Aggregating Policy History

Abstract

The chapter advocates the use of policy histories, scholarly accounts of the political activities surrounding American national policy in each issue area, for understanding policy change. The chapter explains the rationale and procedures for aggregating information from my 268 sources and detail the steps to create comprehensive data from narratives of policy development. To explain the methods, the chapter illustrates with data from one policy area: civil rights and liberties. The chapter reviews the times and places of civil rights policy change, the political circumstances reportedly relevant, and the actors credited for policy enactments. The chapter builds networks of actors credited with civil rights policy change, linking actors responsible for the same enactments, and demonstrate their use. The results show that many political circumstances and actors occasionally influence policy change. But even in civil rights—the issue area most associated with social movements and public mobilization—the internal machinations of government institutions and bargaining among traditional interest groups are the most commonly influential factors in policy change.