About the hierarchy of beliefs and coordination - A chicken and egg problem

This paper deals with the hierarchy of beliefs and coordination. 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 to decisively affect policy outputs and outcomes. Hence, according to the ACF, beliefs are a key driver of coordination and manifold studies have tested this relationship. But does coordination also affect beliefs, i.e., contributes to policy learning? In this paper, we are aiming to disentangle the causality between coordination and beliefs in both directions by asking: What comes first? Beliefs or coordination? Or is there a mutual relationship between the two concepts? By doing so, we tackle two prominent and antagonistic processes discussed in many policy network studies, i.e., social selection vs. social influence. For our analysis, we take the same policy subsystem, the same set of actors, over several points in time and analyze how beliefs and coordination co-evolve over time. To do so, we draw on data from the Swiss Climate Policy Subsystem of the past 20 years. Specifically, we build a network coevolution model that allows us to assess how the political network (ties reflect coordination) and the belief network (ties reflect belief similarity) influence each other over time.