Christopher M. Weible

University of Colorado | UCD

In “The Policy Science of Harold Lasswell: Contextual Orientation and the Critical Dimension,” Torgerson argues against the simplistic classification of scholars, suggesting that stereotyping positions should be resisted or exposed as rhetorical devices rather than serious engagements. Torgerson illustrates that Lasswell was, in part, a critical po...

Although abortion policy is often discussed as a black-and-white conflict characterized by polarization and a lack of compromise, this study explores the validity of such a presupposition by asking how advocates articulate their belief systems about abortion policy and in what ways—if at all—are those beliefs shared within and across coalitions and...

Many theories and approaches to policy studies have recently begun to question and research how emotions interact with peoples' understanding and behaviors, especially in policy and politics. This paper builds on and contributes to studying emotions in policy and politics via the advocacy coalition framework (ACF). In applying Emotional‐Belief Anal...

While many policy process theories mention emotions, they have remained mostly unexplored theoretically and empirically, even as broader social science literature incorporates emotions into understanding policy process-related phenomena such as political beliefs and behaviors. This paper introduces the theoretical arguments and a method for studyin...

The sociology of emotions reveals how emotion contributes to and helps inform social and political issues. This study contributes to the literature by examining how competing advocacy coalitions ascribe emotions to their allies and opponents in the politically contentious issue of siting a gas pipeline project in the US. It analyses the emotional a...

While receiving more attention in the policy sciences in recent years, much remains unknown about policy conflicts. This research analyzes 48 in-depth qualitative interviews of people involved in, or familiar with, conflicts associated with shale oil and gas (aka “fracking”) policy proposals and decisions across 15 U.S. states. We ask the question:...

In disputes over public policy, public debates often hinge on the argument involving policy knowledge. One approach for studying policy knowledge is the Advocacy Coalition Framework, which theorizes that advocacy coalitions form around coherent beliefs partly about policy knowledge and invest in policy knowledge by working with expert allies. This...

Emotions are involved in virtually every aspect of human cognition, including information processing and decision-making. Thus, to understand political conflict and policy decision-making more fully, we must strive to understand the role of emotions in these phenomena. This paper explores expressed emotions in protests related to the policy decisio...

Success or failure of a polycentric system is a function of complex political and social processes, such as coordination between actors and venues to solve specialized policy problems. Yet there is currently no accepted method for isolating distinct processes of coordination, nor to understand how their variance affects polycentric governance perfo...

Policy conflicts are ubiquitous in many countries. Yet research on policy conflict is typically based on cases in western, democratic countries. As a result, little is known about the characteristics of policy conflicts in non‐western countries, such as China, or how these characteristics compare to western contexts. The Policy Conflict Framework (...

The world faces grand challenges that threaten our socio-economical, ecological, and political systems. Inequities, insurrections, invasions, and illiberal democracies represent a sample of the population of problems facing life as we know it. Paramount among these problems lie climate change, caused principally by human activity of burning fossil...

Although the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) emerged in Western democratic contexts, scholars increasingly apply it in other parts of the world to analyze diverse policy topics. These cross-country comparisons have provided a means for advancing comparative research, drawing lessons about policy processes, and offering opportunities to refine th...

Misperceiving political opponents as more influential and evil than they are has been described as the devil shift. More recently, the opposite phenomenon known as the angel shift has been recognised where political allies are misperceived as more influential and virtuous than they are. However, research on the devil and angel shifts has been hampe...

Across the world, public administration and policy decisions are related to diverse levels of conflict and attention. However, the degree and variance of conflict and attention remain largely unspecified. This article examines how types of energy infrastructure and characteristics of project location are associated with the distribution of conflict...

As part of Harold D. Lasswell’s policy sciences, the decisions functions emerged to explore and understand comparative policy processes. The decision functions specified different categories of purposes, roles, and responsibilities performed, to various extents and ways, by all governments. These included intelligence, recommendation, prescription,...

Policy processes are ongoing phenomena without beginning or end. Accordingly, a major focus of research has been on questions of stability and change. This paper continues in this tradition by examining advocacy coalition stability, belief change, and learning. This paper draws on three waves of policy actor surveys that compare panel and non-panel...

This study explores the structure of advocacy coalitions and frames over time in South Korea's adversarial nuclear energy policy subsystem. It relies on the Advocacy Coalition Frameworks and Discourse Network Analysis to guide data collection from 1149 policy statements in 502 newspaper articles of South Korea spanning four years. Using E‐I Index,...

