ABSTRACT Projected energy shortages in the United States have intensified interest in nuclear power as a low‐carbon energy source, yet public acceptance remains a persistent challenge. This study employs a pre‐registered survey experiment to examine how local salience (geographic proximity) and risk information shape citizens' perceptions of newly proposed nuclear energy projects. Findings show that both factors independently reduce willingness to support, citizens' trust in government, and perceived benefit of the new nuclear power plant, with local salience exerting stronger effects than risk information in some cases. Notably, individuals who view climate change as a problem were more likely than those who do not to perceive a new nuclear power plant as beneficial, even when a proposed facility was located nearby. These findings contribute to the salience–complexity framework by demonstrating that issue salience is not fixed in a given policy setting but dynamically shaped by proximity cues and individual attitudes toward climate change. Rather than treating salience and complexity as static and independent dimensions, this study shows how perceived risk and cognitive heuristics interact to blur the traditional boundaries between them, especially in contested policy areas like nuclear energy.

ABSTRACT Polling organizations, like other policy actors, must prioritize certain issues. We argue that, for normative and financial reasons, pollsters prioritize issues that are viewed as important by other institutions and the public, leading them to focus survey questions on issues that are on congressional and media agendas, and which are public priorities. We also argue that it is possible that polling issue agendas shape the issue attention of those actors. Which issues pollsters survey and whether they lead or follow other institutions has important implications for understanding agenda setting, representation, and the use of poll results in research. Thus, we examine which issues are more likely to be surveyed and whether polling agendas predict or respond to the issue agendas of the New York Times, the U.S. Congress, and public priorities. The analysis uses an automated approach to code over 600,000 survey questions fielded from 1980 to 2015 into Comparative Agendas Project topic codes. We find wide disparities in how much attention polling organizations devote to different types of issues. While relationships are generally small, we also find evidence that topics in polls respond to public issue priorities, while also preceding issue attention in Congress and the New York Times.

ABSTRACT Environmental challenges require collaboration across jurisdictions, often through forums or intermediary spaces for repeated interaction. A persistent forum design question concerns inclusion criteria, or which actors should be included. Ecology of Games, public choice, and collaborative governance detail various costs and benefits of expanding inclusion, but less attention has been paid to specific variations in inclusion criteria. To address this, we conduct a comparative case study of four water user associations in Arizona, U.S. that either restrict participation to a certain sector and/or to those holding specific water rights. We assess how inclusion criteria impact participants' perceptions of various dimensions of forum functionality, considering management concerns that may confound the relationship. Drawing on a survey and semi‐structured interviews of forum participants, we find that more restrictive forums benefit from an internal spillover of high coordination to other capacities that require increased buy‐in (e.g., lobbying) while more inclusive forums can create an external spillover of broader regional cooperation as participants interact with more diverse users. Management concerns, particularly the relative concern for groundwater versus surface water and financial resources, confound this relationship. Our findings provide new theoretical and practical insight into how inclusion rules affect forum functionality in complex governance systems.

ABSTRACT There is a well‐established triadic relationship between satisfaction with public services, trust in leaders, and policy support in developed democracies. This study takes a novel approach by considering how gender is associated with the strength and direction of these connections, an element underexplored in the literature. Gender can manifest in several ways: a characteristic of residents, a trait of policymakers, and a lens through which a policy is perceived as a male or female domain. We assess how these dimensions relate to direct and mediated pathways among satisfaction, trust, and support. Using a survey experiment among 500 residents of Haifa, Israel, we identify stronger satisfaction–trust associations among female respondents (citizen gender) and a stronger trust–support association when the policymaker is a woman (policymaker gender). Additionally, trust in a policymaker is often accompanied by higher policy support when the policymaker is a woman and a policy falls within a domain associated with women. These patterns are most pronounced when all three dimensions align as female–female residents, female policymakers, and policies perceived as feminine. No gendered patterns emerged for policies perceived as male domains. The findings demonstrate how gendered identities and stereotypes shape public opinion in advanced local democracies.

