This article examines how political position shapes policy agency in local policy making. Specifically, it asks: what patterns of policy agency functions do municipal councillors ( regidores ) exhibit in the local policy process? Drawing on the Functional Theory of Agency framework and a sequential mixed-methods design combining a national survey of Mexican municipal councillors with follow-up semi-structured interviews, we analyse how councillors exercise four modes of policy agency: steering, innovation, intermediation, and intelligence. Our findings reveal systematic differences between majoritarian and opposition councillors. Majoritarian councillors dominate commissions, align with mayoral priorities, and primarily act as steerers and brokers of executive policy. By contrast, opposition councillors, who are often excluded from formal decision-making arenas, engage in disruptive innovation, cultivate vertical alliances beyond the municipality, and invest more heavily in knowledge production as a counter-power strategy. These distinct patterns suggest that political position shapes the policy agency functions available to local legislators and influences how they seek to affect policy outcomes. The article contributes to the consolidation of a Functional Theory of Agency by demonstrating how unequal access to formal policy-making authority structures actors’ behavioural repertoires within policy-making processes. It also advances comparative research on legislative actors by showing how local representatives adapt their policy agency strategies under conditions of unequal access to formal policy-making authority.
Like most collective decision-making processes, the formulation, adaptation, and implementation of public policies are not immune to conflict. Recently, various authors have lamented the lack of explicit attention to conflict in the policy process and called for more research into how policy conflicts unfold and what consequences they produce. This article contributes to that scholarship in two ways: first, through a systematic discussion of empirical studies on the consequences of policy conflict since 2000; and second, by bringing into conversation insights that are currently dispersed across fragmented research traditions. The systematic literature review focuses on three aspects: how and where policy conflicts have been studied; whether and how they have been conceptualised; and what their consequences are. In doing so, the article highlights the often overlooked productive potential of policy conflicts. Policy conflicts are studied primarily in relation to issues of the (built) environment, where contestation has been shown to produce detrimental effects such as trust erosion, frustration, and disengagement. Supporting an agonistic understanding of conflict, however, they have also been shown to drive productive outcomes such as policy change, stakeholder engagement, policy learning, and innovation. This study contributes to bridging policy conflict scholarship across theoretical perspectives, advancing empirical understanding of policy-conflict consequences, and raising awareness of their productive character in both theory and practice.
Collaborative governance (CG) models show promise for addressing complex governance challenges, yet they also face obstacles and difficulties that necessitate rigorous research in this field, particularly in relation to understanding and managing conflicts and disagreements among diverse stakeholders. The research addresses three primary questions: the scales, stages and domains in which conflicts arise; the strategies utilised by CG to handle minor disagreements and fundamental conflicts; and the outputs and effects of addressing deeper-seated conflicts and disagreements. Through a systematic literature review using the PRISMA-S framework, the study reveals how conflicts in CG frequently arise in environmental and ecological management, primarily at local scales, and mainly during the initial stages of decision making. The research identifies three primary levels for addressing conflicts in CG – motives, dynamics and resolution – categorising CG strategies into six distinct types to provide a comprehensive approach for practitioners. The findings indicate that while CG can effectively manage minor disagreements through negotiation and consensus building, it struggles with fundamental conflicts rooted in differing world views. This study examines the manifestations of addressing conflicts and disagreements resolution mechanisms within CG across three distinct dimensions: output, outcome and impact. It underscores the importance of leadership and innovative dialogue frameworks in constructively managing conflicts, transforming disagreements into opportunities for creative and collective problem-solving, thereby enhancing the sustainability and effectiveness of CG.
This article examines how and why Scotland became the first UK nation to introduce comprehensive smokefree public places legislation through prominent theories of policy change. To do so, it draws on a witness seminar involving former ministers, senior officials, advocates, researchers, and environmental health experts, triangulated with documentary sources. The findings broadly support accounts based on Multiple Streams Framework and Punctuated Equilibrium Theory: a policy window opened as evidence accumulated, political support aligned, and devolution created a new institutional venue. However, the witness seminar also highlights forms of policy work that these frameworks do not fully capture. Participants described how policy makers actively shaped consultation processes, curated and mobilised evidence, deployed strategic framing, coordinated political leadership, and designed implementation to maximise compliance. The article argues that, while existing theories explain agenda-setting and timing, they under-specify the practical ‘statecraft’ through which governments construct conditions for policy adoption and delivery. Building on the evolutionary roots of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, the article introduces Niche Construction Theory to explain how policy makers reshaped institutional, informational, and political environments to influence policy trajectories. This extension highlights the blurring of political and technocratic work and emphasises the value of qualitative analysis for understanding processes of policy change.