Measuring policy conflict and concord about natural resource and environmental issues has been a challenge for scholars. While some have assessed policy conflict and concord in particular locations, current approaches are inadequate for measuring and comparing them across settings or over time. This research note offers a methodological approach fo...

The way in which public policies are composed may lead to conflicts that manifest in an extended policymaking duration. This paper explores the associations between policy composition and the relative duration for policies to be adopted in 15 U.S. state legislatures. We treat policy passage duration as an indicator of policy conflicts in the legisl...

Energy infrastructure is the foundation of any modern society, yet decisions on where and how to site this infrastructure can be contentious. This article argues that energy infrastructure siting is illustrative of policy scenarios involving instigators of a proposed policy and defenders of the status quo . Through analyzing natural gas pipelines,...

Policy conflicts manifest in a variety of ways along the policy process. The design components of public policies may lead to conflicts that manifest in an extended duration of policymaking processes. This paper explores the associations between the composition of public policies and the relative duration for policies to be adopted by U.S. state le...

Maintaining the quality and reliability of electricity transmission lines is central to effective energy governance. However, transmission line siting is often a contentious policy decision since permitting and constructing lines may involve private and public property, residents and communities, and localized and national concerns. Yet, policy con...

Introduction We began this edited volume by challenging policy scholars to translate their findings to a wider audience and improve communication among academics. This volume tackled this challenge through its eight chapters that sought to draw practical lessons from various theoretical approaches. No other book or article gathers as many theoretic...

Introduction We challenge policy theory scholars to change the way we produce and communicate research: translate our findings to a wider audience to gauge the clarity and quality of our findings. Policy theories have generated widespread knowledge of the policy process, but the field is vast and uncoordinated, and too many scholars hide behind a v...

Introduction People can influence government in a number of ways. For some, elections serve as the principal conduit, whereas for others political party affiliation serves this purpose. People might join an interest group, while others might participate in a social movement. All of these paths have been studied in the varied corpuses of academic li...

This chapter presents ways to synthesise and communicate state-of-the-art knowledge from intellectually distinct fields, each with their own reference points and key foundational texts. It explains why the judgement of a theoretical contribution should change, from the need to provide new empirical material to demonstrating a particular way about a...

This chapter summarises the state-of-the-art developments of different theories and aspects of relatively complicated and dynamic policy process theories, such as the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory and Advocacy Coalition Framework. It offers practical insights that sometimes overlap in dealing with various themes of the policy process and focuses on...

This chapter highlights advocacy coalitions, which refer to a type of alliance that involves people aligned around a shared policy goal. It describes people associated with the same advocacy coalition and similar ideologies and worldviews who wish to change a given policy in the same direction. It also examines the coalition that forms an informal...

In this paper, we ask how the written composition of public policies structure an environmental governance system. We answer this question using semi-automated text analyses of 22 state-level policies governing oil and gas development in California between 2007 and 2017. The findings portray an environmental governance system that is both partition...

Una “tormenta en un vaso de agua” es una expresión para referirse a un problema al que se le ha dado una dimensión desproporcionada. Precisamente así vemos la supuesta división entre dos tradiciones de investigación: el estudio convencional sobre procesos de política pública y el análisis interpretativo de la política pública. En este texto explora...

The essence of policy conflicts remains largely underdeveloped, both theoretically and empirically. We explore policy conflict and explain its cognitive and behavioral characteristics using data from a survey administered to policy actors involved in oil and gas politics in Colorado, USA. The analysis begins with a description of the cognitive and...

This paper portrays a polycentric governance system by exploring the evolution of its structure and the interdependencies of its policymaking venues. It utilizes a semi-automated approach developed from the institutional grammar to analyze four policymaking venues by their 55 public policies adopted from 2007 through 2019 in the context of oil and...

This article compares the topics that underlie public debate around hydraulic fracturing covered in newspapers across nine U.S. states over an eleven-year period. In analyzing more than 7000 newspaper articles using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) modeling, thirteen main topics emerge. While these topics fluctuate over time, their relative freque...

“Tempest in a teapot” is an idiom that refers to a problem that has been blown out of proportion, which is how we see the supposedly divisive relationship between two research traditions: mainstream policy process studies and interpretive policy studies. In this commentary, we explore both research traditions, comparing and contrasting their views...

Researchers often focus on the most intense conflicts, skewing our perception of the diversity and nature of policy conflicts. The paper examines the discourse engaged in the siting of three pipeline projects under construction, each with varying levels of conflict, and one rejected project of high conflict. We analyze over 700 newspaper articles t...

