Policy Change: An Advocacy Coalition Framework Perspective

One purpose of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is to explain policy change. Previous holistic reviews of the ACF by Weible, Sabatier, and McQueen (2009) and Pierce, Peterson, Jones, Garrard, and Vu (2017) of the framework have not explicitly analyzed all the concepts and their interactions in a systematic manner. To address this gap and inform scholars and practitioners about past findings, strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for future research, this article analyzes how the ACF's theory of policy change is applied to 148 policy processes among 67 journal articles from 2007 to 2014. Similar to Weible et al. (2009), this research finds the frequent use of multiple primary pathways to policy change, infrequent use of many of the ACF's concepts, a plurality of applications in the environment and energy domain, comparison of subsystems, and a need for greater clarity and transparency among applications. Unlike Weible et al. (2009), this article explores associations between primary pathways and policy domains, the frequency of associations between primary pathways and secondary components, policy change and stasis, and identifies threats to internal validity of key ACF concepts.