A central hypothesis in the influential policy process theory, the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) posits that major policy change is unlikely if the coalition defending the status quo retains power. However, operationalising which coalition is in power has proven challenging.
In my recent article on this topic published in Policy and Politics, I argue that coalition power can be operationalised based on two dimensions: formal authority over decisions (hard power) and the ability to shape policy preferences through discourse (soft power). Employing discourse network analysis to capture the relative dominance of competing coalitions based on discourse interactions, I analysed the contentious 20-year-old debate surrounding the proposed liberalisation of the Mexican electricity generation sector.
The findings align with the ACF hypothesis; they show that the status quo coalition maintained consistent soft power when two reform attempts to liberalise the sector failed. This discursive dominance corresponded with continued policy stability, supporting the ACF hypothesis. However, major policy change occurred when the reforming coalition gained discursive influence and internal consensus, leading to a shift in soft power dynamics.
By Sarah Brown, Journal Manager with Dr. Elizabeth Koebele, co-editor
The theme of this quarter’s highlights collection from Policy & Politics is Policy Feedback Theory (PFT), an increasingly popular theory of the policy process that is featuring more regularly on public policy syllabi. In a nutshell, PFT considers how past policies (re)shape the political context in which new policies are formed.
Our first article in this collection has been one of our most popular and highly cited since its publication in 2022: New pathways to paradigm change in public policy: Combining insights from policy design, mix and feedback by Sebastian Sewerin, Benjamin Cashore and Michael Howlett. Here, the authors argue that policy science scholarship is better at explaining policy change in retrospect, rather than formulating forward-looking recommendations about how to achieve major or paradigmatic change. Potentially even more concerning, existing scholarship emphasises the importance of external shocks in initiating major policy change, which doesn’t augur well for proactively tackling the major problems of our time such as climate change. In their article, the authors identify two conceptual and theoretical gaps that might limit how policy scholars think about major or paradigmatic change: 1) a lack of shared understanding of what ‘policy change’ is, and 2) a focus on (changing) policies in isolation rather than on policies as part of complex policy mixes. Against this background, they argue that combining insights from policy design, policy mix and policy feedback literature allows us to identify other pathways towards initiating and achieving policy change.
Conditional cash transfers, or ‘CCTs’, constituted the backbone of Mexico’s poverty reduction policy for more than twenty years. CCTs provided cash benefits targeted at poor people, conditional on the compliance of certain requirements, like school attendance by children and participation in health promotion activities and check-ups by all family members. The objective of CCTs was to fight poverty through the formation of human capital. The approach was a social policy investment seeking to mould the behaviour of beneficiaries in desirable ways.
Cash transfers were commonly paid to the mother of the family, to secure an adequate use of the additional income within the household. CCTs were pioneered in Mexico, the first country to introduce them at the national level, becoming the backbone of anti-poverty policy for more than two decades. Maintained and expanded by three federal governments of different political parties, the policy reached almost a quarter of the population and yielded significant improvements across many health, education and nutrition indicators, prompting its diffusion around the globe. The stability and positive results of CCTs might have presaged their continuity, but the government that came to power in December 2018, swiftly dismantled them with virtually no opposition.
Policy & Politics Journal Blog 