Month: July 2024

Manifesting Symbolic Representation through Collaborative Policymaking

by Jack Mewhirter, Danielle McLaughlin, & Brian Calfano

Representation is crucial to any collaborative governance arrangement. The makeup of those who participate in collaborative forums impacts not just who “wins” and “loses” in the policymaking process, but also how the public perceives participating organizations. Generally speaking, if citizens feel that their interests and incentives are being represented by those participating in a collaboration, they will hold more positive beliefs toward those organizations involved, a phenomenon referred to as “symbolic representation.” Conversely, a perceived lack of representation can potentially engender distrust and negative perceptions toward participating organizations.

The inclusion of civil society organizations in collaborative policymaking is crucial to making citizens feel represented in collaborative forums. Compared to, for example, business and government stakeholders, civil society organizations tend to be more embedded in local communities and thus more responsive to their wants and needs. Thus, we argue that collaborative policymaking forums that feature high participation from civil society organizations should produce a symbolic effect toward participating organizations for citizens aware of this representation.

We test this hypothesis in the context of the Collaborative Settlement Agreement (or CA) governing policing in Cincinnati, Ohio. Established following the controversial killing of a Black teenager in 2001, the CA created a collaborative forum that brought together the Cincinnati Police Department and civil society organizations to address concerns around policing. The CA is a good case study for our hypothesis because civil society organizations have been well-represented and very active within the forum, using it to bring about numerous reforms to department practices.

To capture respondents most representative of Cincinnati’s urban core, we conducted surveys at several community events in the city of Cincinnati between June and September 2017. We asked respondents about their familiarity with the CA and their subsequent feelings toward the Cincinnati Police Department, anticipating that the two will be positively related (i.e., those who are more knowledgeable about the CA will feel more warmly towards the police). We also asked a number of demographic and personal history questions (e.g., regarding race, age, income, any interactions with police, etc.) to see how such variables might correlate with respondents’ knowledge and attitudes. 

And indeed, we found a strong positive relationship between knowledge about the CA and attitudes towards the police. In our survey we also asked respondents to indicate whether they thought that Cincinnati police officers “looked like” them – otherwise referred to as “passive representation” – and found that those who agreed also felt more positively about the police. Other variables that showed positive correlations included age, employment, and income. 

Our study demonstrates the important role that representation in collaborative policymaking forums can play in how people feel about those who participate in it. The case of the Collaborative Agreement in Cincinnati particularly illustrates how the inclusion of civil society organizations can contribute to feelings of symbolic representation, an important finding in the context of police-community relationships. Our findings point to the need to involve groups with close community ties in collaborative policymaking endeavors, as this will go a long way to securing buy-in and coproduction from the broader population. Our findings also reinforce that passive representation – having participants in forums who “look like you” – can bolster symbolic representation. While the CA is a powerful example of inclusion and representation done well, further studies need to be done to see whether collaborative forums that don’t feature robust involvement from civil society organizations are indeed looked upon less favorably. Furthermore, our study took for granted that citizens feel represented by civil society organizations, but this assumption requires empirical testing as well. 

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Mewhirter, Jack, Danielle McLaughlin, and Brian Calfano. 2024. “Manifesting Symbolic Representation Through Collaborative Policymaking.” Policy Studies Journal, 52(2): 283–318. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12525.

About the Authors

Jack Mewhirter is an Associate Professor in the Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the University of Tennessee. His research assesses the origins, implementation, and impacts of public policies meant to address complex social problems. This work is done in various contexts, including environmental, health and policing policy. 

Danielle M. McLaughlin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Kent State University. Her research focuses on the impact of institutions in solving collective action problems, mainly in the context of environmental policy issues.

Brian Calfano is a Professor at the University of Cincinnati. His research focuses on media and politics, religion and politics, and community engagement with local government. 

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Athletic Competition Between the States: The Rapid Spread of Name, Image, Likeness Laws and Why it Matters for Understanding Policy Diffusion

by Roshaun Colvin & Joshua M. Jansa

Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) policies have rapidly spread across the United States and are dramatically changing the landscape of college sports. NIL enables student-athletes to earn compensation and secure offers and sponsorships while pursuing their education. State lawmakers hope NIL policies will attract premiere student athletes and make their states’ university athletic programs successful (see Figure 1 below). 

The spread of NIL policies allows us to examine mechanisms at work in the policy diffusion process and to consider a new dimension of competition between states related to protecting or enhancing states’ reputations rather than directly accruing economic resources. To improve theory and measurement of competition as a policy diffusion mechanism, we ask: how does national athletic competition influence a state’s decision to adopt NIL policies?

