Same Shock, Different Pathways: Coalition Opportunity Structures and CBDC Policy Change in China, the European Union, and the United States

The emergence of Libra in 2019 constituted a common external shock to the global monetary system, but the central bank digital currency (CBDC) policies of China, the European Union (EU), and the United States (U.S.) subsequently evolved along significantly different paths. Existing research mainly explains the differences in CBDC policies from the perspectives of the international monetary system, monetary sovereignty, and domestic institutional environment, but rarely examines how the common external shock was transformed into different policy change pathways. This paper, based on the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), focuses on the Coalition Opportunity Structure (COS) and uses structured comparative analysis and process tracking to compare the three CBDC policy subsystems. The analysis indicates that two dimensions of the COS influence the different policy processes after the shock. The degree of openness shapes the opportunities for different actors to continuously participate in policy interactions and the potential location for policy-oriented learning: China’s learning mainly occurs within the dominant coalition, the EU has formed institutionalized cross-coalition learning, while the U.S.’s open policy arena is more manifested as coalition competition at the policy core belief level. Consensus requirements shape the transformation of belief adjustments and coalition preferences into authoritative policy decisions: China’s relatively centralized decision-making structure allows belief adjustments within the coalition to be expressed more directly in policy; the EU’s higher consensus requirements institutionalize learning primarily through policy design adjustments; and the U.S. case shows that political control at key decision-making nodes affects the coalition’s ability to institutionalize its policy preferences. Findings demonstrate that COS shapes the political process by which external shocks transform into policy changes, further clarifying the relationship between external shocks, policy-oriented learning, and policy change in ACF, while offering the first systematic comparison of CBDC policymaking across China, the EU, and the U.S.