Theories of the Policy Process

by Christopher M. Weible

Overcoming threats to collective action.

Actors form coalitions and overcome threats to collective action on the basis of three rationales

First, similar beliefs among allies reduce the transaction costs for coordination.

Second, actors are involved in policy subsystems at different levels of intensity and, thus, some engage in weak forms of coordination (sharing information) and others in strong forms of coordina...

Third, actors often experience the devil shift and, therefore, exaggerate the costs of inact...

Principal and auxiliary coalition actors. Network analysis techniques have shown that some coalition actors are more central to a coalition than others and that sometimes actors rarely interact with their allies.

distinction is made between actors who are principal and those who are auxiliary to a coalition

Resources, strategies, and activities. Coalitions are marked not only by shared beliefs and coordination patterns but also by their resources.

Policy-oriented learning is one prominent pathway within the ACF for the explanation of policy change and plays a central role in belief change and reinforcement of members of advocacy coalitions.

Policy-oriented learning is defined as “enduring alternations of thought or behavioral intentions that result from experience and which are concerned with the attainment or revision of the precepts of the belief system of individuals or of collectives” (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993, 42).

four categories of explanatory factors.

Attributes of forums. Forums are the venues where coalitions interact, debate, and possibly negotiate.

the forum’s institutional arrangement, affect the extent that learning occurs among allies and opponents.

degree of openness in participating (open vs. closed forums) and the extent that participating actors share a common analytical training and norms of conduct.

Level of conflict between coalitions. Level of conflict relates to the extent that actors perceive a threat to their policy core beliefs from their opponents’ objectives or actions.

Attributes of the stimuli. Attributes of the stimuli relates to the type of information and experience coalition actors are exposed to.

The more intractable an issue, the lower the level of cross-coalition learning expected.

Attributes of actors. Attributes of the individual actors include their belief system, resources, strategies, and network contacts.

These four attributes can be found in the following five hypotheses on policy- oriented learning within the ACF:

Learning Hypothesis 1. Policy-oriented learning across belief systems is most likely when there is an intermediate level of informed conflict between the two coalitions.

Learning Hypothesis 2. Policy-oriented learning across belief systems is most likely when there exists a forum that is: (1) prestigious enough to force professionals from different coalitions to participate and (2) dominated by professional norms.

Learning Hypothesis 3. Problems for which accepted quantitative data and theory exist are more conducive to policy-oriented learning across belief systems than those in which data and theory are generally qualitative, quite subjective, or altogether lacking.

Learning Hypothesis 4. Problems involving natural systems are more conducive to policy-oriented learning across belief systems than those invo...

Learning Hypothesis 5. Even when the accumulation of technical information does not change the views of the opposing coalition, it can have important impacts on policy—at least in the short run—by altering the views of policy brokers.

Studies have found that learning is more likely to occur with tractable issues, with intermediate levels of conflict, and with the availability of scientific and technical information

“Narratives are the lifeblood of politics”—this appears to be our refrain. Politicians, political strategists, and media reporters understand intuitively that how a story is rendered is as important to policy success and political longevity as are which actions are undertaken.

The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) is a theory of the policy process3 whose central question turns an empirical eye on the truth claim of the power of narrative: Do narratives play an important role in the policy process?

The NPF starts with the assertion that the power of policy narratives is something worth understanding. The basic reasons for doing so are twofold. First, policy debates are necessarily fought on the terrain of narratives, constituted by both formal institutional venues (e.g., floor debates and testimonies in the House or lower chambers) and informal venues (e.g., media, interest group websites, Twitter, YouTube, blogs).

Second, narratives are often asserted to affect the policy process at different points—policy decisions, implementation, regulation, evaluation, and so forth. Thus, the NPF contends that understanding the role of narratives is critical to understanding the policy proc...

To date, however, systematic approaches to the understanding of the role of policy narratives in the public policy process are limited but emergent.

By 2000, two camps emerged over what constitutes legitimate public policy theory: postpositivists, who understand policy as contextualized through narratives and social constructions and more positivist- oriented theorists (Sabatier 2000, 137),4 whose approach is based on clear concepts and propositions, causal drivers, prediction, and falsification. The NPF was developed in response to these debates, ultimately conceiving of the framework as a “bridge” (Shanahan et al. 2013, 455) between divergent policy process approaches by holding that narratives both socially construct reality and can be measured empirically.5

Narrative scholars frequently describe narratives in terms of their content and form. Form refers to the structure of narratives, and content refers to the policy context and subject matter.

the NPF embraces a structuralist6 interpretation of narrative, asserting that policy narratives have precise narrative elements (form) that can be generalized across space and time to different policy contexts (see Jones and McBeth 2010; Jones, McBeth, and Shanahan 2014).

NPF addresses this problem of narrative relativity by empirically studying content in terms of strategy and belief systems.

four policy narrative core elements:

1. Setting: Policy narratives always have something to do with policy problems and are situated in specific policy contexts. As such, the setting of a policy narrative consists of policy phenomena such as legal and constitutional parameters, geography, evidence, economic conditions, norms, or other features

2. Characters: Policy narratives must have at least one character. As with any good story, there may be victims who are harmed, villains who do the harm, and heroes who provide or promise to provide relief from the harm and presume to solve the problem (Ney 2006; Stone 2012; Verweij et al. 2006).

3. Plot: The plot situates the characters and their relationship in time and space.

4. Moral of the story: In a policy narrative, policy solutions are the moral or normative actions incarnate.

With the NPF, however, the variation in narrative content can be systematically studied through narrative strategies and the belief systems invoked within different policy narratives.

Narrative strategies are used in an attempt to influence the policy process. Although there may be additional narrative strategies operationalized in the future, current NPF scholarship has focused on the following three strategies: scope of conflict, causal mechanisms, and the devil-angel shift.

1. Scope of conflict: Influenced by E. E. Schattschneider (1960) and more recently by Pralle (2006), NPF scholars have studied the strategic construction of policy narratives to either expand or contain policy issues (e.g., Crow and Lawlor 2016; Gupta et al. 2014; McBeth, Shanahan, et al. 2010; Shanahan et al. 2013).

narrative strategies that aim to expand the s...

narrative strategies that contain an issue to the status quo

2. Causal mechanisms: Causal mechanisms strategically arrange narrative elements to assign responsibility and blame for a policy problem.

3. Devil-angel shift: Weible, Sabatier, and McQueen (2009, 132–133) describe the devil shift in this way: “The devil shift predicts that actors will exaggerate the malicious motives, behaviors, and influence of opponents” (also see Sabatier, Hunter, and McLaughlin 1987).

The angel shift, on the other hand, occurs when groups or policy actors emphasize their ability to solve a problem and de-emphasize villains (Shanahan et al. 2013).

the extent to which the narrator identifies the opposing narrators as villains in comparison to how much the narrator ide...

The NPF identifies operational measures of policy beliefs through narrative elements such as characters (e.g., Shanahan, McBeth, and Hathaway 2011; Shanahan et al. 2013) and other symbolic, metaphorical, or contextual means by which collective understandings of the policy subsystem (and the processes and objects therein) are generated.

NPF’s core assumptions.