To answer this, we observed the adoption of NIL across all 50 states within 39 months. This data can be used to model the diffusion of NIL through directed dyad event history analysis, a common method in policy diffusion research that allows for the study of how interstate dynamics and internal determinants influence policy adoption. 

A map of the united states Description automatically generated

We consider that states may engage in different forms of competition. States engage in offensive competition by setting policies with the aim of maintaining their reputations to gain an advantage over other states. In order to measure the internal determinants of a state’s athletic reputation, and therefore its susceptibility to engage in offensive competition, we use the number, value, and success of the state’s Division 1 Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) programs. States may also engage in defensive competition, adopting policies to keep up with other states by reacting to what rival states are doing to build their reputations. We measure the interstate dynamics driving athletics competition, and therefore the likelihood of defensive competitive behavior using measures of sport-, conference-, and league-wide competition.

The results indicate that athletic competition best explains a state’s decision to adopt NIL. Particularly, states appear more likely to adopt NIL based on their national competitors’ actions and to preserve their status as premiere football programs. However, there is not compelling evidence that conference competition is a motivating force driving NIL adoptions. Rather, it appears that the states with the highest reputed football programs responded to national competition rather than competition within their conference. Other interstate dynamics, such as geographic contiguity or having the same party in power, do not appear to consistently spur the spread of NIL throughout states, suggesting NIL may be a policy in which a new dimension of competition better explains its diffusion than previous tendencies for states to consistently mimic other states.

The spread of NIL provides an excellent opportunity to understand diffusion mechanisms, specifically the limits of the competition mechanism. Furthermore, it provides the opportunity to generate new ways to operationalize competition for empirical analysis. In the case of NIL policy, states adjusted their status as major destinations for college athletes by hurrying to adopt NIL policy prior to other states adopting NIL policy.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Colvin, Roshaun and Joshua M. Jansa. 2024. “Athletic Competition Between the States: The Rapid Spread of Name, Image, Likeness Laws and Why It Matters For Understanding Policy Diffusion.” Policy Studies Journal 52 (2): 451–468. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12522.

About the Authors

Roshaun Colvin is a graduate student at University of Florida and received his Master’s in Political Science at Oklahoma State University.

Joshua M. Jansa is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Oklahoma State University. His research focuses on policy diffusion, state politics, political and economic inequality, and civic education.

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Race, Representation, and Policy Attitudes in U.S. Public Schools

by Lael A. Keiser & Donald P. Haider-Markel

Tragic events around the country highlight the disproportionate ill-treatment of African Americans within the criminal justice system, the high levels of distrust African Americans have for the police and political institutions in general, and the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in public institutions. In response, some have sought to increase the passive or descriptive representation of minorities within law enforcement, higher education, and public schools, with the hope that doing so will improve the treatment of under-represented groups and enhance positive attitudes toward institutions and the policies they implement. 

However, different schools of thought exist about whether increasing representation of minorities is a zero-sum game (where increasing representation of one group reduces it for others) and whether it worsens attitudes of historical majorities. Further, while scholars have discussed two major perspectives – the mirror image and the institutional democracy hypotheses – few have measured passive representation in ways that fit these two perspectives or examined their implications for both minority and majority groups. 

According to the theory of symbolic representation, greater passive representation can evoke feelings of inclusiveness and of being represented which, in turn, impacts public attitudes toward policy and public institutions. Two distinct and competing mechanisms connect this passive representation with citizen attitudes. One argument, described as the “mirror image” hypothesis, is that a person’s support for government institutions depends, in part, on whether people within those institutions “look like” that person. The institutional symbol of democracy perspective, on the other hand, posits that support for public institutions depends on whether the institution reflects the population as a whole. 

In our paper, we test both of these hypotheses by examining passive representation in public schools and attitudes about school discipline using different measures of passive representation that better map onto existing theory. Using individual-level survey data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS), we analyze a sample of 5,750 white, Black, and Hispanic 10th-grade students across 453 high schools who were asked their perspectives on the fairness of school rules and whether they felt the rules were implemented in a uniform manner across all students. We utilize three distinct measures of passive representation, as illustrated below.

Our results were more consistent with the institutional symbol hypothesis, where more diverse school personnel corresponded with more positive attitudes about how institutions implement policy among white students. White students in schools with a higher proportion of minority teachers (and therefore fewer white teachers) were more likely to think punishment is fair than were white students in schools with less passive representation for minorities. This finding provides evidence that increasing the number of minority teachers may not always be considered a zero-sum context.  However, we do find evidence in support of the mirror image hypothesis for Black students who were more likely to think punishment was fairer when their percentage representation was greater but we find no evidence that attitudes were affected by representation measured by diversity or proportional representation.  We find inconsistent results for Hispanic students. 

