2024/11/01 by Geoboo Song, Gwen Arnold, Melissa K. Merry +9 · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Social Policy and Reform Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/psj.12574
openalex publication_date 2024/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/14
Welcome to PSJ 52(4), our final regular issue of the year! We are excited to showcase 12 outstanding articles that discuss a diverse array of policy theories, topics, and research methodologies, each shedding light on the policy process and its practical applications. This distinct selection underscores PSJ's dedication to cultivating rich, interdisciplinary dialogues that advance the field. This issue marks a significant milestone for PSJ as we introduce four short articles for the first time, along with our regular research articles. Included are two Perspectives and two Research Notes, offering concise yet valuable insights into policy scholarship. As usual, of course, we present eight exceptional PSJ research articles that contribute to meaningful theoretical discussions, methodological innovation, and greater engagement within the policy community. Before delving into these exciting articles featured in this issue, we are pleased to share some important updates regarding PSJ operations. First, we experienced some changes in our core editorial team. Two key members of the PSJ editorial team have recently stepped down. Dr. Aaron Smith-Walter (University of Massachusetts-Lowell), one of PSJ's Associate Editors who has been with us since 2019, stepped down to prioritize his responsibilities at his home institution. Ms. Nataliia Borozdina (University of Arkansas), one of PSJ's Editorial Associates, also stepped down to focus on completing her Public Policy PhD dissertation. Both Aaron and Nataliia played pivotal roles in shaping PSJ into the journal it is today. We are deeply grateful for their contributions and wish them all the best in their future endeavors. At the same time, we are excited to welcome two promising new editorial assistants, Mr. Travis Wagher and Ms. Annette Nyoni, who are both graduate students from the University of Arkansas. Their fresh insights and energy will be invaluable as we continue to improve our editorial processes and enhance the journal's offerings. We look forward to working with them as they take on these important roles. Second, several members of the PSJ editorial team, including Dr. Gwen Arnold (PSJ Associate Editor), Dr. Briana Huett (PSJ Managing Editor), and Dr. Geoboo Song (PSJ Editor-in-Chief), attended this year's American Political Science Association (APSA) conference held in Philadelphia last September. There, we engaged in meaningful conversations with the Public Policy Section leaders and members, discussing the current status of the journal and its role in advancing policy scholarship. These interactions reaffirm our commitment to shaping the future of the field and to furthering PSJ's impact within the policy community. Third, we are thrilled to announce several notable recognitions received at the APSA meeting. Dr. Chris Koski (PSJ Editorial Board Member) and Dr. Paul Manson received the prestigious Theodore J. Lowi Policy Studies Journal Best Article Award for their PSJ article “Policy design receptivity and target populations: A social construction framework approach to climate change policy.” Additionally, Dr. Mark Lubell (PSJ Editorial Board Member) was honored with the Elinor Ostrom Career Achievement Award from APSA's STEP (Science, Technology, and Environmental Politics) Section. Finally, Dr. Annemieke van den Dool was awarded the Evan Ringquist Best Paper Award for her PSJ article “The multiple streams framework in nondemocracy: The infeasibility of a national ban on live poultry sales in China.” We extend our sincere congratulations to these distinguished policy scholars for their impactful contributions to the field. Fourth, we are pleased to share that the PSJ Virtual Special Issue on Policing is now available. Curated by Guest Editors Drs. Jack Mewhirter (University of Tennessee-Knoxville) and James Wright (Arizona State University), this special issue addresses one of the most critical topics in contemporary policy research. The curated collection brings together impactful PSJ articles on policing policies and their far-reaching implications. We encourage you to explore this timely and important work at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1111/(ISSN)1541-0072.policing. Fifth, we are proud to announce that PSJ has surpassed the 500 new submission mark as of October 20 this year! Last year, we received 498 new submissions, and we expect to end this year with between 550 and 600 submissions. This increased submission volume reflects the growing interest in PSJ as a leading publication outlet in the field. Also, our October Scopus CiteScore has risen to 11.5, a significant improvement from 10.4 in October last year. This makes PSJ's current CiteScore higher than any other major journal in policy studies, political science, or public administration. None of these achievements would have been possible without the contributions, support, and dedication of our authors, reviewers, and readers. We extend our sincere thanks to each of you for your continued commitment to advancing the field through PSJ. Now, we will discuss 12 articles of exceptional quality published in this issue. We will begin with eight regular research articles, each offering meaningful contributions to policy process research, followed by four short articles that provide fresh perspectives and methodological discussion. The first three articles focus on key policy actors and their roles in shaping the policy process. Cavari et al. (2024) use deep learning to assess whether U.S. presidents adhere to democratic norms in their public speeches. Anderson and Lewallen (2024) examine how First Ladies engage as policy actors beyond their ceremonial roles. And, Connor and Russell (2024) explore U.S. senators' responses to the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, highlighting the uncertainty and rapid adaptation of senators' policy agendas. The next three articles