Policy learning and policy change: exploring possibilities on the Advocacy Coalition Framework

Understanding policy change with the advocacy coalition framework: an application to Swiss drug policy

Over the last two decades, Swiss drug policy has moved away from a prohibitionist to a ‘harm reduction’ model. This article uses the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) to understand this process of policy change, drawing on social movement theory to overcome shortcomings of the ACF regarding collective action. We argue that recent history in the Želd of drug policy in Switzerland can plausibly ...

Advocacy Coalitions involved in California’s Menu Labeling Policy Debate: Exploring Coalition Structure, Policy Beliefs, Resources, and Strategies

Advocacy coalitions often play an important role in the state health policymaking process, yet little is known about their structure, composition, and behavior. In 2008, California became the first state to enact a menu labeling law. Using the advocacy coalition framework, we examine different facets of the coalitions involved in California's menu labeling policy debate. We use a qualitative re...

Reconceptualizing Major Policy Change in the Advocacy Coalition Framework. A Discourse Network Analysis of German Pension Politics

How does major policy change come about? This article identifies and rectifies weaknesses in the conceptualization of innovative policy change in the Advocacy Coalition Framework. In a case study of policy belief change preceding an innovative reform in the German subsystem of old-age security, important new aspects of major policy change are carved out. In particular, the analysis traces a tra...

Advocacy and Competition Policy

Reasoning about Unforeseen Possibilities During Policy Learning

Methods for learning optimal policies in autonomous agents often assume that the way the domain is conceptualised—its possible states and actions and their causal structure— is known in advance and does not change during learning. This is an unrealistic assumption in many scenarios, because new evidence can reveal important information about what is possible, possibilities that the agent was no...