Constructing Homeland Security: An Anemic Policy Regime

This research addresses the strength of the homeland security policy regime that was constructed after the terrorist attacks of September 2001. We argue that homeland security provides a preeminent example of the challenges of developing policy regimes that focus policymaking on a common goal across diverse subsystems. All the ingredients for fashioning a powerful regime were in place after the terrorist attacks of September 2001—a common purpose, engaged stakeholders, and institutional redesign. But for a variety of reasons that we discuss, the results are far from cohesive. The lessons we draw are more general ones regarding factors that influence the strength of boundary‐spanning policy regimes.     

Beyond Subsystems: Policy Regimes and Governance

We suggest attention to policy regimes provides a fruitful means for joining the contributions of scholars who study policy processes with those who are concerned with governance challenges. Our research synthesis underscores the limits of existing theorizing about policy processes for problems that span multiple areas of policy and highlights the prospects for and limitations of governing beyond the boundaries of subsystems. We suggest new avenues for theorizing and research in policy processes based on the concept of a boundary‐spanning policy regime. We develop notions about this type of policy regime within the context of the broader literature about regimes in political science, discuss the forces that shape the strength and durability of such regimes, and provide a variety of examples. This synthesis challenges the focus of policy process scholars on subsystems and broadens the traditional focus on policymaking to consideration of the dynamics of governing.     

Reconceptualizing the Policy Subsystem: Integration with Complexity Theory and Social Network Analysis

The concept of the policy subsystem is an essential building block for several of the basic frameworks of policy process studies. Over time issues have become more complex, crossing subsystem boundaries, and so subsystems have escalated in their complexity as well. It is increasingly insufficient to study just one policy subsystem and so scholars have turned to studying boundary‐spanning regimes or policy networks. In this essay, we review the major contributions to developing the concept of a policy subsystem and trace its evolution into broader conceptualizations like issue and policy networks. We argue that the future for theories of the policy process is in more explicit integration of complexity theory and more effective modeling of subsystems with the utilization of social network analysis. In closing, we discuss the enduring nature of the concept of policy subsystems and highlight studies that continue using it in innovative ways.     

Themes and Variations: Taking Stock of the Advocacy Coalition Framework

A policy process framework that has been developed to simplify the complexity of public policy is the advocacy coalition framework (ACF). This essay reports on an analysis of 80 applications of the ACF spanning nearly 20 years. The review shows that the ACF is applicable to various substantive topics, across various geographical areas, and with other policy process theories and frameworks, including the stages heuristic. The most commonly tested hypotheses involve policy change, learning, and coalition stability. Although the hypotheses tend to be confirmed, questions remain about the membership, stability, and defection of coalition members; about the causal mechanisms linking external events and policy change; and about the conditions that facilitate cross-coalition learning. Emerging areas of research include policy subsystem interdependencies and coordination within, and between, coalitions.     

What Is Next for Policy Design and Social Construction Theory?1

The study of policy design has made great progress over the past decade in leading scholars to understand why the American political system produces certain kinds of designs rather than others, and the consequences that policy designs have for democracy. This article outlines the distinctive and important elements of policy design theory—the centrality of policy design, the attention to social constructions, the attention to policy consequences (or feed‐forward effects), and the integration of normative and empirical research and theory. It then suggests how policy design theory can complement other policy theories in guiding research and evaluating the conditions of U.S. democracy, and how in its own right it can be further developed and used to guide important inquiry about public policy's politics and social impacts.     

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.     

Greening America's Skylines: The Diffusion of Low-Salience Policies

The diffusion literature is replete with examples of highly salient policies spreading across subnational governments. However, low-salience policies that do not benefit from a groundswell of public opinion also spread across jurisdictions in patterns that appear similar to those of other, more well-known policy ideas. This research is an investigation of the mechanisms that propagate low-salience policies. I analyze the adoption of the U.S. Green Building Council's (USGBC) Leadership in Energy Efficient Design standard across 119 U.S. cities from 2000 to 2008. The investigation indicates that a knowledge broker, in this case the USGBC, occupies critical roles in linking a low-salience policy to a broader set of widely held societal values, developing a common policy vocabulary, providing a base policy that jurisdictions may freely adapt, and creating a diffusion infrastructure by acting as a communication hub for existing and interested jurisdictions to discuss innovations and progress.     

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.     

The Conditioning Effects of Policy Salience and Complexity on American Political Institutions

Years ago, Bill Gormley introduced public policy scholars to a new and innovative salience- complexity typology for regulatory policies. This typology not only helps scholars catalog numerous policies into distinct categories, but also helps explain variation in political processes. Specifically, different policies provide different incentives for political actors to be involved in policymaking. Salience encourages activity on the part of elected officials; complexity often requires policymaking outside of the public sphere. In this article, I extend Gormley's salience-complexity typology to more than just regulatory policies and confirm that levels of institutional activity vary across this range of public policies. I also expand on Gormley's contribution by differentiating the distinct impacts that policy type has on the policy activities of Congress and the presidency, and propose that institutional activity differs according to the dynamics of a policy's salience.     

