The Antecedents and Evolution of Policy Change

One of the primary foci of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is policy change. Since the ACF’s inception, most studies of this phenomenon have been descriptive, single-instance explorations that confirm one or more of ACF’s four pathways of policy change: external shocks, internal shocks, negotiated agreements, and policy-oriented learning. This chapter shifts the focus to the antecedents of multiple, related policy changes within a policy subsystem to better understand the evolution of policies over time. To do this, we analyze 76 policy changes that occurred in the Colorado oil and gas policy subsystem from 2007 through 2021. We use public and government documents, news articles, social media, and interviews to identify the antecedents of each policy change and analyze how these changes influence one another simultaneously or subsequently. Our results identify the antecedents of policy change to include strategies for mitigating conflict, path dependencies on previous issues, and technocratic learning, in addition to the four pathways. These findings do not refute ACF’s current theoretical pathways of policy change; instead, they show the limitations of ACF’s current theoretical arguments and the need for greater contextualization to understand the drivers and effects of related policy changes. Finally, this paper contributes an appendix of methods and guidelines for conducting a medium-sized analysis of policy change over time.