Social Groups and Identities in Policy Actors’ Minds and Action

Abstract

Actor-centered policy process frameworks base on cognitive assumptions about the individual, mostly that of bounded rationality, to theoretically derive explanations for policy actors’ preferences, behaviour, and action. This panel provides a platform for theoretical and empirical contributions shedding light on the group-related and identity-driven factors that influence individual policy actors. We seek answers to the questions of the origins of group identification and identities, to the changing nature of social identification and certain identities (for example programmatic identities), and the impact these have on policy actors, across all stages of the policy process. The policy process is populated by all kinds of social groups: Political parties, formal bodies and committees, interest associations in a policy sector, working groups, regional and local groups, or informal networks. Within these social groups, the leadership dynamics and formation of policy preferences as well as their reactions to outside developments differ, and with them the factors that influence the social identity of their members. Assuming that it is above all the identification with social groups that is salient in policy actors’ minds and guiding their actions, this panel welcomes papers that specify the link between social group membership and policy actors’ preferences and behaviour. Papers submitted to this panel can address a variety of related issues, including but not limited to the following research questions: Which social group memberships are salient in policy actors’ minds in given situations, and why? How does this influence their thinking and action? How are social groups in the policy process built, transformed and abandoned, and how does this influence their members? In what way do social groups and the interaction between social groups exert an influence on agenda setting, policy formulation, policy adoption, and implementation? The panel particularly invites paper proposals that empirically apply and/or theoretically enlarge and/or combine with other existing approaches the perspective of social identities in general and PAF in particular in policy process research.

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