Theories of the Policy Process

by Christopher M. Weible

At the mesolevel, policy actors may derive from institutions or organizations (e.g., a member of the media or the British Parliament), play different roles (e.g., citizen or political leader), and organize in networks (e.g., advocacy coalitions, interest groups, organizations). These policy actors, however arranged and derived, develop or adopt policy narratives to reflect their policy preferences.

the NPF provides guidance on how to operationalize narrative components to test changes in policy beliefs over time, both within and between policy actors.

Policy subsystems. As with many policy process theories, NPF scholarship studies public policymaking within and across policy subsystems. Public policy issues within policy subsystems are either dominated by one constellation of policy actors or contested by many. Policy subsystems consist of a variety of actors (e.g., elected officials, interest groups, experts, judicial actors, media) who vie to control a policy issue.

Although a focus on individual policy subsystems is the norm for policy process approaches and current NPF scholarship, evolving research suggests that examining multiple subsystems (Jones and Jenkins-Smith 2009) or policy regimes (May and Jochim 2013) could strengthen our understanding of the policy process.

The NPF and policy actors in the subsystem. The NPF has historically employed coalitions as the way to understand the organization of policy actors; the NPF now recognizes that not all policy debates emerge from coalitions alone. Some debates occur between interest groups and organizations (e.g., environmental and energy companies);

the NPF seeks a more comprehensive view of the generators of narratives in the policy process while maintaining that approaches to understanding coalition formation and behavior remain an important way to understand policy actor behavior.

instrumental approach, and it focuses on Harold Lasswell’s ([1936] 1990) classic instrumental definition of politics: “who gets what, when, and how,” and sees policy actor interests as a primary driver of coalitional formation and change (Jenkins-Smith, St. Clair, and Woods 1991, 853n2).

The second “line of research holds that members of advocacy coalitions adhere to hierarchically structured ‘belief systems,’ in which the most basic beliefs (e.g., fundamental ontological and normative axioms) constrain more specific or operational beliefs and policy positions” (852).

Several hypotheses at the mesolevel have been developed to test relationships with key dependent variables.

The dominant methodology at the mesolevel has been content analysis.

Meso Hypothesis 1: Issue expansion as a narrative strategy. McBeth et al. (2007) used E. E. Schattschneider (1960) to argue that when groups perceive themselves as losing, they construct a policy narrative to expand the issue.

Meso Hypothesis 2: Issue containment as a narrative strategy. Again using Schattschneider (1960), McBeth et al. (2007) empirically demonstrate that winning groups construct narratives to contain a policy issue by using political strategies of concentrating costs and diffusing benefits when discussing their policy preference.

Meso Hypothesis 4: Devil-angel shift. A few studies have examined the devil and angel shifts.

some studies (i.e., Heikkila et al. 2014 and Crow and Berggren 2014) found no statistical association between winning and losing groups and the use of this strategy in their policy debates.

Meso Hypothesis 5: Coalitional glue and policy beliefs. NPF scholarship has consistently found statistically significant differences between opposing interest groups and coalition use of policy beliefs (e.g., McBeth, Shanahan, and Jones 2005; Shanahan et al. 2013; McBeth, Lybecker, and Garner 2010).

Meso Hypothesis 7: Coalition membership. Shanahan et al. (2008) explore the role of the media as conduit of policy stakeholders or as a contributor in policy debates. This study helped determine that media do contribute to policy debates.

Meso Hypothesis 9: Role of narrative elements in policy communication.

collective use of narrative elements as “narrativity.”

association with narrativity and policy success.

this hypothesis remains untested with digital media such as Twitter.

Meso Hypothesis 10: Role of framing. Iyengar (1990) and Iyengar and Simon (1997) are the originators of the concepts of episodic (specific) and ...

both national and local media outlets employed thematic frames in their narrative (as measured by the casting of the victim), but local coverage used thematic framing at a statistically higher rate than the national media did.

Macrolevel narratives are “communal, historical narratives that are expansive enough to explain a variety of human events across time and place” (Danforth 2016, 584).

socially constructed realities that manifest as institutions, society, and cultural norms.

relatively...

macrolevel narratives can, and do, change over time and space, resulting in marked institutional and cultural shifts

These macrolevel narratives nonetheless are composed of narrative elements, beliefs, and strategies.