delve into the political dynamics of advocacy, governance, and collective action. Finger (2024) explores how advocacy groups shape policy change through teacher evaluation subsidies, while Olivier and Vallury (2024) examine Nebraska's water governance structures and how institutional fit influences effective policy design. Weldon et al. (2024) frame antimicrobial resistance as a series of collective action problems, offering a fresh perspective on global health challenges. The final two articles emphasize learning and policy diffusion, with Strach et al. (2024) investigating how burdensome policies shape the perspectives of those responsible for implementation, and Schulze (2024) exploring the diffusion of climate change adaptation policies across local governments. We will discuss these articles in more detail in the following. Dynamic agenda representation links policy emphases from democratic inputs, such as electoral promises and public opinion polls, to policy agendas, from media to executive orders. In the United States, this suggests that primary programmatic messages (e.g., State of the Union addresses) would align with the president's daily communication. In their article “Staying on the democratic script? A deep learning analysis of the speechmaking of US presidents,” Cavari et al. (2024) explore this congruence using a new database of presidential speeches, enhanced with deep learning for sentence-level policy topic coding, covering speeches from Truman to Trump (16,523 speeches and nearly 2 million sentences). Their findings show that presidents' daily remarks strongly align with annual policy messages, keeping them on the democratic script. The role of First Lady is often seen as ceremonial, reflecting marital and maternal roles. However, modern First Ladies often set their own policy priorities, and the Office of the First Lady plays a key role in presidential administrations. In their article “Not just the nation's hostess: First Ladies as policy actors,” Anderson and Lewallen (2024) argue for studying First Ladies as policy actors by measuring their audiences, roles, and the policy content of their remarks. Using data from public speeches and statements from 1993 to 2022, the authors show that First Ladies have actively embraced a policy role and addressed policy-focused audiences over the past 30 years. Connor and Russell (2024) explore how policymakers engage with issues in a digital media climate in their article “Rapid Response and Uncertain Agendas: Senators' Response to Dobbs.” Using U.S. senators' Twitter reactions to the Roe v. Wade document leak and the Supreme Court decision, the authors analyze digital agenda dynamics and find that policymakers reacted quickly across the political spectrum, capturing shared policy attention but with varying response times and issue frames. The authors argue that during rapid agenda shifts around issues prominent on Twitter, the timing of lawmakers' responses reveals their policy priorities. Policymakers can enact policies against existing interest groups by delegating the costs of challenging them to advocacy groups. These advocacy groups provide information and capacity, freeing policymakers from reliance on vested interests. In their article “Advocacy groups, policy subsidies, and policy change: The case of teacher evaluations,” Finger (2024) conducts a 50-state regression analysis of teacher evaluation policymaking in 2010 and 2011, alongside case studies from Minnesota and Wisconsin. The author demonstrates that with advocacy group support, policymakers can successfully implement policy changes against powerful vested interests. Environmental governance literature uses “fit” to describe the extent to which rules in a governing arrangement address local conditions. Actors with decision-making authority can choose and design policy tools to tackle specific issues, boosting or reducing fit. In their article “Institutional fit and policy design in water governance: Nebraska's Natural Resources Districts,” Olivier and Vallury (2024) combine insights from policy design and common-pool resource governance literature to evaluate the degree to which plans and programs created by Nebraska's Natural Resources Districts (NRDs) are suited to their social-ecological conditions. Using semi-automated text analysis and qualitative comparative analysis, the authors examine how NRDs' plans and programs vary to fit their contexts. The authors find that while the biophysical context influences the content of plans and programs, broader top-down mandates may have an even more substantial impact on NRDs' outputs. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) causes over 1.27 million deaths annually, making it a critical health threat. Despite its urgency, large-scale global initiatives often overlook theories of collective action. A more comprehensive use of these theories is needed to avoid related risks. In their article “Analyzing antimicrobial resistance as a series of collective action problems,” Weldon et al. (2024) use Elinor Ostrom's work to develop an analytical framework for collective action problems involving public and common goods. Through this framework, the authors identify at least nine distinct collective action problems posed by AMR. This more detailed understanding offers a better basis for developing policy solutions to tackle this complex challenge. While political learning literature has explored the impact of policy on clients and those close to them, it has not focused on professionals implementing related programs. What lessons do professionals learn from providing nominally positive services to negatively viewed populations, and how are these lessons learned? In their article “Learning by proxy: How burdensome policies shape policy implementors' views of government,” Strach et al. (2024) conduct interviews, focus groups, and participant observation in substance-use disorder services and find that policy implementors learn lessons contrary to their advantaged status while witnessing government treatment of clients and experiencing how political systems treat powerless populations. Diffusion is crucial for studying policy