Identifying Policy Change Pathways Using the ACF and Set Theory

Policy change pathways are an important part of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) explanation of policy change and stasis. ACF scholars have substantially theorized policy change pathways – as evident in the two ACF policy change hypotheses – but have yet to develop rigorous methodologies for measuring pathways. This paper proposes such a methodology by conceiving the collective actors involved in policy development as intersecting and overlapping sets. It argues that advocacy communities, advocacy coalitions, partisans (i.e., political parties), and veto players have memberships that may overlap and intersect in various ways, as sets. Moreover, these set intersections may change over time as actors learn, negotiate, and respond to policy subsystem shocks. In this way, the causal steps in a policy change pathway can be operationalized as those conditions (policy learning, negotiation, response to shocks) with sufficient impact to change set intersections in ways conducive to policy change. This helps distinguish the causal ‘signal’ of pathway steps from the background ‘noise’ of other events, allowing for more rigorous and more confident pathway identification. This operationalization of pathways is proposed on a heuristic level, using Canada’s 2018 legalization of recreational cannabis as an illustrative example.