapping policy considerations, and public opinion disruptions. The "policy topography" model offers opportunities to assess the relationships across policy subsystems, and to better specify the critical relationship between public policy and mass opinions. We offer examples, and suggest hypotheses along with avenues for appropriate empirical analysis.     

The Ecology of Games as a Theory of Polycentricity: Recent Advances and Future Challenges

The Ecology of Games approach to examining complex governance systems in democratic societies has been recently refurbished to infuse renewed vitality in the analysis of institutions and collective action in polycentric governance systems. This opening article to the special issue on the Ecology of Games Theory (EGT) will discuss the main component elements of the theory, as well as recently produced empirical advances that test and extend it. The article is structured in three sections. The first section describes the EGT as a theory of polycentricity and explains why it is critical to study both the structure and function of polycentric governance systems, including collaboration among policy stakeholders, learning about problems, and equitably distributing the resources generated by policy interactions. The second section reviews empirical evidence that examine structure and function in polycentric systems, including their coevolution. Finally, the third section will provide insights on future research needs to strengthen this newly developed theory of polycentricity.     

Cultural Transmission Theory and the Archaeological Record: Providing Context to Understanding Variation and Temporal Changes in Material Culture

Cultural transmission (CT) is implicit in many explanations of culture change. Formal CT models were defined by anthropologists 30 years ago and have been a subject of active research in the social sciences in the ensuing years. Although increasing in popularity in recent years, CT has not seen extensive use in archaeological research, despite the quantitative rigor of many CT models and the ability to create testable hypotheses. Part of the reason for the slow adoption, we argue, has been the continuing focus on change in central tendency and mode in archaeology, instead of change in dispersion or variance. Yet archaeological research provides an excellent data source for exploring processes of CT. We review CT research in the anthropological sciences and outline the benefits and drawbacks of this theoretical framework for the study of material culture. We argue that CT can shed much light on our understandings of why material technology changes over time, including explanations of differential rates of change among different technologies. We further argue that transmission processes are greatly affected by the content, context, and mode of transmission and fundamentally structure variation in material culture. Including ideas from CT can provide greater context for explaining and understanding changes in the variation of artifacts over time. Finally, we outline what we feel should be the goals of CT research in archaeology in the coming years.     

Point Predictions and the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory: A Data Mining Approach—U.S. Nuclear Policy as Proof of Concept

In Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET), information processing under the constraints of limited attention and bounded rationality leads to stick‐slip dynamics in policy outcomes. Empirical work in this field often focuses on the macro level. Using the case of nuclear energy policy in the United States as proof of concept, we demonstrate how decisive budget changes in a specific policy subsystem can be linked to attention of Congress and the president. We utilize a mixed‐methods data‐mining approach: Maximum likelihood estimation is used to analyze the distribution of the nuclear energy RD&D budget. Then attention data of both Congress and the president are structured by means of cluster analysis and principal component analysis. Finally, these data are used in a generalized linear model to predict specific budget shifts. The article is designed as a proof of concept: In the case of nuclear energy policy, we are able to predict budget shifts without violating the assumptions of PET. More importantly: we can demonstrate that attention is not only affecting the final policy outcome but also the corridor of the possible.     

THE EVOLUTION AND DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE

In his thought‐provoking book, Alex Mesoudi argues for an evolutionary, unifying framework for the social sciences, which is based on the principles of Darwinian theory. Mesoudi maintains that cultural change can be illuminated by using the genotype‐phenotype distinction, and that it is sufficiently similar to biological change to warrant a theory of culture‐change based on evolutionary models. He describes examples of cultural microevolution, within‐population changes, and the biologically inspired population genetics models used to study them. He also shows that some aspects of large‐scale (macro‐evolutionary) cultural transformation can be studied by using ecological models and phylogenetic comparative techniques. We argue that although Mesoudi's evolution‐based perspective offers many useful insights, his ambition—the unification of the social sciences within a Darwinian framework through the use of the methods and models he describes—suffers from a major theoretical limitation. His reductive approach leads to overlooking culture as a system with emergent processes and features. Mesoudi therefore does not engage with any of the central past and present theories in sociology and anthropology for which the systems view of culture is central, and he does not analyze the emergent, high‐level properties of human cultural‐social systems. We suggest that a systems perspective, using some analogies and metaphors from developmental biology, can complement the evolutionary approach and is more in tune with a systems view of society. Such an approach, which stresses feedback and self‐sustaining interactions within social networks, and engages with the insights of sociological and anthropological theories, can contribute to the understanding of cultural systems by highlighting the evolution of processes of social cohesion, and by making use of the mathematical approaches of complexity theory.     

