Swimming with the Streams? Exploring Temporal Determinants of Policy Processes

When a policy process, often stretching across many years, culminates into the legislative deliberation of a specific policy option, time is of the essence: Issue attention is regarded a scarce resource in any political system and a long overdue bill may not be adopted when it has missed its window of opportunity. Many conditions could potentially impact on the time a bill takes to go through the stages of decision making – and this duration of the legislative process itself could even impact on the probability of a successful adoption. In order to further explore these temporal determinants of parliamentary policy processes, this study investigates two questions: 1) Which conditions accelerate or slow the adoption of a policy? 2) Does the length of the legislative process affect the likelihood of adoption? Drawing on recent theoretical advances and methodological suggestions concerning the perhaps most ‘time attentive’ policy process theory, the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF), I derive a set of hypotheses on temporal determinants of policy processes – also beyond the theory’s original focus on agenda setting. These cover all three streams of the MSF taking account of problem, political, and policy factors, their interaction during coupling, and the presence of decision windows. To test these hypotheses I use an updated and extended dataset on all Federal German bills and acts within the policy domain of penal and security law from 1997 to 2017. The German political system featuring significant institutional constraints is chosen to design a strong test of the MSF’s agency-heavy assumptions and the hand coded data allows for a detailed and innovative operationalization of policy and problem stream. Linear and logistic regression models will help to apply the process-oriented concepts of the Multiple Streams Framework within a quantitative study. Doing so, the study contributes to the literature in two regards: First, it adds to the small list of quantitative MSF applications and critically implements some of the recent suggestions. Second, the study significantly expands the literature on the length of legislative processes by specifically drawing on the insights of policy process theory.