Advocacy Coalitions, Policy Entrepreneurs, and Policy Change

The advocacy coalition framework (AC) explains policy stability The policy entrepreneurship model (PE) explains dynamic policy change. Thus, augmenting the AC with insights from the PE provides a method of explaining a common empirical phenomenon: policy stability punctuated by dynamic policy change. This analytical strategy could be used to explore stability and change in many policy arenas. Here, we use it to interpret the background lo and dynamics of recent education policy reform in Michigan.     

Global Public Policy,Transnational Policy Communities,and Their Networks

Public policy has been a prisoner of the word “state.” Yet, the state is reconfigured by globalization. Through “global public–private partnerships” and “transnational executive networks,” new forms of authority are emerging through global and regional policy processes that coexist alongside nation‐state policy processes. Accordingly, this article asks what is “global public policy”? The first part of the article identifies new public spaces where global policies occur. These spaces are multiple in character and variety and will be collectively referred to as the “global agora.” The second section adapts the conventional policy cycle heuristic by conceptually stretching it to the global and regional levels to reveal the higher degree of pluralization of actors and multiple‐authority structures than is the case at national levels. The third section asks: who is involved in the delivery of global public policy? The focus is on transnational policy communities. The global agora is a public space of policymaking and administration, although it is one where authority is more diffuse, decision making is dispersed and sovereignty muddled. Trapped by methodological nationalism and an intellectual agoraphobia of globalization, public policy scholars have yet to examine fully global policy processes and new managerial modes of transnational public administration.     

Policy Theory, Policy Theory Everywhere: Ravings of a Deranged Policy Scholar

The field of policy theory abounds with numerous theories, with each theory having a set of practitioners that are working independently of the others. Resolving conflicts among policy theories as a result is difficult. This essay has a more modest goal of posing some questions and suggesting some avenues for future research. Key points include defining the purpose of policy theory, incorporating management into our theories, making strategic choices about areas of study, addressing the parsimony-comprehensiveness tradeoff, and providing a more nuanced role for institutions.     

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.     

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.     

Policy Travels: Exploring Politics, Policy, and Culture from the Ground-Up

Mark Hertsgaard, Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future . New York, NY: Broadway Books, 1998. 372 pp.
Robert D. Kaplan, An Empire Wilderness: Travels Into America's Future . New York, NY: Random House, 1998. 393 pp.     

Institutions,Incentives, and Policy Entrepreneurship

Policy entrepreneurship is often used to explain agenda setting through reference to the behavior of individual “change agents.” But there are still gaps in our understanding of what motivates entrepreneurs. Rational choice theory emphasizes the importance of material and nonmaterial incentives; however, it remains unclear what role institutions play. This article aims to empirically examine the relationship between incentives and institutional encouragement of innovation. Using a case study of the federal government of Canada, I find evidence that incentives matter. Government agencies with many incentives are more likely to encourage innovation than agencies with few incentives. These results underscore the importance of institutions in determining the motivations of policy entrepreneurs, and suggest future research should focus on the interplay among individual, political, and institutional factors.     

Renewable Energy Politics: Policy Typologies,Policy Tools,and State Deployment of Renewables

This paper investigates the competing forces driving the development of renewable energy in the American states. We formulate a framework of state renewable energy politics and develop a set of hypotheses regarding the role of politics, policies, and prices in renewable energy development. We test these hypotheses with a fixed effect vector decomposition model using a panel data set for the U.S. states from 1990 to 2008. The results indicate that renewable energy development is influenced by regulatory institutions, the party affiliations of the governor and legislators, and the professionalism of the legislature, accompanied by the effects of various policy instruments.     

Network Structures within Policy Processes: Coalitions,Power, and Brokerage in Swiss Climate Policy

The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is a prominent approach to investigate the formation of coalition and their impact on policy outputs. Although the ACF combines both the network structures of a political process with actors' values and belief systems, most empirical tests focus mainly on beliefs rather than network structures. Considering a relational approach makes particular sense when one wants to investigate the structural patterns of a subsystem and to assess coalition formation and maintenance. The author therefore proceeds by taking two steps to study the existence of coalitions, power relations, and policy preferences: first, social network analysis frames the empirical study of network structures, based on the assumption that common beliefs are reflected in relations among actors involved in policy processes. Second, using a sophisticated mathematical algorithm, the multicriteria analysis furnishes a systematic evaluation of the elite's belief system. This methodological combination constitutes the added value of this research and allows for testing to establish if common beliefs are reflected in network structures.     

Revolution, State Building, and Foreign Policy

Book reviewed in this article:
Daniela Spenser, The Impossible Triangle: Mexico, Soviet Russia, and the United States in 1920s     

Science,Badgers, Politics: Advocacy Coalitions and Policy Change in Bovine Tuberculosis Policy in Britain

Badgers represent one of the most controversial and hotly debated environmental issues in modern Britain. This paper advances the study of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) by examining the limited extent to which extensive scientific research over a 15‐year period changed the basic composition and argumentation of different advocacy coalitions in a highly adversarial setting. Based on coding of the media coverage over the period 1986–2013, this paper analyzes the composition of the advocacy coalitions, their stability over time, and the limited extent to which learning took place in response to scientific disputes. It also highlights how coalitions between actors with similar policy beliefs did not form, highlighting the importance of the ACF and other policy processes to consider dynamics that go beyond the individual subsystem under investigation.     

Scientific Uncertainties, Public Policy, and Global Warming

Whether the uncertainties (about global warming) are large enough to suggest delaying policy responses is not a scientific question per se, but a value judgment… [T]he public and government officials need to know which uncertainties are reducible, which may not be reducible, and how long it may take to narrow the reducible uncertainties. (Schneider, 1989a)     

Problem Definition, Agenda Access, and Policy Choice

Problem definition is fundamental to public policy making, intertwined as it is with the political process throughout the activities of issue initiation, program design, and legislative enactment. Yet problem definition remains in immature analytic construct, productive of only a modest amount of scholarship that is lacking a coherent shared framework. Seeking to address this deficiency, this article systematically examines the origins, elements, and consequences of problem definition, relating this discussion to previous literature in the area, current policymaking developments, and future research needs.