Pet Sounds: Subsystems,Regimes, Policy Punctuations,and the Neglect of African American Farmers, 1935–2006

Punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) has reoriented the study of public policy and American politics in particular. In this study, we documented how a policy punctuation that appears to take hold at the macro level of the polity in the form of a policy regime has difficulty penetrating subsystem politics. We drew on subsystems theory, PET, and the latest work on policy regimes to document the resistance of the agriculture subsystem to efforts to add a civil rights dimension to agriculture policy between 1935 and 2006. We concluded that the issue evolution of agricultural support programs, and their insulation from civil rights policy, is a prime example of how subsystems use negative feedback to resist change.     

Positive Returns and Equilibrium: Simultaneous Feedback Between Public Opinion and Social Policy

This paper pushes forward political research from across disciplines seeking to understand the linkages between public opinion and social policy in democracies. It considers the thermostatic and the increasing returns perspectives as pointing toward a potentially stable set of effects running between opinion and policy. Both theoretical perspectives argue that opinion and policy are reciprocally causal, feeding back on one another. This is a general argument found in opinion‐policy literatures. However, much empirical research claims to model “feedback” effects when actually using separate unidirectional models of opinion and policy. Only a small body of research addresses opinion‐policy endogeneity directly. In this paper I consider an opinion‐policy system with simultaneous feedback and without lags. I argue that there is a theoretical equilibrium in the relationship of opinion and policy underlying the otherwise cyclical processes that link them. Given that available cross‐national data are cross‐sectional and provide limited degrees of freedom, an ideal theoretical model must be somewhat constrained in order to arrive at empirically meaningful results. In this challenging and exploratory undertaking I hope to open up the possibility of a general system of effects between public opinion and social policy and how to model them in future research. I focus on social welfare policy as it is highly salient to public interests and a costly area of government budgets, making it an area of contentious policymaking. Social policy is also a major part of the thermostatic model of opinion and policy, which was recently extended to the cross‐national comparative context (Wlezien & Soroka, 2012) providing a critical predecessor to this paper because identification of equilibrium between public opinion and social policy in any given society is greatly enhanced through comparison with other societies. This counterfactual approach helps to identify opinion‐policy patterns that may not change much within societies, but can be seen as taking on discrete trajectories between societies.     

The Making(s) of an Alternative Urban Policy: What Happens When Free Fares Come to Town?

While many urban policies and practices claim to offer an “alternative” to the “mainstream” of urban entrepreneurialism, they remain under-theorised and prone to alignment with entrepreneurial agendas. In this paper I examine fare-free public transport (FFPT) as a salient example of an alternative urban policy. Looking at Aubagne (France) and Tallinn (Estonia), I explore what happens when an alternative policy “comes to town”. I detect how FFPT enters local urban regimes, and study the (non-)participation of public transport passengers and workers in the decision-making process about whether and how to abolish public transport fares. My analysis reveals that albeit alternative policies such as FFPT seem to oppose entrepreneurialism, they may hinge on urban regimes that span across institutions, leave the local configurations of power unchallenged, and strenghten local elites. The adaptability of alternatives to diverse political and intellectual positions explains their resilience. Consequently, their radical character cannot be taken for granted and remains an object of political struggle.     

Policy coordination and selective corruption control in China

In autocracies facing widespread corruption, the allocation of the scant attention available for fighting corruption strongly affects corruption control. Although research has found that authoritarian regimes tend to fight corruption selectively, it is unknown whether and how autocracies allocate attention across different policy areas to combat corruption. We propose that single-party authoritarian regimes can steer anticorruption attention to the policy domains prioritized by the central authority through the mechanism of cross-organizational policy coordination. Using original datasets compiled from Chinese governmental and procuratorial policy papers from 1998 to 2016, we demonstrate that Chinese prosecutors direct anticorruption attention to the policy domains accentuated in the central government's major reforms. Our field interviews support this finding and reveal possible disruption of anticorruption efforts in policy domains falling off the central government's top list. Thus, we extend the research on political influence over anticorruption agencies and show that single-party regimes can instrumentalize anticorruption to serve the government's policy agenda, driving the allocation of limited anticorruption attention across policy areas.     

Unions,Parties, and the Politics of State Government Legacy Cost

Many American state governments have made extensive promises to pay for employees’ health care and other benefits in retirement. Currently estimated at over $1 trillion in unfunded liabilities, these other postemployment benefits (OPEB) are creating a major fiscal problem for state governments. In this article, we examine the politics of OPEB. We seek to explain the variation in the generosity of OPEB across U.S. states. We argue that party competition theories do not adequately explain the outcomes we observe. Instead, we draw on the emerging Schattschneiderian approach to the politics of public policy to show that public union strength conditions a party's incentives to represent unions’ interests. In states where public sector unions are strong, unions can find their way into either party's coalition. We find that Republicans are more responsive to public union interests than either their ideological brand or prior research would suggest. It is only in states where public employees are weak that Republicans can act unilaterally and enact their preference for less government spending. To test our theories, we carry out an empirical analysis using a newly assembled data set of per capita OPEB liabilities across 49 states.     

