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AbstractPolicy processes are ongoing phenomena without beginning or end. Accordingly, a major focus of research has been on questions of stability and change. This paper continues in this tradition by examining advocacy coalition stability, belief change, and learning. This paper draws on three waves of policy actor surveys that compare panel and non‐panel samples. The data were collected in 2013, 2015, and 2017 in the context of oil and gas development in Colorado, USA. The findings mostly confirm that coalitions and beliefs tend to be stable and that learning leans toward reinforcement rather than change in beliefs. However, although rare, some instances of belief change, change in coalition membership, and changing policy positions occur. This paper makes theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of stability, change, and reinforcement of advocacy coalitions and their beliefs and charges policy scholars to look more at the exceptions to the evidence rather than the confirmations.

AbstractResearchers struggle to understand the relationship between science and policy positions, especially the complicated interplay among the various factors that might affect the acceptance or rejection of scientific information. This article presents a typology that simplifies and guides research linking scientific information to policy positions. We use the typology to examine how characteristics of both scientific information and policy actors' existing policy positions affect the likelihood of changing, maintaining or reinforcing those policy positions. We analyse data from surveys conducted in 2015 and 2017 of policy actors engaged in contested policy debates over shale oil and gas development in Colorado, US. Our findings confirm expectations that policy actors will most likely maintain and reinforce their policy positions in response to scientific information. Our data also show that changes in policy positions depend on policy actors' risk perceptions, perceived issue contentiousness, networks and experience with science.

Among the policy instruments used to pursue social and environmental goals, voluntary programmes are seen as 'win‐win' opportunities. Despite a sizeable literature documenting reasons individuals opt into voluntary programmes, little attention has been paid to why participants are motivated by certain reasons more than others. This article addresses this gap. Using data from a survey of organic producers in the United States Department of Agriculture's organic certification programme, we examine how organic producers' values relate to their stated reasons for pursuing organic certification. Along the way, we test hypotheses inspired by grid‐group cultural theory, as well as a hypothesis regarding the alignment of participants' values and the substantive programme domain. Study findings provide consistent support for the value‐alignment hypothesis and mixed support for grid‐group expectations. We conclude by discussing the findings' implications for voluntary programme theory and empirical programme success.

We are pleased to present the sixth edition of the Public Policy Yearbook. Each year, dating back to its launch in 2009, we have used the content of the Yearbook to develop indicators for tracking developments in public policy scholarship. While we recognize that trends we can identify are only representative of the sample of Yearbook scholars, the patterns of scholarly focus have remained quite stable despite a more than doubling of our membership over the 2009-2014 period. In this introductory article, following a brief description of the Yearbook, we take a comparative look at how research trends in the Yearbook have evolved over the last six years. Adapted from the source document.

Introduces a special journal issue covering "Public Policy Yearbook 2013". Adapted from the source document.

This paper examines the policy analytical capacity
of government compared to the non-profit and private sectors
and to the research/academic community. Based on
original data from a 2011 questionnaire administered to
policy actors in the context of energy and climate issues in
the state of Colorado, the findings show that government is
not as "hollowed out" as expected. While individuals from
academia and consulting firms may have higher analytical
capacity than government in conducting research, government
is higher across most other measures. Nonetheless,
nearly all respondents agree that government needs higher
levels of policy analytical capacity to address climate and
energy issues.

The study of policy process involves the study of
policy actors - people involved in the development of public
policy in a particular geographic area. This paper investigates
policy actors in the context of Colorado climate and
energy issues with a particular emphasis on the types and
levels of their engagement in policy activities. The conceptual
framework guiding this study centers on policy analytical
capacity, the ability to acquire and use information in the
policy process. High policy analytical capacity is expected to
be associated with high levels, and more diverse kinds, of
policy activities. The findings partly confirm the expectations.
Actors from government and the non-profit sector
report the highest policy analytical capacity and highest and
most diverse range of policy activities. However, researchers,
despite relatively high levels of policy analytical capacity,
report involvement in just a few activities beyond conducting
research. Actors with strong educational backgrounds in the
physical sciences are more likely to be involved in conducting
research whereas those with strong backgrounds in the
social sciences are more likely to be involved in evaluating
and appraising policies and working with the public. The
conclusion contextualizes the findings by focusing on the
relationship between technical and scientific complexity of
climate and energy issues and the necessity for participating
actors to possess high levels of policy analytical capacity.

While many policy process theories mention emotions, they have remained mostly unexplored theoretically and empirically, even as broader social science literature incorporates emotions into understanding policy process-related phenomena such as political beliefs and behaviors. This paper introduces the theoretical arguments and a method for studying advocacy coalitions using a combination of emotions and beliefs within the Advocacy Coalition Framework. An application is illustrated in a natural gas pipeline siting conflict in the US using data from news media coverage. The empirical results show that coalitions express emotions and beliefs differently, and that the dyadic relationship between emotions and beliefs significantly distinguishes coalitions rather than emotions by themselves. This paper takes a significant step forward in integrating emotional and belief expressions into the ACF, adding to coalition identification methods, providing a foundation for advancing theory, and contributing to the broader community of policy studies.

This article introduces the special issue 'Transformational change through Public Policy'. After introducing the idea of transformational societal change, it asks how public policy scholarship can contribute to fostering it; the research questions we need to do so; what actors we need to study; who our audiences are; and how we need to expand our theories and methods. In our conclusion, we draw five lessons from the special issue articles. Transformational change (1) often results from many instances of policy changes over extended periods of time; (2) involves social movements that reconceptualise problems and possibilities; and (3) requires policy changes across sectors and levels of society, from local communities to national or global communities. As a field, Public Policy will (4) never offer detailed instructions to create transformational change in all circumstances, but (5) must involve scholars taking on different roles, from engaged scholarship to theory development that each provide unique contributions.

The articles presented in this supplemental issue mark the 10th edition of the Policy Studies Journal's Public Policy Yearbook. This issue includes three retrospective review articles summarizing recent developments in public policy research across the following focus areas: public opinion, policy learning and international relations.