Editorial Introduction: Contributing to the policy process literatures

Abstract

Policy Studies JournalVolume 51, Issue 1 p. 7-10 EditorialFree Access Editorial Introduction: Contributing to the policy process literatures Geoboo Song, Corresponding Author Geoboo Song gbsong@uark.edu University of ArkansasSearch for more papers by this authorMichael D. Jones, Michael D. Jones University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleSearch for more papers by this authorMelissa K. Merry, Melissa K. Merry University of LouisvilleSearch for more papers by this authorHolly L. Peterson, Holly L. Peterson Louisiana State UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorAaron Smith-Walter, Aaron Smith-Walter University of Massachusetts, LowellSearch for more papers by this authorGwen Arnold, Gwen Arnold University of California, DavisSearch for more papers by this authorRachael Moyer, Rachael Moyer University of ArkansasSearch for more papers by this authorCreed Tumlison, Creed Tumlison University of ArkansasSearch for more papers by this author Geoboo Song, Corresponding Author Geoboo Song gbsong@uark.edu University of ArkansasSearch for more papers by this authorMichael D. Jones, Michael D. Jones University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleSearch for more papers by this authorMelissa K. Merry, Melissa K. Merry University of LouisvilleSearch for more papers by this authorHolly L. Peterson, Holly L. Peterson Louisiana State UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorAaron Smith-Walter, Aaron Smith-Walter University of Massachusetts, LowellSearch for more papers by this authorGwen Arnold, Gwen Arnold University of California, DavisSearch for more papers by this authorRachael Moyer, Rachael Moyer University of ArkansasSearch for more papers by this authorCreed Tumlison, Creed Tumlison University of ArkansasSearch for more papers by this author First published: 20 February 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12497AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat We are thrilled to announce the start of 2023 and the first issue of the Policy Studies Journal (PSJ) for this year. In this issue, we have an excellent collection of ten articles for our readers to explore. Before doing so, please let us share some exciting news regarding PSJ operations. First, we are delighted to welcome Dr. Geoboo Song (University of Arkansas) as PSJ's Co-Editor-in-Chief. Dr. Song has worked as an Associate Editor for PSJ over the past four years and will be working closely with Dr. Michael D. Jones (University of Tennessee), who has been leading PSJ as Editor-in-Chief since 2019, and many others in the PSJ editorial team. We are pleased to introduce Ms. Hailey Mattingly (University of Louisville) who is joining our editorial team as an editorial assistant. We look forward to her contributions in helping us elevate the quality and reach of PSJ's content even further in 2023 and beyond. Discussing the content of this issue, we feel privileged to be able to share a selection of articles that make a significant contribution to advancing three theoretical approaches concerning policy process research: Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) (e.g., Petridou & Mintrom, 2021), Social Construction and Policy Design (e.g., Bell, 2021), and Advocacy Policy Framework (ACF) (e.g., Funke et al., 2021). The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) is utilized in this collection as a means of analyzing policy narratives and understanding how these narratives influence public opinion and shape policy decisions. Through the use of various qualitative and quantitative methods, the following NPF research helps us understand how ideas, identities, and interests are communicated and connected with the policymaking process. In the lead article, titled “Policy Dimension: A New Concept to Distinguish Substance from Process in the Narrative Policy Framework,” Kuenzler and Stauffer (2023) propose the concept of a policy dimension to differentiate between substance (questions dealing with policy design) and process (questions concerning power in the policy process) within NPF research. Although both are present in existing NPF studies, they are yet to be separated analytically. The authors explain the policy dimension as a novel aspect of narrative content and further demonstrate its application to NPF research with exploratory case studies. The authors argue that the substance policy narrative elements depict debates about the implementation model of a policy, while process policy narrative elements expose power dynamics undergirding said debates. In addition, the authors provide evidence that these two categories appear differently