Coalition Formation Between Core Beliefs and Secondary Aspects in Nascent Subsystems

In nascent policy subsystems, political actors have a hard time identifying coalition partners, given that knowledge about subsystem boundaries (both in terms of relevant issue and actors) are unknown, and the belief systems and policy preferences of potential coalitions partners (as well as opponents) are difficult to assess. Actors in such subsystems are known to rely on prior knowledge and deep core beliefs for forming coalitions. It is further known that the belief hierarchy – the idea that secondary aspects and thus specific policy instruments preferences are aligned with policy core beliefs – is hard to establish, given unknown and changing secondary aspects. In this paper, we ask how secondary aspects align with coalition structures over time in a nascent subsystem. We analyze the nascent subsystem of Swiss sustainable construction over 15 years, based on public discourse from newspaper data. We differentiate between three phases and reconstruct actor coalitions based on core beliefs and related institutional logics. We then analyze a) how these coalitions change over the three periods, and b) how secondary aspects represented by different technological solutions are integrated into the actors’ coalition structures. The latter is relevant not only because of the potential misalignment of core beliefs and secondary aspects in nascent subsystems, but also because of the highly dynamic discourse about potential solutions towards the challenge of sustainable construction, with changing technologies being discussed and assessed by actors. Not least, this analysis makes a link to transition studies, further bridging it with the ACF, and their methodology of socio-technical configuration analysis.