Cultural policy archetypes: the bathwater and the baby

ABSTRACT

Cultural policy archetypes have been fundamental to comparative cultural policy study and continue to be influential in both everyday and scholarly characterizations of national cultural policy systems. This paper explores the proposition that cultural policy archetypes reflect what people believe to be true about culture – their cultural ideologies. Cultural ideologies are integral to the formation of cultural policy and, thus, must be considered in any theory that hopes to measure the extent to which and explain why cultural policies differ. Cultural ideologies embody ideas about why culture is important and how it should be governed. Those ideologies spotlight certain administrative mechanisms, overemphasizing their role in systems that actually are deeply administratively hybrid. This makes archetypes poor tools for analyzing the mechanisms of cultural policy; however, because archetypes tell us about cultural ideologies in straightforward and powerful ways, it is essential that they continue to be a part of comparative cultural policy study.     

Drugs, Sex, Rock, and Roll: A Theory of Morality Politics

I assume that (a) the demand for sin is characterized by heterogeneous preferences and (b) private behavior diverges from public statements. From these assumptions, in the first section of this article I derive a series of propositions about morality policy. Rational politicians will perceive that demand for restrictive policies will be greater than it actually is and thus compete to produce more extreme policies. Bureaucracies will lack expertise and thus will not provide a check on political excesses. This "politics of sin" can be translated into a contemporary form of redistributive morality policy politics if the issue can be refrained by political actors to legitimate an opposition position. In the second portion of the article, I argue formally that sin policies in general will fail because they operate on subsets of the population that are more and more resistant to the policy instruments available to government. I conclude with potential expansions of this theory, including how it might be generalized to other types of public policy.     

Archaeology and the Late Modern State: Introduction to the Special Issue

While archaeologists have always shown great interest in the rise and fall of premodern states, they perennially show little interest in their own. This is particularly troubling because the state is the nexus of power in archaeology. In practice, virtually all archaeology is state archaeology, imbued with and emboldened by state power. It is in this light that contributors to this Special Issue of Archaeologies grapple with the archaeology–state nexus, addressing such timely issues as colonialism, capitalism, and cultural resource or heritage management (CRM/CHM). We outline here the archaeology–state nexus concept and introduce the Special Issue.     

Understanding Policy Change Using a Critical Junctures Theory in Comparative Context: The Cases of Ireland and Sweden

Utilizing a new theory for examining critical junctures, we seek to better understand the nature of industrial policy change in Ireland during the 1950s and macroeconomic policy change in Sweden in the 1980s. Did these policy changes constitute critical junctures, or something less, and if so why? The theory consists of three elements—economic crisis, ideational change, and the nature of the policy change—that must be identified for us to be able to declare with some certainty if a policy change constitutes a critical juncture. Herein, we will be examining the roles of a variety of change agents including the media, central banks, and politicians. Our findings will help explain why Irish industrial policy was transformed in the late 1950s, while Swedish macroeconomic policy underwent only minor change in the early 1980s.     

Collaboration and Culture: Organizational Culture and the Dynamics of Collaborative Policy Networks

This paper presents a theory of the role of culture in collaborative policy networks. It builds on the literature that analyzes the factors related to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of collaborative arrangements by demonstrating the importance of hitherto undertheorized cultural factors. Cultural theory indicates that actors with different cultural viewpoints have distinct and predictable biases in terms of their expectations of collaboration and their preferences concerning how collaborative policy networks are structured. These biases, in turn, shape how collaborative partners are chosen and how collaborative relationships are maintained over time. The theory is illustrated with a case study of the rise and dissolution of a coalition within a housing policy network in Los Angeles. The case illustrates that cultural differences can impede collaboration even when organizations share similar policy goals.     

Game Theory and Institutional Entrepreneurship: Transfer Pricing and the Search for Coordination International Tax Policy

Coordination in international tax policy is extremely problematic. Economists and political scientists have explained this lack of coordination by arguing that tax competition triggers a prisoner's dilemma. In this article I argue that not all international tax policy can be reduced to the prisoner's dilemma syndrome. Transfer pricing policy, the object of this study, can be modeled as a coordination game. By drawing upon game theory and new institutional analysis, I argue that institutional entrepreneurs who decide to play their favorite option first can facilitate the emergence of international policy coordination. This idea is examined in the context of the creation of the new Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development rules on transfer pricing. The conclusion is that coordination emerges in transfer pricing policy through a process of conflictual institutionalization.