Although each level of analysis provides rich areas for NPF research, there is a growing interest in understanding the connectedness between the macro-meso-micro levels.

McBeth and Shanahan were attempting to identify the macrolevel narrative driving mesolevel coalitional politics.

The macrolevel condition identified in their study as driving the policy process was consumerism.

the 2004 McBeth and Shanahan article provides a way to link the three levels of analysis in the NPF. Importantly, it also draws our attention to the central role of the policy marketer in shaping that opinion. As such, the policy marketer is potentially a critical link between micro- and mesolevel research.

Crow (2012) and Gray and Jones (2016), however, offer a potential link between the microlevel and mesolevel that may allow NPF researchers to extract more out of the microlevel than just studies of public opinion.

Crow (2012) suggests researchers examine how elite actors process and convey policy narratives. Such approaches could tap the NPF’s homo narrans model of the individual to better understand mesolevel phenomena such as the behavior of policy marketers and other elites.

the use and interpretation of policy narratives by key individual elite players within a particular coalition and, more specifically, with how that use shapes coalition composition.

Four substantive new directions have opened up for the NPF. The first is the prospect of NPF comparative analyses, with policy issue and theoretical concept comparisons across countries becoming a rich new direction of research. A second avenue is recent work that focuses on a deeper exploration of the use of evidence in NPF analyses. A third path follows the emergence of digital media as valid narrative data. Finally, we posit a new NPF hypothesis on policy change grounded in policy narrative learning.

Comparative approaches tend to fall into two categories: country comparisons (e.g., case study comparing countries) and concept comparisons (e.g., comparison of policy process theory constructs in different contexts) (Orvis and Drogus 2014).

the central research question of NPF remains relevant when applied to a comparative context: What is the role of narratives in the policy process in different regime contexts?

Cross-country comparisons focus on understanding differences and similarities across regimes (Orvis and Drogus 2014).

for both diffusion-oriented research (e.g., how different countries respond to policy narrative inspired by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, European Union, or World Bank) and policy area research (e.g., how two structurally similar political systems differ in their narratives of a similar policy problem).

One can argue that narratives evolve at a differential pace in the politics stream, the policy stream, and the problem stream of the Multiple Streams Framework (Kingdon 2003).

Gupta et al. (2014) find that winning groups use science in a way that demonstrates certainty in the status quo, whereas losing groups use science to show uncertainty about unwanted public policy.

evidence cannot be separated from the use of narrative elements such as setting, moral of the story, characters, and plot.

NPF studies commonly derive policy narrative data from “public consumption documents”—the policy narratives disseminated by policy actors through newsletters, speeches, editorials, and sometimes media accounts (McBeth, Shanahan, and Jones 2005). The proliferation of digital media and the relative ease with which these data can be collected have resulted in several mesolevel NPF studies that expressly explore whether policy narratives exist in these digital venues (e.g., YouTube, Twitter, blogs).

Many policy scholars point to policy learning as a way to understand policy change.

The Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework is conceptually simple, but theoretically rich. Conceptually, it consists of seven components—an action situation, actors, rules (in use), community attributes, physical and material attributes, outcomes—and evaluative criteria. It is most useful in developing theories and models that seek to explain the “logic, design and performance of institutional arrangements” (Ostrom 2014, 269).

seek to explain how actors’ behavior is guided and constrained by institutions and how, in turn, human behavior shapes and forms institutional arrangements.

Compatibility means that these theories use variables representing different dimensions of the seven components making up the framework to explain the interactions between institutional arrangements and human behavior.

the Social-Ecological Systems (SES) framework, that consists of the seven objects, plus others, but that rests on a diagnostic logic. The diagnostic logic, because it focuses on identifying more limited sets of variables that account for an outcome, tends to highlight the important role of models in theory development, although its full potential to do so has barely been tapped.

the role of institutional arrangements is not as prominent in the SES framework as it is in the IAD; rather, the SES emphasizes the interactions between actors and ecological systems (as mediated by governing arrangements).

“In the case of the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework, useful knowledge consists of understanding the logic, design, and performance of institutional arrangements in a wide variety of settings and at different scales” (Ostrom 2014, 269).