in policy narratives depending on the debate venue, where political parties as narrators are not considered to be influential. Through this analysis, the authors elucidate valuable insights for NPF scholars and practitioners. Their claims provide new possibilities in NPF studies while presenting practitioners with an innovative tool for delving into policy debates and taking action accordingly. In the second article of this issue, Stauffer (2023) combines both theoretical and empirical perspectives on NPF macro-level narratives in a study titled “What's the Grand Story? A Macro-narrative Analytical Model and the Case of Swiss Child and Adult Protection Policy.” Utilizing a comparative multi-method design in the Swiss child and adult protection policy, Stauffer's (2023) research reveals that macro-level NPF analysis can assist individuals in identifying the origin of meso-level policy debates - an underlying paradigm as well as its effects on culture and institutions which support or hinder narratives at the macro-level. This article presents three main contributions to the NPF research: (1) defining macro-level narratives as story forms of policy paradigms; (2) suggesting a model and empirical approach that can provide a basis for standardizing NPF's macro-level analysis; and (3) connecting the meso-level with the macro-level in order to support NPF's multi-level analysis. Next, Peterson (2023) explores how narratives help direct the focus of attention in her article “Narrative Policy Images: Intersecting Narrative and Attention in Presidential Stories about the Environment.” Using Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET) and the NPF, she expounds on the concept of narrative policy image as it pertains to the policy process. By analyzing 73 years of State of the Union Addresses in the United States, Peterson (2023) uncovers contrasting narrative policy images in Democratic and Republican stories. In these environmental policy stories, Democrats tend to present issues such as climate change with a victim focus, while Republicans devote their attention to solutions such as new programs that maintain the status quo. This study demonstrates that a narrative policy image may be a useful concept for understanding macropolitical narrative attention by considering both narrative elements and attached sentiments. The NPF was specifically designed for democracies, yet its potential applications in non-democratic contexts have not been explored thoroughly. Schlaufer et al. (2023) tackle the dearth of research regarding narrative strategies in non-democratic settings with their article “Narrative Strategies in a Non-democratic Setting: Moscow's Urban Policy Debates.” Through an empirical analysis, they find that when it comes to urban policy debates in Moscow, Russia, governmental actors often utilize angel shifts, contain issues, and avoid using causal mechanisms, whereas those opposing government policies tend towards devil shifts, expanding issues, and intentional causal mechanisms as strategies for persuasion. These findings suggest that the choice of narrative strategies employed by policy actors to promote reforms or draw attention to issues is contingent upon their political objectives, which suggests that policy actors' said objectives should be taken into account when determining which narrative strategies will be utilized in the policy process in both democratic and nondemocratic contexts. In the next article, “Shifting Narrative Strategies: How Monument Advocates Change Their Stories in Response to Conflict over Time,” Rupinsky et al. (2023) extend previous NPF studies by utilizing a case study method to explore how narratives are generated temporally. To answer the question of how narrative strategies evolve over time, the authors used a change-point analysis of a massive Twitter dataset related to the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments controversy. The analysis suggests that there have been significant shifts toward the utilization of the devil-angel shift, the scope of the conflict, and causal mechanism strategies at various points in time. Rupinsky et al. (2023) conclude that organizations remain consistent in their utilization of narrative strategies over the entire course of a policy conflict, only varying them in response to events. Consequently, they recommend refining and expanding NPF hypotheses as well as conducting a more detailed investigation into how narrative strategy use changes according to specific policy events throughout the process. In their article, “Taking Perspective of the Stories We Tell about Transgender Rights: The Narrative Policy Framework,” Flores et al. (2023) utilize the NPF to examine how narratives