Policy Core Belief Change as Complex Contagion

The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) has proposed that the sharing of core beliefs related to policy is what unites political coalitions, as organizations gather together in order to further political goals that they see desirable based on their beliefs. ACF expects powerful coalitions to be able to dominate policy if no competing coalitions are able to match them in resources. Furthermore, ACF argues that actors sometime do change their core beliefs but usually as a result of a shock that is exogenous to the political subsystem in question. It has been documented that such exogenous shocks can act as catalysts for the redistribution of resources and also for changes in beliefs. However, even though ACF is in practice done by many policy network analysists, previous research has rarely taken into account that factors related to the structures of networks themselves might act as catalysts of belief change. In this paper, we test hypotheses that explain belief change as a result of social contagion. ACF makes a three-fold distinction of different kinds of beliefs and their differences also act as the basis for different kinds of social contagions. First, we expect that so called deep core beliefs are very resistant to change when faced with social pressure (i.e. no contagion). Furthermore, secondary beliefs, which have to do with technical solutions, are quite likely to change even if just a few contacts act as sources of contagion. Thus, they represent simple contagions. Changes in policy core beliefs are instances of complex contagions, which require reinforcement from several contacts for change to take place. The threshold for complex contagions is therefore higher than for secondary beliefs. These hypotheses will be tested with longitudinal policy networks survey data from four countries. In all cases, the policy networks have to do with REDD+, which is a program initiated in the Global South for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.