Building Blocks of Polycentric Governance

by Tiffany H. Morrison, Örjan Bodin, Graeme S. Cumming, Mark Lubell, Ralf Seppelt, Tim Seppelt, & Christopher M. Weible

Many governance systems are plagued by coordination problems. Polycentricity is often presented as key to resolving such problems.  Polycentric systems are characterized by a decentralized and self-organized style of governance, where actors operating across diverse venues work together to make decisions through collective action. But despite their pervasiveness, as well as numerous studies that have looked into different polycentric governance arrangements, we still don’t have tools for studying how coordination within a polycentric governance system changes over time, and how those changes impact the success or failure of that system.

Our paper, “Building blocks of polycentric governance,” introduces a “building blocks” model for understanding polycentric governance. It treats polycentric governance as a network of decision-making venues, governance actors, and policy issues that are linked to one another. Our model focuses on three permutations of those linkages: venue-to-actor, venue-to-issue, and venue-to-actor-to-issue. If a polycentric governance system has certain permutations of venues, actors, and issues that appear regularly, we refer to those as building blocks. Those building blocks can then be used to study how coordination in that system evolves over time. Figure 1 shows different kinds of building blocks that can emerge in a polycentric system.

Figure 1. Proposed typology of building blocks of polycentricity

We applied our model to study the polycentric system that governs the Great Barrier Reef. We chose the Great Barrier Reef because of its longevity (it dates to the 1970s), the wealth of publicly available quantitative and qualitative data, the presence of prior studies, and its status as an innovator in polycentric governance. We mapped out the network for three years: 1980, 2005, and 2015. Figure 2 shows the results.

Figure 2. 3-Mode network models of the polycentric Great Barrier Reef regime

Our network analysis yielded several findings. First, between 1980 and 2015, coordination among actors participating in the same venue increased. Across that same period, there was also greater coordination between venues and issues, meaning that venues became increasingly specialized in the specific governance issues that they tackled. That said, venues were more crucial in coordinating actors than issues. This suggests that it’s easier for venues to bring actors together than to evolve to take on new issues. Finally, the governance system became more polycentric over time, as new policy issues resulted in new actors joining the system and new venues were created to address those issues. However, those newcomers have been at a disconnect from the other actors, issues, and venues in the system, operating independently rather than embedding themselves within pre-existing relationships.

By capturing the linkages among actors, venues, and issues and showing how they change over time, our building blocks model reveals the key role that venues play in facilitating – and hindering – coordination within a polycentric governance system. On the one hand, venues can help bring diverse governance actors together and facilitate specialization on specific policy issues. At the same time, the introduction of new venues can cause the governance system to fragment: actors who participate in new venues may not necessarily work with actors in other venues, or new venues will focus on a specific policy issue (or set of issues) without considering its relationship to other issues.

The Great Barrier Reef governance system is small and has changed slowly over time. Additionally, in the interest of presenting an application of our model that was easy to digest, we focused narrowly on actors, venues, and issues. We welcome studies that apply our building blocks model to larger and more dynamic polycentric governance systems. There are, of course, many more variables present in any polycentric governance system, and we would love to see future studies that incorporate that complexity into applications of our model. Benefits of extending our building blocks approach therefore include: (1) understanding how structure and agency influence environmental efforts (for example, if a new ‘polycentric’ governance system is only partially successful, are its failures due to structural inadequacies?); (2) detection of threshold effects and feedbacks (for example, does a system need to be strongly polycentric in order for a particular social process to occur?); and (3) more direct comparison between different case studies, facilitating practical insights for policymakers and other stakeholders interested in improving the performance of a specific environmental governance system.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Morrison, Tiffany H., Örjan Bodin, Graeme S. Cumming, Mark Lubell, Ralf Seppelt, Tim Seppelt, and Christopher M. Weible. 2023. Building blocks of polycentric governance. Policy Studies Journal 51: 475–499. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12492

About the Authors

Tiffany Morrison holds professorial appointments in the School of Geography, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences at Melbourne University, the Environmental Policy Group at Wageningen University & Research, and the College of Science & Engineering at James Cook University. Her expertise is in the governance of environmental change, policy responses to warming ecosystems, and governance of new interventions in warming ecosystems. She has twenty years of experience conducting innovative interdisciplinary research spanning human geography, political science, climate science, and ecology.

Örjan Bodin is a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University, Sweden. He employs a cross-disciplinary approach, integrating methods from various scientific disciplines to study social-ecological systems. He is particularly interested in using network analysis to study various aspects of ecosystems governance.

