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.     

Committee Influence Over Controversial Policy: The Reproductive Policy Case

Debates about legislative committee power have been fueled with empirical examples depending too much on distributive policies. I argue that answers to questions about the nature of committee influence can be enhanced by focusing on nondistributive policies that evoke broad national attention. For years scholars have not systematically tested committee influence over nondistributive policy because they have asserted that these policies are designed by the parent chamber or party. By using a methodology that traces the origin of legislation and identifies key policy activists, I demonstrate that committee influence over nondistributive controversial policy is more pronounced than others have maintained     

Text as Policy: Measuring Policy Similarity through Bill Text Reuse

The identification of substantively similar policy proposals in legislation is important to scholars of public policy and legislative politics. Manual approaches are prohibitively costly in constructing datasets that accurately represent policymaking across policy domains, jurisdictions, or time. We propose the use of an algorithm that identifies similar sequences of text (i.e., text reuse), applied to legislative text, to measure the similarity of the policy proposals advanced by two bills. We study bills from U.S. state legislatures. We present three ground truth tests, applied to a corpus of 500,000 bills. First, we show that bills introduced by ideologically similar sponsors exhibit a high degree of text reuse, that bills classified by the National Conference of State Legislatures as covering the same policies exhibit a high degree of text reuse, and that rates of text reuse between states correlate with policy diffusion network ties between states. In an empirical application of our similarity measure, we find that Republican state legislators introduce legislation that is more similar to legislation introduced by Republicans in other states, than is legislation introduced by Democratic state legislators to legislation introduced by Democrats in other states.      

Foreign Policy Reviews and Canada's Trade Policy: 1968–2009

Governments, upon assuming office, most often seek to refocus foreign policy according to the preferences of the new prime minister and the primary means of accomplishing this has been to release a white paper outlining the priorities of the new government. This article will demonstrate that discussions of trade issues reinforce existing studies questioning the innovation and impact of white papers. The purpose of this analysis, however, is not to dwell on the utility of white papers and foreign policy reviews but instead search for a deeper understanding of why trade policy is discussed in an unoriginal and superficial manner. The focus of the article is on the period from 1968 to the present.     

Policy Feedback: The Comparison Effect and Small Business Procurement Policy

Federal programs to help small business obtain government contracts reflect a type of policy learning termed the comparison effect. In contrast with studies of learning focused on policy instruments, the comparison effect directs attention to a class of policy dissatisfaction that leads to a search for new policy and the translation of dissatisfaction into problem definitions that influence the agenda. In the comparison effect, policy fuels comparisons of government treatment of different groups or sectors that contribute to compensatory or offsetting programs for those deemed to be on the losing end of the comparison.     

Policy Subsystems and Regimes: Organized Interests and Climate Change Policy

This research is an examination of the role of organized interests in international climate change policy formation. Systematic survey results are used to demonstrate that organized interests actually engage in the same activities in both the international and domestic arenas. This research demonstrates that the climate change negotiations can be characterized as both a policy subsystem and an international regime. It is further argued that these two concepts are in fact highly analogous, thereby facilitating new cross-discipline research opportunities. The research is based on a web survey of organized interests accredited by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and on interviews and field research at the 8th Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC in New Delhi, India.     

Studying Public Policy through Immigration Policy: Advances in Theory and Measurement

This essay provides a critical review of the field of immigration policy studies from the perspective of measurement and modeling. It serves to contextualize and broaden the views presented in the special issue. As such, we combine insights from American and comparative politics, pinpoint key limitations and challenges in the field, and identify areas of strength within each subfield which could inform theory and measurement development for the other. Ultimately, the concerns about conceptualization, definition, and measurement that we identify and discuss herein, do not apply only to immigration policy studies but to policy studies writ large.     

Policy by Doing: Formulation and Adoption of Policy through Government Leadership

Do government choices, rather than legislative policies (i.e., mandatory regulations or incentives), influence the choices private actors make? In this article we develop a concept of “policy by doing,” which examines the power of government actions as hortatory tools to encourage other community members to act. “Policy by doing” can be an attempt to shape outcomes by providing symbolic leadership, reducing uncertainty, creating market, and telegraphing actions. Empirical analysis of privately held green buildings in 591 U.S. cities from 2004 to 2010 suggests that when governments increase their own commitment to green building for their facilities; private actors will be more likely to build green. We find that the actions of local governments, rather than those of state or federal, exert the strongest substantive influence on private decision making. Our findings contribute to understanding how governments can augment existing policy regimes by modeling the behavior they hope to inspire in other actors.     

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.     

20世纪70年代美国对波斯湾的“双柱＂政策

从二战结束到20世纪60年代末,波斯湾地区的国际关系发生了巨大变化：英国持续了一个世纪的海湾霸权已成强弩之末。1968年,英国政府宣布将于1971年从苏伊士运河以东(包括海湾地区)撤出,这为美苏进一步的竞争开辟了新场地。美国并未像1956年第二次中东战争后所为,直接填补真空,而是制定了一项新的海湾政策：“双柱”政策,