The goal of this article-which also functions as the introduction to a themed section-is to establish and further develop an interpretive variant of Process Tracing (PT) for policy research: Interpretive Process Tracing (IPT). Inspired by the turn towards mechanism-based explanations, policy scholars started studying the causal mechanisms that shape policy making. However, the dominant understanding of PT establishes the method as largely positivist and regularity-oriented. Yet, much truly qualitative policy scholarship looks for thick descriptions and is rather interested in locally embedded, actor-oriented policy processes accounting for actor sense and meaning-making. This article therefore advances a second, so far less visible strand of PT that would facilitate a focus on policy making as a social and meaning-making process: IPT. We outline IPT's ontological and epistemological foundations and think through what they mean for IPT as a method. This way, we develop further the logic and the tools to study policy processes from an interpretive perspective and introduce IPT as an approach that focuses on the social mechanisms that constitute the process. While this article introduces the method theoretically and provides an overview, the three articles in this themed section on IPT showcase how it can be applied in and to practical research.
This article explores how discourses of crisis shape aspects of UK asylum governance. Bringing Teun A. van Dijk’s ‘ideological square’ into conversation with framing and political-communication literatures, it suggests that an evaluative pattern (foregrounding ‘our’ positives and ‘their’ negatives while backgrounding counterexamples) informs agenda-setting, legislative change, and some administrative routines. Drawing on interview accounts from residents on their experiences of accommodation, precarious support systems, and administrative burden, it traces these dynamics through examples that include the issue of ‘asylum hotels’, showing how privatised contracts, backlog-driven contingency accommodation, and media optics convert bureaucratic failure into a spectacle that legitimises deterrence while obscuring governance design. Conceptually, the article extends the ideological square from discourse analysis to the epistemic architecture of government, showing how issue bias curates what counts as policy relevant truth. It concludes by advocating the ‘good governance of evidence’ and systematic auditing of administrative burdens as countermeasures to crisis-based legitimacy, recentring proportionality, legality, and protection within asylum policy.
This study advances the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) literature by introducing new approaches to capture variation in actors’ belief expression and to analyse how such expressions are constrained by actors’ organisational affiliations. Moving beyond existing accounts of constrained belief expression, it reconceptualises constraint as measurable differences in the breadth and intensity of beliefs articulated by actors within a coalition. Drawing on debates over US offshore wind energy, the study examines how organisational affiliation shapes patterns of constrained belief expression in public discourse. To do this, the article develops two quantitative metrics – the Belief Variety Score and the Belief Extreme Score – which capture the range and intensity of belief expression within coalitions. These are complemented by network-based measures of cohesion across actor types. The findings show that purposive (value-oriented) groups are more cohesively connected in their belief-sharing, draw on a narrower range of concepts, and express more extreme beliefs than material (profit-oriented) groups. This suggests that actors in purposive groups may be more constrained in their belief expressions. These results provide empirical support for, and refinement of, ACF expectations regarding constrained belief expression, while demonstrating how within-coalition variation can be systematically measured. The study contributes a more precise conceptualisation and a novel measurement strategy for analysing belief expression in policy conflicts.
The article establishes the concept of policy fatalism, defined as the view that some societal issues are so intractable that no policy measures can be effectively taken to resolve them. It does so by distinguishing it from other well-known concepts and demarcating policy fatalism as a concept in contrast with a focus on personal fatalism applied in other studies. The concept finds empirical support through representative surveys in Britain and Australia that show a high proportion of people in both countries are fatalistic about the prospects for dealing with climate change but also for securing homeownership for future generations and avoiding economic slumps. We test for a range of correlates of policy fatalism, finding that those with lower formal education and those on the ideological right are more fatalistic, as are those that trust traditional media. Those expressing personal fatalism about their lives are not more fatalistic over policy. Exploring the consequences, we find that policy fatalism leads to greater disenchantment with democratic rule yet does not inspire greater personal action. We argue that policy fatalism is distinct from established concepts and connects policy studies to wider debates about a trend towards fatalism in society and its role in politics.