However, our results suggest some important caveats. Though our analysis indicated that white students’ attitudes toward fairness were greater in schools with higher percentage representation of minorities, this was largely only the case in schools with smaller minority student populations. We found no evidence that white students’ attitudes varied with differences in proportional representation. This suggests that the positive link between minority representation and whites’ attitudes was strongest when in schools with relatively small minority student shares.

And perhaps more importantly, our results highlight how the use of different measures of representation, as well as of distinct statistical models, can lead to dissimilar results. This calls attention to the assumptions researchers implicitly make about theory when they choose measures of representation and calls us to both specify the theoretical mechanisms at play and to match them to theory so that we can improve our understanding of how passive representation truly affects policy attitudes. 

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Keiser, Lael R., Donald P. Haider-Markel, and Rajeev Darolia. 2022. “Race, Representation, and Policy Attitudes in U.S. Public Schools.” Policy Studies Journal, 50(4): 823–848. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12443

About the Authors

Lael R. Keiser is professor and director of the Harry S. Truman School of Government and Public Affairs. Her research and teaching focuses on the policy implementation and the administration of public programs. She serves on the editorial boards of Public Administration Review and the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory.

Donald P. Haider-Markel is Professor of political science at the University of Kansas. His research and teaching are focused on the representation of group interests in politics and policy, and the dynamics between public opinion, political behavior, and public policy.

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Rethinking Policy Piloting: Managing Uncertainty in the Policy Process

by Sreeja Nair

As governments grapple with uncertainties associated with complex policy issues such as climate change, digital transformation, pandemics and Artificial Intelligence, the role of policy piloting and experimentation will be key in shaping policy choices. Designing policies as pilots and experiments “in theory” permits governments a safe space to test new and alternative policy designs and learn from them. There are, however, challenges in realizing the potential of pilots to do so in practice. In my book Rethinking Policy Piloting, I study design features of selected policy pilots that were launched to manage risk and uncertainty in the agriculture sector in India. Despite their technical merit, pilots—just as regular policies—are prone to political influences, which can alter their expected performance on implementation. This is then an interesting departure from a common sentiment, “When in doubt, just pilot.”

Drawing from literature on policy experimentation, scaling-up, and policy change, I develop a theoretical model with four conditions hypothesized to influence a pilot’s outcomes in terms of its policy translation. These conditions are 1) the pilot’s vision to scale-up, 2) stakeholders governing the pilot, 3) semblance of the pilot’s objectives and 4) semblance of the pilot’s instruments (to reach set objectives) to a policy it was designed to improve or replace. Thirteen policy pilots launched by the central Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Government of India to address risks and uncertainties in agriculture production were selected for a comparative case analysis. These pilots spread across 25 years starting from 1990—the decade that saw liberalization and decentralization reforms in India to 2015.

The pilots aimed at increasing crop productivity and reducing risks to agricultural production following a period of demonstration and evaluation and involved testing of different policy elements for guiding national agriculture policy. While some were intended to be incremental measures to support current policy programmes, others proposed new models and innovations to reform and replace the same. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with those involved in design and implementation or evaluation of the pilots. Thick case narratives along with a Qualitative Comparative Analysis helped understand how variations in the four conditions influenced the outcomes of each pilot.

The analysis reveals three key insights. First, pilots can survive in different forms without scaling-up fully and still contribute meaningfully to improved policy design. Second, successful design, implementation, and scaling up of pilots is not automatic and involves a tussle between its technical merit and political appeal. Pilots come with the risk of failure and associated reputational consequences to the policymaker and thus might often be conservative, proposing only marginal changes to current policies. Third, a departure from conservative pilots is seen when non-governmental actors are involved, which could be attributed to risk-sharing in case of failure.

Rethinking Policy Piloting makes an appeal to policymakers to experiment more considering these as opportunities to improve policy design, and to researchers to regulate their enthusiasm around expected outcomes from pilots considering the politics that surrounds them- just as routine policies.

