The Hierarchy of Beliefs and Coordination: Identifying Coalitions in Switzerland's Climate Policy Subsystem

The Advocacy Coalition Framework emphasizes the role of policy actors and their beliefs in public policy making. As soon as actors share beliefs, they start to coordinate actions, in order to affect policy outputs and outcomes decisively. There are many different ways in how to identify advocacy coalitions. Some emphasize more the belief-centered approach, whereas others focus more on coordination (assuming coordination being a result of joint beliefs). However, to our knowledge, never the two were systematically compared. To do so, we take the same policy subsystem, the same set of actors, the same point in time and identify coalitions once based on beliefs (stated in discourses) and once based on coordination (through joint venue participation). The results will give us a first answer about the hierarchy between beliefs and coordination.