Policy Change and the Advocacy Coalition Framework: Meta-Analysis of Past Applications

The advocacy coalition framework is one of the most widely utilized and applied theories of the policy process. The framework was developed by Paul Sabatier and Hank Jenkins-Smith to explain policy change and learning. Most past studies of the framework have focused on a single policy subsystem or a minority have even completed comparative work across policy subsystems. This paper examines 67 past applications of the ACF that focused on policy change. Content analysis was completed on these journal articles that were identified as applications of the framework. All of the articles come from peer reviewed English journal articles from 2007 – 2014. Inter-rater reliability has been completed on all of the coded items and has a percentage agreement of at least 80% and a Cohen’s Kappa of greater than 0.4 which is regarded as moderate agreement. The analysis explores policy change across nearly one hundred policy subsystems. We describe the policy subsystems based on their policy domain, country and level of government. We identify common themes across the applications such as whether policy change occurred and how it was described, if minor or major policy changes were identified, the role of learning, external shocks, internal changes and negotiations in policy change, as well as the presence of a policy broker. The purpose is to better understand how policy change is studied by ACF scholars, the strengths and weaknesses of this research, and hopefully provide insights about how policy change occurs.