The research paper presents the results of the author's Ph.D. thesis, which is currently in its final stages of production and will be officially submitted in June 2017. Its main research objective is to explain the contrasting prominence of the firearm control issue in the political agendas of Brazil and Uruguay during the last decade, as well as the differing policy decisions that followed. Namely, the approval of the 'Disarmament Statute' in Brazil in 2003 and the 'Firearm Law' in Uruguay in 2014.
To explain these phenomena, we resort to public policy theories concerning policy formation, a term that condenses three aspects of the policy process: agenda-setting, the development of alternatives and policy decision making. Applied is John Kingdon’s (2014/1995) Multiple Streams Framework (MSF), because of its capacity to analyze the dynamics surrounding agenda-setting, policy change and variation. However, we go beyond the original framework and adopt a major recent modification proposed by Zohlnhöfer, Herweg, and Huß (2016), which introduces a second coupling process to the framework. Their suitability is assessed with the help of empirical evidence from different qualitative explanatory sources. Among others, the study of legislative documents, academic literature and media reports, as well as the conduction of in situ interviews with protagonists of the specific policy processes.
Inasmuch as the MSF and the proposed extension were developed with Western democracies in mind, their explanatory capacity might not be the same in different regions. Thus, our second research objective is the further development of the MSF and the public policy research agenda in Latin America. Because the study of policy formation in the region is recent and relatively limited, we aim to make an original contribution to the empirical verification of the MSF in Latin America and developing countries. The challenges and complications that arouse during the analysis will allow us to devise adjustments to the MSF and its extension, and to further its theoretical development, while deepening our understanding of the policy formation process in Latin America.
Bibliography:
● Kingdon JW (2014) Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policy. 2nd ed. Crawfordsville: Pearson Education Limited.
● Zohlnhöfer R, Herweg N and Huß C (2016) Bringing Formal Political Institutions into the Multiple Streams Framework: An
Analytical Proposal for Comparative Policy Analysis. Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice 18(3): 243–256.
