Content Stability and Change Through New and Old Programmatic Elites

Research on policy processes increasingly addresses explanations of policy content. In doing so, scholars make use of established theories like policy design theory (Schneider and Ingram 1990), discussing the relation between policy instruments and outcomes, or policy paradigm shifts (Hall 1993). But a change in policy paradigm may also be the result of sectoral network structures (Coleman et al. 1996). When a new policy program substitutes an existing one, this presents an instance of policy change breaking policy stability. Such instances usually come with shifts in power relations (Wison 2000). Connecting to the research strand shifts in policy programs, this paper discusses the relationship between the programmatic changes within policy sectors, the networks and interests of collective actors as programmatic elites, and long-term policy developments in policy sectors. The recently developed Programmatic Action Framework (PAF) forms the theoretical basis of the analysis (Hornung and Bandelow 2017). It assumes that in sectoral policies the development of new programs is closely connected to the emergence of a programmatic elite as an alliance between central actors close to the state within the policy sector (Hassenteufel et al. 2010). After reviewing the established approaches to policy design, regime and paradigm change, the proposed paper reveals how the PAF contributes to the analysis of policy stability and change with an explicit focus on programmatic elites. How does programmatic change in policy sectors come about? What factors influence the policy content advocated by new programmatic elites? The central argument presented here is that while new policy programs present innovation, the proponents of new policy programs become proponents of stability the longer the program persists. Through a new policy program, a sectoral programmatic elite evolves and coins sectoral policies over a longer period of time. At the beginning, it advocates changes and uses the process of programmatic changes for pursuing own goals and career interests. Due to new problems coming up in phases of policy stability, which the existing policy program may not solve, the programmatic elite weakens over time and is challenged by new elites with new programs. Then, old elites seem conservative while the new elites connected to the new program seem innovative. Nevertheless, not all problems induce policy change. The paper therefore investigates what problems may induce new policy content and hypothesizes that winning over programmatic actors of the old elite for the new program makes success of the latter more likely.