The world is in the grip of a crisis that stands unprecedented in living memory. The COVID-19 pandemic is urgent, global in scale, and massive in impacts. Following Harold D. Lasswell’s goal for the policy sciences to offer insights into unfolding phenomena, this commentary draws on the lessons of the policy sciences literature to understand the dy...

The spread of COVID-19 – a currently incurable, highly contagious, and potentially lethal virus – has presented the world with unprecedented challenges. Spanning virtually every policy domain, these challenges seem to spare no one, affecting individuals, families, communities, and all types of organizations, public or private. Moreover, many of the...

The Institutional Collective Action (ICA) framework has contributed to understanding collective action problems in fragmented governance and identified mechanisms for overcoming them. Participation in collaboration is risky––even if it has the potential to make all parties better off. This framework has uniquely shown how collaboration risk and oth...

Researchers struggle to understand the relationship between science and policy positions, especially the complicated interplay among the various factors that might affect the acceptance or rejection of scientific information. This paper presents a typology that simplifies and guides research linking scientific information to policy positions. We us...

This review of 81 applications of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) in China between 2006 and 2017 finds that the ACF's hypotheses about the existence and stability of competing advocacy coalitions in policy subsystems, the occurrence of change across its three-tiered belief system, and the credence of its four pathways to policy change, which...

Institutions are strategies, norms, and rules embodied in public policies and/or social conventions. They reflect and establish expectations about who can do what, where, and how, and are often employed for resolving collective action dilemmas and other kinds of governance challenges. Given their salience, social science scholars have dedicated sub...

The concept of “advocacy coalitions” is the bedrock of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), one of the most established and successful approaches for understanding policy processes across the globe. This article revisits and sharpens the conceptual definition of advocacy coalitions. We summarize the lessons from its theoretical emphases under th...

This paper identifies the coalitions involved in the topic of shale oil and gas development in India and identifies the circumstances surrounding a change in policy in 2013 by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas to promote shale exploration. Using the Advocacy Coalition Framework as the theoretical lens, the data are collected primarily from...

Among the policy instruments used to pursue social and environmental goals, voluntary programmes are seen as ‘win‐win’ opportunities. Despite a sizeable literature documenting reasons individuals opt into voluntary programmes, little attention has been paid to why participants are motivated by certain reasons more than others. This article addresse...

Es hora de imaginar unas nuevas ciencias de política pública. El mundo de la elaboración de políticas ha avanzado desde su primer diseño. Así también nuestra comprensión del mismo. Las ciencias de políticas públicas originales fueron contextualizadas, orientadas a la solución de problemas, multi-métodos y se centraron en la utilización de la invest...

For decades, institutional scholars have embraced the concept of polycentricity as a way to describe systems of governance with multiple, overlapping centers of authority. However, intellectual progress on polycentricity has been constrained by inconsistent conceptual measurement, an overemphasis on small‐n versus large‐n research designs, a lack o...

en The articles presented in this supplemental issue mark the 10th edition of the Policy Studies Journal's Public Policy Yearbook. This issue includes three retrospective review articles summarizing recent developments in public policy research across the following focus areas: public opinion, policy learning and international relations. 摘要 zh 此增刊...

Traditional scholarship on political engagement has emphasised political parties, interest groups and social movements as ways to influence public policy. This paper highlights the particular role of advocacy coalitions as another conduit for political engagement. Drawing from scholarship associated with the Advocacy Coalition Framework, we offer a...

We challenge policy theory scholars to change the way we produce and communicate research: translate our research to a wider audience to gauge the quality of our findings. Explain state of the art knowledge to others to aid communication among ourselves. If we succeed, we can proceed with confidence. If not, we should reconsider the state of our fi...

Political mobilization of policy actors into advocacy coalitions is a defining feature of policy subsystems. Nonetheless, knowledge about the particularities of advocacy coalitions across different political systems remains limited. This paper offers insights for comparative analysis of advocacy coalitions by exploring the issue of shale developmen...

The purpose of this essay is to analyze two theories. One is a relatively new approach called Instrument Constituencies. The other is an established approach called the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). This essay begins by comparing the two theories by an explicit set of criteria. It then lays out opportunities for refinement and advancement of...

South Korean policy studies have had a strong tradition in the field of policy analysis but less so in the study of policy processes. This essay offers strategies for building research programmes towards advancing theories about policy processes, particularly policy scholarship in South Korea. Using the advocacy coalition framework as an illustrati...

It is time to imagine a new policy sciences. The policymaking world has moved on since its first design. So too has our understanding of it. The original policy sciences were contextualized, problem-oriented, multi-method, and focused on using scientific research towards the realization of greater human dignity. We introduce a new policy sciences t...