ABSTRACT Forums play an important role in addressing interdependent policy issues, and their effectiveness depends on the continuous adaptation of forum rules. Yet, it remains unclear whether rules are exclusively used and adapted to improve forum effectiveness. In this article, we therefore investigate the influence of individual goals of forum founders, forum interdependencies, and changes in higher‐level institutions on the use and adaptation of forum rules. To this end, we conduct a case study of a state‐initiated geographically transboundary forum in Dutch strategic spatial planning. Building on in‐depth interviews, document analysis, and nonparticipant observations, we find that forum rule adaptation is driven by a combination of finding effective policy solutions, the individual pursuit of the forum founder to create a new national spatial vision, the formation of the national government, provincial elections, the fall of the national government, and decision‐making in other forums. These findings suggest that forum rule use and adaptation results from an interplay between seeking forum effectiveness, the self‐interest of forum founders, and various polycentric governance linkages, rather than the desire to improve forum effectiveness alone.

ABSTRACT This article explores how polycentric governance systems can facilitate resistance to democratic erosion from within the state, bridging two lines of research: polycentricity and democratic backsliding. Such resistance materializes through three key mechanisms within polycentric arrangements: decentralized political discretion, bureaucratic autonomy, and institutional capacity. In conducting a critical event analysis of environmental politics in Brazil, we analyze the actions of the Brazilian Central Bank, the Supreme Court, and a consortium of Amazonian governors. Although these entities do not have specific environmental mandates, their varying degrees of discretion, autonomy, and capacity enabled them to resist antidemocratic measures targeting environmental policies while fragmenting authoritarian presidential power. By examining how the combination of these three elements influenced the levels of resistance to democratic backsliding in Brazil, our findings illuminate both the challenges and promises of polycentric governance systems in promoting democratic deliberation in policy‐making within democracies under threat.

ABSTRACT As the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) begins to unpack issues of power and narratives, the main focus has been on power‐over and domination rather than more transformative notions of power‐to and empowerment. This article draws on insights from gender and policy studies and suggests that the NPF benefits from adopting a multifaceted notion of power that includes empowerment as well as domination. In so doing, the article also demonstrates the usefulness of the NPF for feminist scholars interested in unpacking the diversity of actors, strategies, and claims in gender equality policy processes. Empirically, the allocation of government grants as part of the Swedish national violence prevention program is used as a case of representation in the policy process, with funding applications providing a novel source of narrative data. The analysis displays a moderate level of diversity among the represented groups—although with a strong emphasis on children and youth as the victims or at‐risk communities. The article also demonstrates how the reconstruction of narratives—by connecting characters, plots, and policy solutions—displays a (lack of) diversity in narratives told about different groups of victims.

ABSTRACT This article explores the application of systems thinking to address complex policy challenges, or “wicked problems”. Addressing complex policy problems is difficult when they exist in dynamic environments with interconnected systems, each with their own subsystems and a lack of clear causal chains. Grounded in systems theory and thinking, an inductive, participatory soft systems methodology is adopted, moving beyond linear, top‐down approaches to demonstrate how policy problems that account for the whole system(s) and its interactions are considered, thereby offering a more effective approach to policy development. The article uses a case study of female entrepreneurs in York and North Yorkshire, England, to illustrate this approach. NVivo is employed to generate clusters or “systems” to demonstrate the interconnected nature of challenges faced by female entrepreneurs and identify potential policy levers to address them. Rational approaches alone are insufficient for policymaking and by embedding a soft systems methodology with an inductive participatory approach, hidden systems and subsystems are uncovered, enabling the design of inclusive, place‐based policy interventions. This approach uncovers patterns, derives actionable insights, and designs targeted, context‐sensitive policy interventions.

ABSTRACT Despite extensive research on policy diffusion, the ways in which policy attention influences this process remain underexplored. This study addressed this gap by distinguishing between three types of policy attention—political speeches, policy issuance and field visits—and investigating their differential impacts when delivered by central and provincial governments. We constructed a data set related to the adoption of China's river chief system by 276 prefecture‐level cities from 2007 to 2017 and employed event history analysis to systematically examine the above‐mentioned effects. Our findings revealed that field visits have the strongest impact, followed by policy issuance, with public speeches having the weakest impact. Furthermore, policy attention from the central government has a significantly stronger influence on prefecture‐level policy diffusion than that from provincial governments, particularly in the context of field visits. This research extends policy diffusion theory by unveiling the distinct roles of specific policy attention patterns at different government levels. It offers critical insights for governments regarding the most effective means of promoting policy innovation through political signals.