shape our attitudes regarding transgender rights. Rather than considering communications as just informative, the NPF stresses that becoming engaged in stories is essential for shifting attitudes when it comes to public policy. To estimate the effect of perspective-taking on individual attitudes, the authors conducted a survey experiment involving 1784 American adults. They found that participants who were exposed to an inclusive transgender policy narrative through either watching or reading it displayed greater support for transgender rights, with watching having a more significant impact than reading. Those captivated by the narrative with a greater degree of narrative transportation formed more supportive opinions. This research indicates that those with a penchant for immersing themselves in stories, in general, are more prone to be influenced by watching policy narratives than those less imaginatively involved. These findings imply something distinct from traditional framing-based explanations and call for further research on unique causal mechanisms that can result in attitude changes through narrative transportation. The social construction and policy design literature demonstrates how policies influence the way in which society perceives various social groups. An extensive body of research within this tradition takes the multi-theoretical approach, consciously incorporating other relevant theories to better understand the political dynamic of the policy process. In their article, “How Racialized Policy Contact Shapes the Social Constructions of Policy Targets,” Maltby and Kreitzer (2023) investigate the potential of citizens to alter how the targets of public policies are viewed. Using survey data, the authors examine how direct and indirect experiences with the criminal justice and social welfare systems influence perceptions of target populations. They find that both direct and indirect contact with punitive policies is linked to more positive views of negatively constructed groups, though direct experience has a greater effect. They also find that the effects are racialized: Whites respond more strongly to personal experience than Blacks. These findings add to the growing literature on the role of racial identity in policy feedback (see Michener, 2019) and contribute to the social construction and policy feedback literature by identifying a citizen-led pathway to change in the social construction of target populations. Blanton and Jones (2023) use the social construction framework in a different (but similarly compelling) manner to understand policy diffusion in their article, “Social Construction and the Diffusion of Anti-trafficking Laws in the US.” Focusing on human trafficking laws, they posit that differential diffusion rates of anti-trafficking laws–with varying degrees of emphasis on the prosecution of traffickers, protection of victims, and prevention of trafficking–depend on the social construction of the target population. Using event history analysis, the authors examine the diffusion of 14 types of anti-trafficking laws throughout the United States between 2003 and 2013. Consistent with their expectations, the authors find that prosecution-related policies (which impose burdens on a deviant group, i.e., criminals) diffused more rapidly than protection- and prevention-focused policies. These findings underscore the importance of social construction in policy design and reveal the pitfalls of focusing on the criminalization of human trafficking while ignoring other facets of the policy problem. Policy researchers have recently been putting an intensified focus on both collaborative and competitive relationships that exist among stakeholder coalitions. In particular, the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) has directed scholarly efforts to this realm of interactions between policy actors. ACF defines advocacy coalitions as groups of policy actors with similar beliefs who can work together for a common political goal. Yet, previous ACF research was inconsistent in its definitions and measurements, consequently obstructing comparative studies and theory building. Satoh et al. (2023) propose a novel approach to measuring advocacy coalitions in their work, “The Advocacy Coalition Index: A New Approach for Identifying Advocacy Coalitions.” This method gauges both belief similarity and action coordination, which allows researchers to assess the presence of coalitions in policy subsystems, whether subgroups resemble coalitions, and how individual actors impact coalition formation. To demonstrate the utility of their coalition index, the authors offer a comparison between two climate change policy subsystems in Finland and Sweden. The