Theories of the Policy Process

by Christopher M. Weible

an endeavor to develop a science that integrates research on politics and government around a policy orientation.

Shipman, who used the term policy process to denote a needed area of study that integrates politics, policy, and administration.

an intricately interconnected process for seeking satisfaction of societal values.”

the phenomenon of policy processes refers to the interactions that occur over time between public policies and surrounding actors, events, contexts, and outcomes.

Public policy is defined as the deliberate decisions—actions and nonactions—of a government or an equivalent authority toward specific objectives.

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Public policy interactions involve actors—individuals or collectives such as organizations, networks, or coalitions—and their attributes, including their knowledge, values, beliefs, interests, strategies, and resources.

The context of a public policy is the setting around which the interactions involving public policy happen.

The outcomes of policy processes are the short- or long-term consequences or impacts of public policy on a society.

A process refers to the continuous points in time (e.g., usually in terms of actors’ decisions and actions, events, and outcomes) that constitute policy processes.

This volume offers seven different theories of policy process research that meet, to various extents and ways, the criteria outlined above for their inclusion in the discussion.

Nicole Herweg, Nikolaos Zahariadis, and Reimut Zohlnhöfer (2017), covers the Multiple Streams Framework. The Multiple Streams Framework depicts a process that emphasizes timing in the merging of problem, political, and policy streams in the creation of windows of opportunity for both agenda setting and decision making.

Frank R. Baumgartner, Bryan D. Jones, and Peter B. Mortensen (2017), is on the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory. Under this theory, scarce attention drives incremental and punctuated patterns of policy change over time.

Policy Feedback Theory, coauthored by Suzanne Mettler and Mallory SoRelle (2017), takes a different perspective. Drawing on the notion that policies shape politics, the Policy Feedback Theory seeks to understanding what happens after a policy is adopted, with an emphasis on resource and interpretive effects on mass publics.

coauthored by Hank C. Jenkins-Smith, Daniel Nohrstedt, Christopher M. Weible, and Karin Ingold (2017). The Advocacy Coalition Framework deals with ongoing patterns of conflict and concord as reflections of different beliefs, situations fostering belief change and learning, and rationales for major and minor policy change.

Elizabeth A. Shanahan, Michael D. Jones, Mark K. McBeth, and Claudio M. Radaelli (2017) coauthored Chapter 5 on the Narrative Policy Framework. This relatively new theory focuses on the politics of storytelling and the impacts on public policy.

Edella Schlager and Michael Cox (2017), summarizes the Institutional Analysis and Development framework and its offspring, the Social-Ecological Systems framework. Both frameworks are extremely versatile, with an exceptionally

approach policy change by looking at the reasons, speed, and patterns of adoption or rejection of policy proposals across government units, as found in Berry and Berry’s (2017) summary of innovation and diffusion models.

Part II of this volume includes three summary chapters. The first (Chapter 8), by Tanya Heikkila and Paul Cairney (2017), provides a comparison and critique of the theories in this anthology. Given the importance of the comparative approach in advancing policy process theory, in Chapter 9 Jale Tosun and Samuel Workman (2017) provide tips and strategies for using the theories to conduct comparative research. The final chapter, by Christopher M. Weible (2017), offers an overview of the status of the field and general strategies for moving forward and climbing upward.

Ecology of Games (Lubell 2013), the Policy Regime Perspective (May and Jochim 2013), the Institutional Collective Action Framework (Feiock 2013), and the Collective Learning Framework (Heikkila and Gerlak 2013).

The best strategy is to interpret how the different theories provide insight into policy process rather than to impose an artificial categorization on them.

One of the reasons for the high number of MSF applications could be that the conditions under which policies are made increasingly resemble the framework’s assumptions

MSF was originally developed for the analysis of agenda setting processes,

garbage can model of organizational choice.

MSF’s basic assumptions deal with ambiguity, time constraints, problematic preferences, unclear technology, fluid participation, and stream independence.

organized anarchies, such as universities, national governments, and inter...

