European Policy Analysis Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016 | Page 131

European Policy Analysis

ideas become the policies, programs, and
policy philosophies that dominate politics
and political decision making, while
others become sidelined, marginalized,
or neglected? We can distinguish here
between ideas-based accounts traceable
to cognitive psychology and cognitive
science, and approaches embedded in
a social-constructivist, meaning-based
ontology of social reality (e.g., Fligstein
and McAdams 2012, 32ff).

In the former, ideas have primacy
over and are tightly coupled to speech
and action; and theorists and researchers
stick to mainstream, often quantitative
methods of researching the policy
process. Sabatier’s “advocacy coalition
framework” (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith
1988) sees the policy-oriented behavior of
actors as dominated by their “worldview”,
made up of “deep core beliefs” and “policy
core beliefs”. Advocacy coalitions are
formed between actors, both public and
nonpublic, on the basis of congruency
(not consensus) in their belief syste m
and coordinated political strategizing.
On the other hand, Kingdon’s “multiple
streams” approach (1995) sees the mindset of the actors as being more related to
their skill-set and occupational position
(the two being closely related). He
identifies some actors as focusing on the
nature and source of the concern (the
“problem stream”), others as focusing on
what could be done about it (the “policy
stream”), and a third cluster concerned
with what (if anything) should be done
about it (is this something with which
government should be concerned?), and
more particularly, what were opportune
moments for government to intervene.
Kingdon argued that the three streams
operated largely independently of one
another and that a critical question in

policy analysis was to identify the ways
in which links were made between them
(see Zahariadis 2003).

Both of these approaches tend
to focus attention on the stability of
policy settings, resting as they do on the
knowledge and values of the actors. But
Jones and Baumgartner (2005) focus
on change as well as stability, and on
the relationship between them. They
argue that policy subsystems dominated
by stabilized policy images can be
punctuated by bursts of nonincremental
change through disproportionate decision
making. So long-term patterns of periods
of stability and incremental change
with short outbursts of nonincremental
change, returning to a new equilibrium,
give their theory of political information
processing and attention allocation its
most well-known name: punctuated
equilibrium theory. Its proponents claim
to have integrated incremental and
nonincremental patterns of policy change
in an overarching new theory (Howlett
and Migone 2011).

Accounts of the social construction
of meaning take a broader perspective,
starting with the social process of
meaning-making and asking: How and
why do sociopolitically constructed
meanings impact the policy process?
Politics is conceptualized as a struggle
to control and impose shared meaning
that governs collective action projects or,
in Foucault’s words, become hegemonic
governmentalities (Dean 1999/2010).
Edelman (1988) and Alexander (2010,
276ff) view politics as an elite-staged
spectacle of performances where
“background representations, scripts,
actors, means of symbolic production,
mise en scène, social and interpretive
power, and audiences” either “felicitously”

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