This article applies the Policy Conflict Framework (PCF) to describe and explain the characteristics of policy conflict within the oil and gas subsystem in Colorado. We use data from a survey of policy actors to assess three cognitive characteristics of policy conflict: divergence in policy positions, perceived threats from opponents’ positions, an...

Sustainable governance of the environment requires that people and decision makers are capable of learning and adapting to new and emerging environmental issues. Yet our ability to learn and adapt can be hindered when conflicts arise over the nature of environmental issues or the appropriate policy solutions for addressing these issues. At the same...

How is the air pollution issue in Delhi framed by the news media and narrated by nonprofit organizations? To study news media framing, we employed an inductive approach based on automated text coding of news coverage of the issue. To study nonprofit organization narrations, a deductive approach guided by the Narrative Policy Framework was used to f...

All politics and policy issues involve the accumulation of data about problems and solutions in context of social interactions. Drawing on these data, policy actors acquire, translate, and disseminate new information and knowledge toward achieving political endeavors and for revising or strengthening their policy-related beliefs over time. ‘Policy...

This essay introduces a Policy Conflict Framework to guide and organize theoretical, practical, and empirical research to fill the vacuum that surrounds policy conflicts. The framework centers on a conceptual definition of an episode of policy conflict that distinguishes between cognitive and behavioral characteristics. The cognitive characteristic...

Why people collaborate to achieve their political objectives is one enduring question in public policy. Although studies have explored this question in low-intensity policy conflicts, a few have examined collaboration in high-intensity policy conflicts. This study asks two questions: What are the rationales motivating policy actors to collaborate w...

A scholarly nexus is defined as identifiable spheres of theoretical and empirical overlap between academic fields or disciplines. This article explores the nexus between policy process research, public management scholarship, and nonprofit and voluntary action studies, oriented from the perspective of policy process scholars. The article begins wit...

This chapter analyzes coalition politics and public policy in the USA. The data are based on an online survey of policy actors in Texas, New York, and Colorado. Two coalitions are identified based on respondents’ positions on hydraulic fracturing, problem perceptions, and interaction patterns. One coalition consists of proponents of hydraulic fract...

The conclusion of this book highlights the major insights surrounding the comparative study of advocacy coalitions and public policies on hydraulic fracturing across seven countries. Based on the chapter findings, it discusses insights into factors influencing the structure and functioning of policy subsystems, the characteristics of advocacy coali...

This edited volume compares seven countries in North America and Europe on the highly topical issue of oil and gas development that uses hydraulic fracturing or "fracking." The comparative analysis is based on the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) and guided by two questions: First, in each country, what are current coalitions and the related poli...

This article offers an analysis of the national level news media coverage of the risks and benefits surrounding hydraulic fracturing, using two different content analysis methods. First, we complete a manual content analysis on 150 articles by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. We examine differences across these newspapers...

The central challenge in advancing the study of public policy is developing portable approaches that capture the specificity of a particular context while also identifying generalities. This article explores the portability of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) to South Korea. The arguments are drawn from a comprehensive review of 67 peer-revie...

The study of policy narratives is challenged by inconsistencies and a need for more precise definitions and measurements. The goals of this article are to build precision and clarity in the study of policy narratives by developing a network-based approach—the ego-alter dyad—for coding characters and their interactions around a policy issue and then...

Since the emergence of public policy as a field of study in the middle of the twentieth century, a definitive challenge has been to develop theoretical approaches for the comparative study of policy processes. One theoretical approach that has endured over time is the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). With more than three decades of research and...

The purpose of this article is to analyze perceptions and activities of policy actors, who are actively involved in or knowledgeable about the politics of hydraulic fracturing in New York, Colorado, and Texas. The analysis is guided by research questions drawn from the Advocacy Coalition Framework that focus on policy actors' policy positions, prob...

Understanding how the news media portray controversial natural resource issues is an important area of environmental policy research due to the media’s ability to influence public opinion and policymaking. Automated media coding is becoming increasingly used as an alternative or supplement to the human coding of these portrayals. However, the compa...

Hydraulic fracturing and oil and natural gas development are possibly the most contentious energy and environmental issues to face the USA in the twenty-first century. One point of contention is the disclosure of fluids used in the hydraulic fracturing process. This paper analyses the Colorado 2011 policy requiring disclosure of hydraulic fracturin...

Public policies are structured by policy designs that communicate the key elements, linkages, and underlying logic through which policy objectives are to be realized. This paper operationalizes and integrates core concepts from the institutional analysis and development framework, including the institutional grammar, the rule typology, action situa...