About the Author

Sreeja Nair is an Assistant Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. She studies how governments manage risk and uncertainty in the policy process, focusing on the interplay of science and politics. Her research examines varied policy tools, in particular pilots and experimentation, for addressing high uncertainty in planning for climate change, sustainability transitions and digital transformation. Follow her on X/Twitter: @Sreeja_Nair01

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Understanding Policy Influence in Hybrid Regimes: Insights from a Qualitative Study of Policy Advice in Ukraine and Moldova

by Denitsa Marchevska & Trui Steen

Policy advisory systems research has provided important insights into the networks of individuals and organizations that support decision makers during the policy process. Much of this research has, however, focused on Western (liberal) democracies. Less is known about how those findings apply (or don’t) in weak democratic or even authoritarian settings. 

To address this gap, we turn our attention to policy advisory systems in “hybrid regimes” – that is, political systems that exhibit both democratic and authoritarian features. For example, a hybrid regime might hold competitive elections, which are mostly free but not necessarily fair due to abuse of administrative resources by incumbents. Similarly, they may feature key institutions associated with democratic governance but their functioning may be impaired by the presence of rampant corruption. 

To illustrate our point, we use Ukraine and Moldova as case studies. Between June and October 2021, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 45 individuals across both countries (21 from Moldova, 24 from Ukraine) who were involved in the policy process in some capacity, including civil servants, consultants, representatives of donor organizations, and others. The interviewees hailed from four main policy domains: economy, environment, health, and rule of law. 

The interviews sought to explore the different reasons why decision makers choose to accept or ignore policy advice. The analysis focused on four broad types of explanatory factors in line with the framework proposed by Manwaring (2019). Namely, the analysis looked for factors associated with demand (the reasons why policymakers seek  advice), supply (explanations focused on the source of the advice), content (the substance of the advice provided), and context (the larger ecosystem within which advice is given and received). The aim of the analysis was to explore how the manifestations of those dimensions varies (or not) within the hybrid regime setting and how this compares to what we know about advisory dynamics in established democracies.

Our findings nuanced Manwaring’s framework in several ways. For one, while Manwaring presents the four above factors as discrete units, in practice it was challenging to sort motivations into these categories neatly. For example, the line between context and demand-side considerations proved especially porous. It was almost impossible to separate contextual factors like societal salience from demand considerations linked to political survival in the analysis. 

We also found a clear hierarchy in the importance of the four factors, which the framework did not necessarily acknowledge.  In particular, demand-side and contextual considerations appeared far more important  in determining whether policy advice is accepted than supply-side and content-related ones. The demand for advice arguably emerged as the most salient determinant of advisory success. The policy and advisory process appeared to be highly reflective of the wants and needs of those in power, something which is only exacerbated by the relative weakness of political institutions as well as commitments to the rule of law in these hybrid regimes. 

Related to this, we observed that the advisory dynamics in Moldova and Ukraine tend to be much more personalized (i.e., the individual preferences of government officials were decisive) and politicized (e.g., strongly impacted by political considerations) than is typically assumed within Western democracies. Current thinking about policy advisory systems tend to adopt biased assumptions about depoliticized, rational bureaucracies contributing to a preoccupation with expertise and institutional explanations for advisory influence. Considering both personalization and politicization within policy advisory systems models will make them more useful for studying hybrid regimes.

Lastly, our analysis highlights that international actors (e.g., donor organizations), as well as the international context more broadly, exert significant influence on the policy advisory systems of both Moldova and Ukraine. While this international dimension is rarely examined in the context of affluent Western democracies, it appears highly salient in countries like Ukraine and Moldova, given their greater reliance on international financial support and expertise to help shore up weak political and economic institutions. 

Though existing conceptualisations of the advisory process have much to offer, we show that they require some retooling to capture the nuances of policy advisory systems outside of the democratic context. Scholarship on policy advice should pursue greater empirical diversity in order to untangle such commonalities and differences as well as to advance a more robust comparative understanding on policy advisory dynamics. 

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Marchevska, Denitsa and Trui, Steen. 2022. “Understanding Policy Influence in Hybrid Regimes: Insights from a Qualitative Study of Policy Advice in Ukraine and Moldova.” Policy Studies Journal, 50(4): 735–755.  https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12477

About the Authors

Denitsa Marchevska is a PhD Researcher at KU Leuven’s Public Governance Institute and a Doctoral Fellow of Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), Belgium. Her research focuses on policy advice provision, advisory systems and public policy formulation in flawed democracies and hybrid regimes with a particular focus on Eastern Europe. She also carries out research on (comparative) politico-administrative relations and bureaucratic politicization in the region.

Trui Steen is Full Professor at KU Leuven’s Public Governance Institute. She is interested in the governance of public services and the role therein of different stakeholders, including public sector professionals, civil society and citizens. Her research interests include co-creation and co-production of public services, public sector innovation, and local governance.

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