Policy stability and dynamics of policy change

Abstract

Political scientists studying policy change over time in the United States have posed a range of conceptual frameworks to analyze and make sense of often perplexing phenomena. This study uses a longitudinal case study, the three decades long saga of the establishment and eventual increase of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard (CAFE), to examine the utility of three dominant frameworks for understanding policy change: John Kingdon's convergence model of agenda formation and policy change, Paul Sabatier's advocacy coalition framework, and the punctuated equilibrium model pioneered by Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones. This analysis of long-term stasis and then major-and sudden-change in CAFE standard at first glance would most support the Baumgartner and Jones model of punctuated equilibrium. However, the CAFE case differs in some fundamental ways from the types of policy areas on which Baumgartner and Jones based their theoretical model. Nor does Sabatier's advocacy coalition framework, by itself, seem to account for the timing and scope of policy change after decades of stasis. In the end, Kindgon's convergence model, even with its explanatory limitations, best fits any account for what at first glance seems to be an unexpected, and even unexplainable, shift in longstanding policy.