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AbstractThe analysis of policy change has produced a number of contrasting theoretical approaches, each offering a lens through which to view policy phenomena. This article suggests that the existing menu of approaches for understanding change can be usefully complemented by an understanding of the role played by value conflict. Using institutionalist analysis, I argue that the need to make value‐choices in a nondisruptive way shapes large areas of government activity, particularly in Westminster systems, and explains many observed patterns of stability and change.Building on work by Thacher and Rein, I describe and characterize six types of response to value conflict, giving examples of the role and implications of each. It is not claimed that all policy change can be understood in this way—simply that some types of change reflect the value‐based nature of public policy itself, and the fact that political and bureaucratic systems must evolve mechanisms for dealing simultaneously with thousands of competing and conflicting policy values.

Seeking to amend historical institutionalism, this article draws on the political science literature on ideas and the sociological literature on framing to discuss three ways in which ideational processes impact policy change. First, such processes help to construct the problems and issues that enter the policy agenda. Second, ideational processes shape the assumptions that affect the content of reform proposals. Third, these processes can become discursive weapons that participate in the construction of reform imperatives. Overall, ideational processes impact the ways policy actors perceive their interests and the environment in which they mobilize. Yet, such processes are not the only catalyst of policy change, and institutional constraints impact the politics of ideas and policy change. This claim is further articulated in the final section, which shows how national institutions and repertoires remain central to the politics of policy change despite the undeniable role of transnational actors and processes, which interact with such institutions and repertoires. Adapted from the source document.

The paper discusses forms or patterns of policy change and how catastrophe theory may, in certain circumstances, provide a useful technique for formalising these changes. The first section reviews different configurations of change and focuses on discontinuous and incremental patterns and the factors explaining them. The second section considers, in the light of the preceding dichotomy, evidence on the nature of change in UK road policies. It is suggested that in this policy area there is a tendency for discontinuous change which may be susceptible to more rigorous analysis using techniques of catastrophe theory. In a third section these techniques are applied specifically to trunk road policies in order to examine the hypothesis that pressure groups have played an influential role. The approach is an exploratory one and the application of the technique is kept informal to encourage further research from this perspective.