Advocacy Coalitions: Beyond the Archetype and Toward Dynamism and Diversity

For more than 30 years, the concept of “advocacy coalitions” (as found within the Advocacy Coalition Framework) has guided hundreds of research projects in studying politics and public policy across the globe. Motivating this research was an archetypical depiction of advocacy coalitions that featured a diverse array of actors with similar beliefs who coordinate their political behaviors over extended periods of time. This archetypical depiction of advocacy coalitions yielded a great deal of original insights including how and why advocacy coalitions form, how they are structured, and the ways in which they influence policy processes. However, as this knowledge has accumulated, archetypical depiction of advocacy coalitions has increasingly come to impede theoretical and empirical progress. Part of the challenge is that the archetypical depiction was most applicable to certain contexts, particularly those found in advanced democracies, intense and sustained political conflicts, and established policy issues. Yet, advocacy coalitions have been found within and beyond those contexts with more diversity and dynamism than originally conceived. This paper offers a path beyond the archetype. It begins with a look to the past at the original conceptualization of advocacy coalitions and a summary of what has been learned to date. The paper then looks to the future by updating the definition of advocacy coalitions to integrate recent advances in network analysis, offering a static coalition taxonomy and dynamic representation of coalition configurations, and integrating the factors that induce coalition stability and change. We then offer updates to the original hypotheses found in the Advocacy Coalition Framework. The paper concludes with a research agenda that features best practices for studying coalitions, identifies the unanswered questions for moving their study forward, and provides strategies for conducting both applied and basic science in the studying advocacy coalitions.