Instead of assuming that policymaking is an exercise in rational problem solving, the MSF negates the existence of a rational solution to a given problem. In contrast, the MSF assumes that because of ambiguity, a multitude of solutions to a given problem exists.

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Policymakers operate under significant time constraints and often do not have the luxury of taking their time to make a decision.

because many issues vie for attention, policymakers sense an urgency to address them and to “strike while the iron is hot.” Consequently, time constraints limit the range and number of alternatives to which attention is given.

Problematic policy preferences emerge in the presence of ambiguity and time constraints.

actors’ policy preferences are not fixed and exogenously given but emerge during (inter)action. To use economic terms, ambiguity and time constraints result in intransitive and incomplete policy preferences.

technology refers to work processes that turn inputs into products.

members of an organized anarchy are aware of only their individual responsibilities and exhibit only rudimentary knowledge of how their job fits into the overall mission of the organization, we speak of unclear technology.

Unclear technology is complicated by fluid participation.

Fluid participation means that the composition of decision making bodies is subject to constant change—either because it varies with the concrete decision to be made or because turnover is high.

In a nutshell, the MSF assumes that political problems, policy solutions, and politics—referred to as problem stream, policy stream, and political stream—develop mostly independently of each other.

Because consensus building in the political stream and in the policy stream takes different forms, these streams also have their own dynamic (Kingdon 2011). In the political stream, the mode of interaction is bargaining; in the policy stream, it is persuasion.

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The MSF’s starting point is the notion of stream independence. Nonetheless, if an issue is to gain agenda prominence, and is ultimately to be decided on, these independent streams need to come together at some point. The opportunity to bring these streams together arises if a “policy window” (sometimes called “window of opportunity”) opens.

because there is no natural or inevitable connection between a problem and a solution, according to MSF thinking, the two often have to be coupled together by a policy entrepreneur and presented to receptive policymakers.

According to the MSF, problems are conditions that deviate from policymakers’ or citizens’ ideal states and that “are seen as public in the sense that government action is needed to resolve them”

Nonetheless, many conditions deviate from citizens’ or policymakers’ ideal states, and not all of them receive political attention.

Nevertheless, policymakers are made aware of numerous problems on a daily basis, and it is impossible to pay attention to all of them because policymakers can attend to only a limited number of issues at any given time

Thus, whether a problem receives policymakers’ attention also depends upon which other problems are currently discussed.

if a problem jeopardizes a policymaker’s reelection, it will probably be defined as a relevant problem the policymaker needs to attend to.

Thus, MSF does not see problems (and their severity) as objective facts but rather as social constructs.

problem broker only argues that something must be done about a specific condition, whereas the policy entrepreneur suggests solutions to the problem.

In the policy stream, policy alternatives are generated in policy communities. A policy community “is mainly a loose connection of civil servants, interest-groups, academics, researchers and consultants (the so-called hidden participants), who engage in working out alternatives to the policy problems of a specific policy field”

Although the number of ideas floating around in the primeval soup originally is quite large, the process of softening up filters out many of them until a limited number of viable policy alternatives emerges, each backed by a substantial part of the policy community. Only these alternatives will receive serious consideration.

The gestation period of ideas in the policy stream varies from rapid to gradual. The content ranges from totally new to a minor extension of the old. The typology that emerges from these criteria yields four categories: quantum (rapid propulsion of new ideas); emergent (gradual gestation of new ideas); convergent (rapid gestation of old ideas); and gradualist (slow gestation of marginal extensions of existing policies)

Less integrated policy communities, those that are larger in size and interact in a competitive mode, are more likely to facilitate a quantum to gradualist evolution of ideas. More integrated, that is, smaller and consensual policy communities, are likely to follow an emergent to convergent pattern.

External influences on the policy stream should also be considered. For example, Lovell (2016) finds that MSF must be supplemented with theoretical insights from policy mobility as ideas move across national boundaries.