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 Influence of Organizations and Institutions on Wetland Policy Stability: The Rapanos Case

This paper uses a case study of wetland regulation in the United States to develop elements of a theory about institutional stability and change in policy processes involving large public organizations. This theoretical approach draws on the Institutional Analysis and Development framework to understand events that are not well explained by other policy theories. Our approach accounts for the theoretically unexpected outcomes of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Rapanos v. United States, which stood to change the way the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulate the filling of wetlands. We propose a typology of institutional types that operate inside public organizations, and use process tracing to show how tacit institutions, those created informally within public organizations, can play key roles in determining the outcomes of policy processes. In the Rapanos case, informal coordination mechanisms enabled regulators and members of the regulated community to preserve substantially the pre‐ruling status quo. The key role of these microlevel interactions in shaping the macrolevel behaviors of public organizations underscores the importance of further research investigating how, in similar cases, different behavioral mechanisms interact in often complex and unexpected ways to determine the outcomes of policy processes.     

Bureaucratic Leverage over Policy Choice: Explaining the Dynamics of State-Level Reforms in Telecommunications Regulation

While state governments have enjoyed greater control over regulating local telephone service providers since 1984, movement toward efficiency-based policy reform (e.g., adoption of competitive markets) has proceeded slowly. We investigate this pattern by addressing how the degree of policy discretion held by state public utility commissions (PUCs) affects reform of local telephone exchange regulation. Using precise measures of both PUC discretion and state policy changes over time, we find that states with "stronger" PUCs (more policymaking authority) are significantly more likely to move toward efficiency-based policy regimes and away from traditional rate-of-return regimes. Greater PUC discretion systematically related to state adoption of efficiency-based reforms over time suggests that regulators are using updated information about policy impacts to inform their policymaking activities. Our findings contradict a common presumption that regulatory bureaucracies are simply motivated by a desire to increase their control over policymaking. Instead, state PUCs are a key source of telecommunications policy reform in the states.     

An Angel on the Wind: How Heroic Policy Narratives Shape Policy Realities

Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) is a new and maturing theory of the policy process that takes a systematic, scientific approach to understanding the social construction of policy realities. As such, NPF serves as a bridge between postpositivists, who assert that public policymaking is contextualized through narratives and social construction, and positivists, who contend that legitimacy is grounded in falsifiable claims. The central questions of NPF are: What is the empirical role of policy narratives in the policy process and do policy narratives influence policy outcomes? First, the contributions of NPF scholarship at three levels of analysis—micro, meso, and macro—are examined. Next, necessary conditions of a policy narrative are specified, accompanied by detailed discussion of the narrative components: narrative elements, narrative strategies, and policy beliefs. Finally, an empirical illustration of NPF—a case study of Cape Wind's proposal to install wind turbines off Nantucket—is presented. Although intercoalitional differences have long been studied in the NPF scholarship, this is the first study to examine intracoalitional cohesion or the extent to which a coalition tells the same story across narrative elements, narrative strategies, and policy beliefs. NPF is a new approach to the study of the policy process that offers empirical pathways to better speculating the role of narrative in the policy process.     

Framing Food Policy: The Case of Raw Milk

Policies governing the sale of raw milk—making the sales of raw milk more permissive—are gaining traction on the legislative agendas of dozens of states. This paper examines one contributor to this movement on the policy agenda: the role of competitive framing. By combining theoretical approaches from policy studies and political psychology theories of competitive framing, we offer evidence supporting the recent relative success of raw milk activists in several state legislatures. Using an Internet survey‐based experiment with a sample size of 1,630 respondents from seven Midwestern states, we show that a frame emphasizing consumer choice and food freedom is more effective than the frame that dominates among the policy establishment, that emphasizing public health risks. This is true in both one‐sided and competitive framing contexts. We further show that those previously aware of this issue were less influenced by the public health frame than those naïve to the issue. Our results suggest that the pro‐raw milk movement may be making strides on the state policy agenda because their frames are more resonant among the public. We also highlight the advantages gained from considering psychological and policy processes simultaneously to understand policy change.     

The Effects of Risk,Beliefs, and Trust in Education Policy Networks: The Case of Autism and Special Education

There are multiple theoretical accounts of how actors address problems of collective action in policy networks, but the two most prominent hypotheses are the risk and belief homophily hypotheses. The risk hypothesis claims that relational structures (e.g., bridging, bonding) depend on the benefits actors receive from uncooperative behavior, while the belief homophily hypothesis claims that relational ties form around shared policy beliefs. This study incorporates the case of autism and special education policy, a subsystem best characterized by Berardo and Scholz's (2010) conceptualization of a low-risk environment, to test hypotheses about the influence of risk, policy beliefs, and trust on the formation on relational ties in education policy networks. Utilizing data from a 2016 network survey of public and private special education stakeholders in Virginia, results from exponential random graph models provide support for the effects of bridging structures, beliefs related to the medical model of disability, and social trust on strong (collaboration) and weak (information/advice) relational ties in policy networks. The findings reinforce the importance of using policy networks to understand how actors build connections across multiple jurisdictions and policy sectors to mitigate problems of coordination in policy decision making and implementation.