Universal Basic Income (UBI) has gained global attention as a potential policy response to the AI revolution, yet public support remains divided. While existing research highlights the role of political predisposition in shaping attitudes towards UBI, such explanations rely on the presence of partisan/ideological cues. In contexts where UBI is not yet politicized, ideological alignment may offer limited explanatory power. This article examines how individuals' cultural predispositions, as conceptualized by CulturalTheory (CT), shape responses to different UBI framings in Taiwan, a non-Western democracy where partisan cues on UBI are less salient. Using an online survey experiment, the article tests how cultural world views interact with framing conditions to influence support for UBI. Findings demonstrate framing effects are conditioned by cultural orientations, supporting CT that individuals filter policy information through stable value lenses. This study advances a theoretical framework for understanding how public opinion forms in the absence of partisan cues.
This study develops an interpretive approach to understanding complex causal mechanisms in policy diffusion, using it to examine how ideas and practices surrounding assisted voluntary return policies for migrants without the right to remain have spread and become institutionalised within policy systems. The article explains how diffusion occurs and why policies take root in particular political and institutional contexts, arguing that diffusion operates through both vertical and horizontal mechanisms. Vertical diffusion reflects the influence of actors such as the European Union in promoting policy harmonisation across Member States, while horizontal diffusion captures the spread of ideas and practices among organisations and actors within states, including implementation agencies and professional networks. Instead of treating diffusion mechanisms as fixed causal devices, they are conceptualised them as interpretive tools that illuminate how actors perceive problems, frame solutions and interact strategically within institutional settings. Mechanisms such as problem definition, institutionalisation, competition, incentives, framing, knowledge sharing, and processes of co-option and boundary setting are treated as sensitising concepts that guide analysis rather than rigid explanatory models. An interpretive approach to complex mechanisms enables a nuanced understanding of diffusion that recognises the role of meaning making and strategic action. This perspective reveals how diffusion processes may involve contradictory dynamics and adaptations, shaped by actors' interpretations and institutional constraints, thereby offering a richer account of how policies spread and become embedded in federalised contexts such as Germany.
The aim of this study is to explore under what conditions policy actors are able to achieve advisory influence in a contested policy-making space. Specifically, it focuses on the factors leading to the success of a set of advisory actors typically assumed to be among the most disadvantaged - non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The article departs from dominant approaches to studying influence relying on theoretical exclusivity and argues for the need to adopt more flexible complexity-oriented analytical styles. To illustrate this, the study uses the extreme case of Bulgaria's social service delivery reform. The analysis of the case provides strong support for the need to employ greater analytic eclecticism rather than rigid theoretical assumptions based on a single explanatory theory in making sense of advisory influence. It highlights the critical role of individual agents in leading and facilitating an opening in the advisory space for NGOs' input. It also, however, vividly illustrates the necessary, albeit not sufficient, enabling function performed by institutions and contextual factors in explaining advisory success. Importantly, the study indicates that the factors conducive to influence are not only complex and interdependent but also vary across stages of the policy formulation process and the arenas within which advisory activities take place.
Why do states commit to open government reforms amid growing concerns over democratic backsliding? Understanding this question can illuminate how governments attempt to navigate democratic erosion through open governance. Yet, the motivations driving state participation in global initiatives like the Open Government Partnership (OGP) remain underexplored. Prior research has examined definitions, adoption patterns and diffusion mechanisms, but rarely investigates why states themselves choose to pursue such reforms. These gaps have fuelled competing interpretations: some scholarsview open government as a sincere effort to counter democratic erosion, while others criticize it as 'open-washing'. Methodologically, the field has also lacked scalable tools capable of capturing nuanced motivational claims across countries. This study addresses these gaps by analysing policy documents from all 75 OGP national member countries using a hybrid method that combines natural language processing with qualitative validation. Drawing on policy diffusion and institutionaltheories of state behaviour, we identifyfour primary motivational logics: coercion, mimesis, attraction and competition. Our findings revealthatthese motivesoften co-occur, forming layered repertoires of rationalist, instrumental and socializingjustifications. This article challenges rigid models of state behaviour and advances policy diffusion theory by treating motivations as empirically observable discursive constructs ratherthan merely inferred from structural conditions. These findings also inform open government scholarship and practices by providing analytical tools to better interpret and support adaptive reform efforts.
