CLASSIFYING ROLES OF POLICY ACTORS

Policy actors are a central element in policy making and many classic and contemporary policy theories stress and investigate their importance. Policy actors are usually classified onto state / institutional / official actors and nonstate / noninstitutional / unofficial actors, with several subtypes within each. Then the features of actors are analysed, their power, resources, skills, strategies, perspectives, ideas, etc., to get more precise insight into their influence onto policy making. Finally, research is devoted to the relationships among actors and the structure of those relations in the form of triangles, networks, coalitions, or communities. Even though actors are a major issue in policy process research, there is still a lack of knowledge on how policy actors affect policy making. The roles different types of actors, with different features and relationships, take in the agenda-setting, policy design, and implementation are one of the weakest parts of the discipline. Concept of policy entrepreneurs is a good exception (Kingdon, 1984, Petridou, Mintrop, 2020), but what other heterogeneous roles policy actors perform in policy making? There is no systematic classification of all the roles actors can fulfil within policy transformations. This is where this paper will try to contribute by conducting an empirical investigation on diverse variants of policy actor’s roles, with descriptive purpose and a descriptive research question. It will be founded on the cross-sectoral comparison of Croatian public policies, that represent diverse policy areas (from defence and foreign affairs, law and order, economic, social, sectoral, and other policies, see Compston, ed, 2004). Data gathering will be done through expert interviews with Croatian scholars from different disciplines, that are devoted to studies of specific sectors. Whole material will be transcribed verbatim and processed by NVivo software. Expert’s answers on types of conduct that actors undertake will be coded inductively, without strict prior theoretical assumptions, to empirically extract broader actor’s behaviour patterns that appear in practice of policy making. The analysis will be based on the research strategy of thematic analysis (Boyatzis, 1998; Fereday and Muir-Cochrane, 2006; Guest al, 2012). This could be a base for a solid classification of policy actor’s roles in policy making, to enhance empirical policy theory on policy actors and their effect on policy transitions and transformations.