Theories of the Policy Process

by Christopher M. Weible

The category of concepts and variables that has received more limited attention than the others has consistently been labeled “attributes of the community.

“norms,” “culture,” and “world views” as constituting aspects of the community (Ostrom 1999, 2005; Poteete, Janssen, and Ostrom 2010).

Many applications of the IAD framework explicitly or implicitly involve linked action situations (McGinnis 2011). Action situations typically link through the outcomes of one situation directly affecting one or more of the components of another action situation.

Figure 6.3 links action situations through what Kiser and Ostrom (1982) call the three worlds of action, and what currently are called levels of analysis.

through the creation and application of rules.

“All rules are nested in another set of rules that define how the first set o...

Collective choice rules, which guide and constrain collective choice levels of action, define how operational-level rules are devised and adopted, how monitoring of operational-level actions is to occur, and so forth.

Constitutional choice rules, which guide and constrain constitutional choice levels of action, define how collective choice rules are devised and adopted, how collective choice activities are monitored and enforced, and so forth.

Levels of analysis are among the most difficult of the IAD concepts to work with and have led to considerable confusion, especially among graduate students who are just learning the framework or scholars who do not regularly work within the tradition. Part of the confusion stems from habitual thinking that regular, everyday people cannot also be rule creators,

Some confusion can also stem from attempting to assign a level of government to a level of analysis.

But much of the confusion comes from trying to apply complex concepts to messy, complex settings.

Beginning with operational situations at the top of the figure, provision, production, distribution, appropriation, assignment, and consumption are distinctive sets of activities.

Collective choice and constitutional choice situations are not restricted to rule making, that is, prescribing and invoking, but such situations also include rule monitoring, rule clarifying, and sanctioning of rule violations.

Most of the E. Ostrom design principles point to institutional arrangements and activities that occur at the collective choice and constitutional choice levels of action.

the framework makes clear that rule activity is not delegated to a handful of actors, such as policy elites, or interest groups. Rather, rule activity may be engaged in by many actors.

“A SES is an ecological system intricately linked with and affected by one or more social systems.”

“framework further elaborates the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework developed by scholars at Indiana University … and the framework developed by Anderies et al…. for examining the robustness of SESs” (Ostrom 2007a, 15182).

social-ecological system (SES) as consisting of four main types of components: governance systems, actors, resource systems, and resource units. The framework includes two other components as well: (1) social, economic, and political settings and (2) related ecosystems,

These components are described as constituting the first “tier”; the framework then associates each of them with a set of objects at what Ostrom labeled the second tier in a multitiered framework.

the SES framework has not succeeded in important ways. There are several likely reasons for this, some resulting from the framework itself and some resulting from the challenges faced by any group of scientists who need to collaborate to produce generalizable findings. Regarding the framework itself, the most important factor is likely that there are no instructions to guide the user in how to implement it.

The concept and use of a framework are not widely recognized or used in the social sciences. Whereas most scholars and analysts are comfortable with theories and models, organizing knowledge at a more general level is rarely pursued.

The IAD framework is likely to continue to provide the infrastructure for research well into the future.

Although most actions by governments are incremental in that they marginally modify existing programs or practices, and much research about policymaking seeks to explain why it tends to be incremental, ultimately every government program can be traced back to some nonincremental innovation.

explain the process through which governments adopt new programs.

The dominant practice in the policy innovation literature is to define an innovation as a program that is new to the government adopting it (Walker 1969, 881). This means that a governmental jurisdiction can innovate by adopting a program that numerous other jurisdictions established many years before.

not to study policy invention—the process through which original policy ideas are conceived.

a single policy invention can prompt numerous governmental jurisdictions to innovate, som...

these theories borrow heavily from others developed to explain innovative behavior by individuals: for example, teachers using a new method of instruction (studied by education scholars), farmers adopting hybrid seeds and fertilizers (studied by rural sociologists), and consumers purchasing new products (studied by marketing scholars).

many commonalities with models that seek to explain organizational innovation.

there are two principal explanations for the adoption of a new program by a government: internal determinants and diffusion (Berry and Berry 1990).

Internal determinants explanations posit that the factors leading a jurisdiction to innovate are political, economic, or social characteristics internal to the jurisdiction.

diffusion explanations are inherently intergovernmental; they view government adoptions of policies as emulations of previ...

few policy adoptions can be explained purely as a function of (1) internal determinants (with no diffusion effects) or (2) policy diffusion (with no impact by internal factors),

during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the “single- explanation” methodologies were highly creative approaches using state-of-the-art quantitative techniques. However, more recent research has shown that these traditional methodologies are severely flawed (Berry 1994b).

Rogers (1995, 35) defines diffusion as “the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system.

we can say that policy diffusion occurs if the probability of adoption of a policy by one governmental jurisdiction is influenced by the policy choices of other governments in the system.

a variety of alternative mechanisms by which the policy choices in one jurisdiction can influence the choices of other governments.

five mechanisms have been discerned: learning, imitation, normative pressure, co...

Learning. Learning occurs when policymakers in one jurisdiction derive information about the effectiveness (or success) of a policy from previously adopting governments (Levy 1994; Braun and Gilardi 2006).

Some theories (e.g., Bayesian updating models from economics) assume that policymakers are rational and that learning is complete; each government observes all information about the effectiveness of a policy in every jurisdiction in which it has been adopted and is capable of processing all this information (Simmons, Dobbin, and Garrett 2006).

Other theories assume that gathering and processing information about policy effectively are costly, and thus policymakers are “bounded” (or constrained) in their ability to obtain and analyze information (March and Simon 1993; Meseguer 2005; Weyland 2007).

Imitation. Government A imitates government B when A adopts a policy adopted by B simply “in order to look like [B]” (Shipan and Volden 2008, 842–843). Imitation occurs because policymakers in A perceive B as worthy of emulation, prompting A to adopt any policy that B adopts independently of any evaluation of the character of the policy or its effectiveness (Simmons, Dobbin, and Garrett 2006; Meseguer 2006; Karch 2007).

“leader” governments;

large or wealthy jurisdictions or jurisdictions that have earned strong reputations or high levels of credibility (Walker 1969; Grupp and Richards 1975).

the major distinction between learning and imitation “is that learning focuses on the action (i.e., the policy being adopted by another government), while imitation focuses on the actor (i.e., the other government that is adopting the policy).”

Normative pressure. Government A succumbs to normative pressure when A adopts a policy, not because it is imitating any particular government or learning from the experience of other adopters but rather because it observes that the policy is being widely adopted by other governments and, because of shared norms, A chooses to conform (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Sugiyama 2012).

the role of experts (or “epistemic communities”) in forging a consensus on norms (Haas 1992).

Competition. A policy diffuses via competition when a government’s decision about whether to adopt the policy is motivated by the desire of its officials to achieve an economic advantage over other jurisdictions or, equivalently, to prevent other jurisdictions from securing an advantage over it.

At least two distinct types of competition mechanisms have been described in the literature; we refer to them as location-choice competition and spillover-induced competition.

In location-choice competition, governments seek to influence the location choices of individuals (persons or firms) who are in position to acquire some good in more than one jurisdiction—usually their own and at least one other (Meseguer and Gilardi 2009).