results illustrate that this standardized method effectively distinguishes different types of subsystems, coalitions, actors, and brokers, including those who are heavily involved with coalition formation, as well as those creating links across them. The coalition index provides a useful methodological tool for more researchers, especially when they try to analyze the composition of various belief networks and advocacy coalitions. Policy processes are an ever-evolving reality with no start or finish. As a result, much of the previous research has been focused on policy stability and change. Weible, Olofsson, and Heikkila's article “Advocacy Coalitions, Beliefs, and Learning: An Analysis of Stability, Change and Reinforcement” (2023) joins this conversation by looking into advocacy coalition stability, belief change, and learning. Leveraging three distinct policy actor surveys, this research analyzes panel and non-panel sample responses to explore hydraulic fracturing to develop oil and gas resources in Colorado, United States, between 2013 and 2017. The authors' findings mostly support the view that advocacy coalitions and their beliefs are stable, with learning leaning more toward reinforcement rather than a shift in beliefs. Nonetheless, although uncommon, some changes in belief systems and coalition membership, and policy positions were observable. Thus, this research makes both theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of stability, change, and reinforcement among advocacy coalitions, which encourages policy scholars to observe anomalies instead of just validating existing theories and evidence. We hope that you all enjoy reading our articles in this issue, and feel free to reach out to us at any time if you have any questions or comments about anything related to PSJ or our content. Thank you for your unwavering support, and here's wishing everyone a very Happy New Year! PSJ Editorial Team REFERENCES Bell, Elizabeth. 2021. “Deserving to Whom? Investigating Heterogeneity in the Impact of Social Constructions of Target Populations on Support for Affirmative Action.” Policy Studies Journal 49(1): 268– 99. Blanton, Robert G., and Peter A. Jones. 2023. “Social Construction and the Diffusion of Anti-Trafficking Laws in the US.” Policy Studies Journal 51(1): 161– 83. Flores, Andrew, Daniel Boden, Donald Haider-Markel, Daniel Lewis, Patrick Miller, and Jami Taylor. 2023. “Taking Perspective of the Stories we Tell about Transgender Rights: The Narrative Policy Framework.” Policy Studies Journal 51(1): 122– 42. Funke, Nikki, Dave Huitema, Arthur Petersen, and Shanna Nienaber. 2021. “The Roles of Experts and Expert-Based Information in the Advocacy Coalition Framework: Conceptual and Empirical Considerations Based on the Acid Mine Drainage Case Study in Gauteng, South Africa.” Policy Studies Journal 49(3): 785– 810. Kuenzler, Johanna, and Bettina Stauffer. 2023. “Policy Dimension: A New Concept to Distinguish Substance from Process in the Narrative Policy Framework.” Policy Studies Journal 51(1): 11– 32. Maltby, Elizabeth, and Rebecca J. Kreitzer. 2023. “How Racialized Policy Contact Shapes the Social Constructions of Policy Targets.” Policy Studies Journal 51(1): 143– 60. Michener, Jamila. 2019. “Policy Feedback in a Racialized Polity.” Policy Studies Journal 47(2): 423– 50. Peterson, Holly L. 2023. “Narrative Policy Images: Intersecting Narrative & Attention in Presidential Stories about the Environment.” Policy Studies Journal 51(1): 53– 77. Petridou, Evangelia, and Michael Mintrom. 2021. “A Research Agenda for the Study of Policy Entrepreneurs.” Policy Studies Journal 49(4): 943– 67. Rupinsky, Shae, Madeline Schomburg, Gabriel Chandler, and Carrington Gelardi. 2023. “Shifting Narrative Strategies: How Monument Advocates Change their Stories in Response to Conflict over Time.” Policy Studies Journal 51(1): 100– 21. Satoh, Keiichi, Antti Gronow, and Tuomas Ylä-Anttila. 2023. “The Advocacy Coalition Index: A New Approach for Identifying Advocacy Coalitions.” Policy Studies Journal 51(1): 184– 204. Schlaufer, Caroline, Dilyara Gafurova, Ekaterina Zhiryakova, Marina Shikhova, and Nina Belyaeva. 2023. “Narrative Strategies in a Nondemocratic Setting: Moscow's Urban Policy Debates.” Policy Studies Journal 51(1): 78– 99. Stauffer, Bettina. 2023. “What's the Grand Story? A Macro-Narrative Analytical Model and the Case of Swiss Child and Adult Protection Policy.” Policy Studies Journal 51(1): 33– 52. Weible, Christopher M., Kristin L. Olofsson, and Tanya Heikkila. 2023. “Advocacy Coalitions, Beliefs, and Learning: An Analysis of Stability, Change, and Reinforcement.” Policy Studies Journal 51(1): 205– 26. Volume51, Issue1February 2023Pages 7-10 ReferencesRelatedInformation