spread and is a shared governance strategy, especially when direct coercion is not an option. However, the current mechanism-focused concept of diffusion is hard to measure and does not fully capture the governance potential of policy diffusion. In their article, “The soft channels of policy diffusion: Insights from local climate change adaptation policy,” Schulze (2024) introduces a new channel-centered framework that identifies six soft policy diffusion channels: autonomous, collaborative, exemplary, persuasive, organized, and funded diffusion. The framework is tested by examining local climate change adaptation policy using survey data from 190 municipalities in Hessen, Germany. The author demonstrates that local adaptation in Hessen is linked to several government interventions, such as policy models, climate networks, and grant programs. Yet, the variety of adaptation measures is connected to informal exchanges between municipalities. External grants are more effective in larger municipalities for institutionalizing adaptation. The following two Perspectives articles offer unique and thought-provoking viewpoints on policy processes. Zaki (2024) explores the darker side of policy learning, highlighting how it can sometimes lead to value destruction rather than improvement, challenging the assumption that learning always enhances policy outcomes. Maor (2024) takes an emotional approach to the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF), offering a novel lens for understanding how emotions influence decision-making in policy processes and contribute to shaping policy agendas. For decades, policy learning has been perceived as a force for the common good aimed at creating public value through problem-solving. While learning can indeed foster value creation, it also has a darker side where it can lead to value destruction. However, this aspect of policy learning is underexplored, especially beyond meso-level policy and organizational mishaps. In their article “Hello darkness my old friend: How policy learning can contribute to value destruction,” Zaki (2024) uses policy learning and value theories to outline two types of policy learning failures that can destroy public value: misdirected learning design failures (unintentional and cybernetic) and normative failures (intentional and deontological). This work contributes to the literature by exploring the dark side of learning, expanding our understanding of learning outcomes beyond organizational impacts, and developing new insights into value destruction mechanisms. Emotions are central to human behavior and significantly influence policymaking. The Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) includes the concept of “public mood” in the political stream, but it mainly refers to a fleeting, less intense emotional state not tied to a specific event or policy. In their article “An emotional perspective on the Multiple Streams Framework,” Maor (2024) addresses this gap by utilizing insights from political psychology, interpreting the MSF through an emotional lens. The author explores the links between emotions and the MSF's assumptions and structures by refining concepts, such as the emotional agenda window, emotional decision window, and emotional policy entrepreneurs. The author concludes by showing how an emotional perspective on the MSF can help scholars create nuanced hypotheses, move beyond metaphorical language, and determine when policy seeks a rationale. Lastly, the following two Research Notes present innovative methodological and experimental approaches to policy research. Zufall and Scott (2024) introduce a syntactic measurement tool for analyzing governance networks using textual data, applying this approach to water management plans to showcase its potential for examining complex policy documents. Liu (2024) explores partisan collaboration in local government policy adoption through an experimental study, shedding light on how local government officials navigate political divides to collaborate on policy initiatives. In their article “Syntactic measurement of governance networks from textual data, with application to water management plans,” Zufall and Scott (2024) present an automated workflow to extract network data from policy documents using natural language processing, part-of-speech tagging, and syntactic dependency parsing to represent relationships between entities in text. With a corpus of regional groundwater management plans, the authors demonstrate unique graph motifs from syntactic relationships and how document-level syntax can be combined to develop large-scale graphs. This method complements existing public management and governance research by (1) expanding the geographic and temporal scope of data collection and (2) enabling customized representations of governance systems, especially by creating graphs with diverse node and edge types. Partisanship is central to the policy process, but its effect on policymakers' collaborative strategies is unclear and under-explored. In their article “Partisan collaboration in policy adoption: An experimental study with local government officials,” Liu (2024) conducts a conjoint experiment with municipal officials across the United States to examine how co-partisanship influences policy collaboration and impacts its collaboration attributes, such as resource allocation, trust, and outcomes. The results show that a partner's co-partisanship significantly increases the likelihood of adopting a program. Co-partisan proposals generally improve the appeal of collaborative attributes. The consistent effect across ideologies and subgroups indicates that party identity is rooted in in-group loyalty and significantly influences collaboration. In conclusion, we are very excited about this issue and the exceptional contributions it brings to the policy community. As we wrap up the year with this final regular issue, we hope that you find the articles insightful and inspiring. We are also planning to release an extra Policy Theory & Practice (PT&P) special issue later this year. Thank you again for your continued support and contributions to PSJ. Take care, and see you in 2025!