The Resonance Effect: Politicization and the Politics of Coalition-Building

What drives politicization? Resonance with the contestation of others! In this paper, I develop a generic theory of politicization that builds on the insight—central to the Advocacy Coalition Framework—that policy actors coordinate on the basis of shared ideas, while addressing a key limitation of that literature: the lack of theorized causal conditions under which actors are likely to act in concert. I argue that politicization is often driven not by direct stakeholders alone, but by actors who are not immediately affected by policy decisions reacting strategically to the contestation of those who are. I theorize coalition formation as a process in which actors advocate for solutions to others’ problems in order to influence who can enter their own field of interaction (closure) or to affect the monopolization of enforcement resources within it (control). I term this strategic pursuit of closure and control resonance, and develop a conditional logic specifying when and why different types of actors are motivated to align with, amplify, or appropriate the claims of others. Building on Bartolini’s (2018) distinction of political action as behavior motivated by the will to achieve the behavioral compliance of others, I derive a set of ideal-typical situations in which resonating across policy fields resolves coordination dilemmas faced by advocacy coalitions. I propose resonance as an analytical extension of coalition-based policy process theories, offering a way to connect actors’ ideational alignment to institutional constraints and strategic incentives. Empirically, the framework is applicable to coalition formation and politicization dynamics across EU policy fields, and contributes to balancing structural and agentic explanations of policy change.