Policy Change: An Advocacy Coalition Framework Perspective

2017/09/20 by Jonathan J. Pierce, Holly L. Peterson, Katherine C. Hicks · 5 citations
Decision Sciences · Social Sciences · #Evaluation and Performance Assessment #Policy Transfer and Learning #Public Policy and Administration Research

paper · doi:10.1111/psj.12223

openalex publication_date 2017/09/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/27

Abstract

One purpose of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is to explain policy change. Previous holistic reviews of the ACF by Weible, Sabatier, and McQueen (2009) and Pierce, Peterson, Jones, Garrard, and Vu (2017) of the framework have not explicitly analyzed all the concepts and their interactions in a systematic manner. To address this gap and inform scholars and practitioners about past findings, strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for future research, this article analyzes how the ACF's theory of policy change is applied to 148 policy processes among 67 journal articles from 2007 to 2014. Similar to Weible et al. (2009), this research finds the frequent use of multiple primary pathways to policy change, infrequent use of many of the ACF's concepts, a plurality of applications in the environment and energy domain, comparison of subsystems, and a need for greater clarity and transparency among applications. Unlike Weible et al. (2009), this article explores associations between primary pathways and policy domains, the frequency of associations between primary pathways and secondary components, policy change and stasis, and identifies threats to internal validity of key ACF concepts.

Citations

• A River Runs Through It: A Multiple Streams Meta‐Review
• State Lottery Adoptions as Policy Innovations: An Event History Analysis
• An advocacy coalition framework of policy change and the role of policy-oriented learning therein
• Policy Change and Learning in Response to Extreme Flood Events in Hungary: An Advocacy Coalition Approach
• Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches to Implementation Research: a Critical Analysis and Suggested Synthesis
• Reconceptualizing Major Policy Change in the Advocacy Coalition Framework: A Discourse Network Analysis of German Pension Politics
• The Measurement of Observer Agreement for Categorical Data

Cited by

• Coalition Breakdown and Subsystem Exit
• Beyond wildfire crisis: explaining policy changes in the wildfire governance subsystem in Argentina through longitudinal analysis
• Using Cultural Theory to Specify the Policy Actors, Belief Systems, and Sources of Coalition, Conflict, Stability, and Change in Policy Advocacy Coalitions and Environmental Resource Policies
• A guide to policy analysis as a research method
• Theorizing the functions and patterns of agency in the policymaking process

Related

• Evaluating the Advocacy Coalition Framework
• Sharpening Advocacy Coalitions
• Advocacy coalitions, beliefs, and learning: An analysis of stability, change, and reinforcement
• The Advocacy Coalition Index: A new approach for identifying advocacy coalitions
• Policy Narratives and Policy Processes