This article investigates the role of cultural theory (CT) in explaining attitudes towards solar radiation management (SRM) in the US. Partisanship traditionally provides a clear lens through which to view favourability to climate change policies; however, the lack of partisan attention to geoengineering policies, such as SRM, suggests other belief systems may be better explainers of attitudes. Previously, scholars have found climate attitudes to vary based upon cultural types, which are a function of how individuals see the role of authority in policy making and the extent to which individuals see themselves as part of a social unit. We find that partisanship is a weak predictor of SRM attitudes, while cultural affinities provide strong influences over SRM attitudes. Specifically, we find strong group affinities (particularly egalitarians) to lead to more favourable impressions of SRM research and deployment in the case of climate emergencies. Attitudes towards hierarchy, specifically cultural affinities that disfavour hierarchy, explain SRM scepticism. We contrast these results with a separate analysis of more widely known mitigation policies: carbon taxes, regulations on carbon emissions, taxes on higher income earners for green investment, and carbon cap and trade. For these better-known policy positions, partisanship is far more important. Our work contributes to the application of CT to policy attitudes as well as to explaining the shifting landscape of attitudes towards geoengineering and a variety of climate mitigation policies.
Process tracing (PT) is a popular method that is increasingly applied in policy studies, including foreign policy analysis (FPA). However, while policy research and FPA have strong interpretivist strands, PT has been predominantly developed and applied within a regularity-oriented, broadly positivist framework. This article advances an analyticist approach to PT for policy research. Pivoting around ideal typification, it reconceptualizes mechanisms as ideal types and distinguishes between mechanisms proper, their concrete instantiations, and the processes they concatenate into. This reconceptualization enables researchers to treat knowledge as socially constructed, to produce meaning-sensitive and contextually rich case descriptions while retaining the possibility of drawing analytically general and portable conclusions, and to advance a constitutive understanding of causation grounded in locally embedded processes. Although not inherently interpretive, this reconceptualization makes PT amenable to interpretive research in ways the regularity-oriented approach is not. The advantages of this approach are shown through a reinterpretation of a published FPA study by Eun A. Jo: 'Memory, Institutions, and the Domestic Politics of South Korean-Japanese Relations'. This example demonstrates the added value of analyticist PT highlighting the sometimes nuanced differences in what regularity-oriented and analyticist approaches to PT afford.
Collaborative governance has generated influential theoretical frameworks, yet existing research often relies on qualitative reasoning and pays limited attention to the micro-level behavioural dynamics that shape the transition from consensus building to collective action. This article develops a new framework for collaborative climate governance that conceptualises collaboration as a dynamic, sequential process linking these two phases. Drawing on a mixed-method approach that combines extensive field studies with evolutionary game modelling, the study examines how stakeholder behaviours and interaction patterns underpin collaborative outcomes over time. The framework conceptualises consensus building as the development of mutual trust and shared commitment among stakeholders, and collective action as the institutionalisation of this foundation through joint decision making and collaborative implementation. From the interaction between these two dimensions, the framework identifies four collaborative governance patterns-productive, unproductive, independent and symbolic-which are presented as a diagnostic map linking micro-level behavioural dynamics to emergent governance outcomes. In this way, the article advances collaborative governance theory by offering a behaviourally grounded, process-oriented approach to analysing climate collaboration across governance contexts.
We use the concept of material beliefs to integrate self-interest into the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), providing new insights into collaboration between actors with material and purposive beliefs and transitions between subsystem types. Focusing on policy regarding the 1.6 million tons of sea-dumped munitions from the Second World War in German seas, which pose significant environmental and safety challenges, we applied a qualitative mixed-methods approach, combining interviews with desk reviews. Our findings reveal that material beliefs, such as financial profit and political power, initially sustained policy stasis within a unitary subsystem. A decade later, material beliefs enabled policy change, when aligned with purposive beliefs like environmental protection and long-term societal benefits. Contrary to the ACF hypothesis that purposive actors are more constrained in expressing beliefs, we find that both actor types are more constrained when expressing beliefs of their belief type and more flexible when expressing beliefs of the other. We demonstrate that entrepreneurs leveraged the differing incentives, rooted in actors' deep core beliefs, to align policy core beliefs and foster collaboration. The alignment reflected asymmetric policy learning: material coalitions revised their policy core beliefs in response to shifting opportunities, while the purposive coalition adjusted secondary beliefs, suggesting greater stability but lower flexibility. Our findings challenge the ACF assumption that collaborative subsystems develop only when opposing coalitions collaborate with each other. We demonstrate an alternative theoretical pathway, in which collaboration emerges through the dissolution of one coalition, the participation of new actors, and the alignment of beliefs across coalitions.
