Shifting Belief Homophily? A Case of the Czech Climate Policy

The major assumption of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is that advocacy coalitions are belief homophilous and tend to persist over time. In other words, policy actors tend to collaborate with like-minded others, which may result in the formation and maintenance of such coalitions. However, they may be susceptible to alteration in their beliefs through the process of policy learning under certain conditions, such as exposure to novel information or various external and internal events. This research utilizes organizational survey data collected during two governmental periods (2013-2017 and 2021-2025) in the Czech Republic, which are divided by the adoption of the European Green Deal in 2019. To disentangle belief-driven selection (belief homophily) from network-based belief alteration (policy learning), the study employs stochastic actor-oriented modelling (SAOM), jointly examining changes in information ties, collaboration ties, and policy beliefs over time. Our expectation is to identify two complementary, co-evolutionary tendencies. First, we expect that the selection via belief homophily is present. Second, we expect policy learning to be differentiated, depending on the dominant information sources. Thus, we explore whether the belief homophily shifts to operate on different sets of beliefs – for instance, moving from the nature of climate change to beliefs about specific climate policy instruments, such as the ban on combustion-engine cars.