The existence of poverty in Germany was long denied in politics and media. This problem denial resulted from insufficient research and the pervasive belief that Germany's comprehensive welfare state had eradicated poverty. This article traces how poverty gradually became a legible policy problem through European-level initiatives, coalitions between civil society and poverty researchers, as well as self-advocacy efforts. Focusing on the institutionalization of the federal government's Report on Poverty and Wealth (Armuts- und Reichtumsbericht), and the integration of marginalized voices through shadow reporting and lived experience workshops, the study examines how actors mobilized new knowledge to (re)configure established political perceptions. Based on qualitative interviews with policy makers, poverty researchers and civil society representatives, the study combines interpretive process tracing with policy feedback theory to identify and analyse key episodes and central mechanisms driving this process. Ultimately, the article proposes an interpretivist framework that sensitizes process tracing and policy feedback theory to reveal how definitional interventions gain institutional traction through underlying mechanisms over time. In this way, it makes two distinct contributions to the field: the explanation of a political process of problem recognition and agenda-setting on poverty and what can be learned from it; and a critical discussion of the use of interpretive process tracing in the analysis of this historical process.
Policy instruments are often presumed to shape a defined target population's behaviour, yet the way those instruments are calibrated - their micro-characteristics and accountability rules - can alter who is governed. This article examines how calibration reshapes policy targets, using the case of Xcel Energy's Quality Installation rebate programme for residential cooling in Denver, Colorado (2020-23). We show how rules that require certified contractors to follow specified installation practices transform a consumer rebate into an instrument that also targets contractor behaviour. Drawing on a mixed-methods design that combines qualitative analysis of regulatory documents with quantitative permit data, we find that programme partners install smaller, more efficient systems, at higher cost, and with fewer failed inspections than non-participants. These findings suggest that energy-efficiency rebates can influence contractor practice across all households, not only device choices by end users. We argue that overlooking calibration and the politics embedded in design obscures the behavioural and institutional pathways from policy action to outcome. By distinguishing between intermediate and end targets, we propose a conceptual refinement to policy design theory that is generalizable across policy domains where instrument calibration reshapes who policies act upon.
This article introduces the concept of intertextuality to the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). Outlining three broad approaches in the NPF study of evidence, the article highlights that the existing literature has overlooked how some phenomena invoked as evidence are themselves narratives. By introducing intertextuality, the article contributes to the NPF by providing an approach to study the use of pre-existing narratives in the creation of new narratives. Empirically, the study examines Swedish municipal policy documents on men's violence against women with a new code for intertextual references added to the traditional NPF codebook. The study finds that (1) the narratives use different forms of intertextual references to previous narrative texts, (2) these intertextual references contain narrative elements from the referenced text, and (3) the references can be used to situate the new narrative, or to develop, echo or counter past narratives. The theory and methods developed in this analysis will help to guide future NPF studies in using intertextuality to identify the flow of narratives through policy discourse.
Recent research in sustainability science has highlighted the crucial role of imaginaries, stories and narratives in shaping how sustainability governance is understood. One example is Adloff and Neckel's framework of ideal-typical sustainability trajectories: modernization, transformation and control. This article examines how these trajectories can help analyse sustainability policy making when viewed through the theoretical lens of the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). To do this, we reinterpret the sustainability trajectories as policy paradigms and identify the broader cultural and institutional macro-level narratives that underpin them. We ask how these overarching sustainability policy paradigms shape the way specific sustainability-related policy processes unfold. Empirically, we analyse how macro-level narratives within the modernization and transformation paradigms influence local policy discourse on sustainable urban transport in the Swiss city of Z & uuml;rich over a 12-year period. Methodologically, the study introduces an innovative approach for assessing how actors' ideal-typical discourse network positions align with macro-level narratives, and how these patterns structure actual policy discourse networks. Our findings provide some evidence that macrolevel narratives do influence the structure of policy discourse. More broadly, the results suggest that the policy paradigms of modernization, transformation and control offer valuable starting points for applying the NPF to sustainability-related policy domains. For policy makers, these paradigms also provide a useful way to situate and interpret the stories told in everyday policy making.