Graeme S. Cumming is an academic and researcher with a background in Zoology and Entomology. He is currently a Professor and Premier’s Science Fellow at the University of Western Australia. Graeme has a wide range of interests, centering around understanding spatial aspects of ecology and the relevance of broad-scale pattern-process dynamics for ecosystem (and social-ecological system) function and resilience. He is also interested in the applications of landscape ecology and complexity theory to conservation and the sustainable management of natural resources.

Mark Lubell is Professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis and the Director of its Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior. Lubell studies cooperation problems and decision making in environmental, agricultural, and public policy. His research topics include water management, sustainable agriculture, adaptive decision-making, climate change policy, local government policy, transportation behavior, plant disease management, invasive species, and policy/social network analysis.

Ralf Seppelt is a professor for landscape ecology and Resource Economics at Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, where he lectures course on Environmental Modelling. He is head of the department for Computational Landscape Ecology. His major research focus is land resources management based on integrated simulation and modelling systems. He thus is interested in the interactions and interrelationship of anthropheric and biospheric processes. 

Tim Seppelt is a fourth-year PhD student at RWTH Aachen University. He is interested in graphs and more specifically in theoretical and algorithmic notions concerning the similarity of two graphs. A central theme of his PhD is homomorphism indistinguishability, which describes the similarity of graphs in terms of numbers of homomorphisms.

Christopher M. Weible is a Professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver. His research focuses on policy process theories, contentious politics, and environmental policy. He is the Editor of Theories of the Policy Process (Routledge, 2023), Co-Editor of Methods of the Policy Process (with Samuel Workman, Routledge, 2022), Co-Editor of Policy & Politics, and Co-Director of the Center for Policy and Democracy.

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Policy Feedback via Economic Behavior: A Model and Experimental Analysis of Consumption Behavior

by Gregory S. Schober

Policy feedback scholars have done extensive work to understand how public policies affect mass behavior (the feed) and subsequent policy outcomes (the back). Thus far, this literature has focused mainly on political behavior feeds. However, the impact of these policies extends beyond the realm of politics, influencing the economic behavior of individuals and, in turn, shaping future policy outcomes.

In my paper, I develop a policy feedback model of consumption behavior in mass publics. Illustrated in Figure 1, the model shows how policies influence consumption capacity and preferences, which in turn affect future policy decisions. For example, social assistance policies transfer resources to beneficiaries, thus altering their spending decisions and influencing government policy responses (see path A-C-F-H).

I use this theory to investigate how targeted cash assistance policies (TCAPs) influence not just the immediate consumption patterns but also the subsequent policies. To do this, I analyzed the effects of Progresa—a Mexican TCAP that aimed to reduce poverty—by utilizing data collected during a randomized field experiment. I performed downstream analysis on the data to estimate the effects of Progresa.

In the short term, Progresa positively influenced private consumption of basic utilities. When households received the cash transfers, they used them to purchase private access to drainage (via septic tanks). However, in the medium term, a startling shift occurred. In communities where Progresa was implemented and private access to drainage increased, the government began making less of an effort to maintain the public water system.

My work offers key insights into the complex relationship between short-term consumption changes and (unintended) medium-term policy outcomes. It emphasizes that while consumption effects did occur swiftly, leading to increased private access to drainage, the subsequent impact on government policy ultimately led to reductions in basic utility access.

An intriguing question arises when considering the medium-term results: are targeted cash assistance policies—which generally are administered at the national level—letting local governments off the hook in terms of basic utility provision? When program beneficiaries use cash transfers to invest in private access to basic utilities, they in turn may be disincentivizing local governments from investing in public utility systems.

The implications of this study reverberate across various domains of policy feedback research. It highlights the need to broaden the scope of policy feedback analysis beyond political spheres to include economic mechanisms. These findings prompt further exploration into how economic feeds could influence future political behavior and policy outcomes.

In conclusion, this research breaks new ground by unraveling the ripple effects of social assistance policies, shedding light on how they influence consumption patterns and government policies regarding basic utilities. Understanding these intricate dynamics between policy, consumption behavior, and subsequent governance decisions is crucial for designing effective, holistic policies that address poverty while ensuring sustained access to essential services for vulnerable populations.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Schober, Gregory S. 2023. “Policy feedback via economic behavior: A model and experimental analysis of consumption behavior.” Policy Studies Journal 51: 607–627. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12474.

About the Author

Gregory S. Schober is an Assistant Professor in the Rehabilitation Sciences Program at The University of Texas at El Paso. His research examines social policy, political and economic behavior, and health in developing countries and the United States.


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Mitigating conflict with collaboration: Reaching negotiated agreement amidst belief divergence in environmental governance

by Elizabeth A. Koebele & Deserai Anderson Crow

Conflict is a natural part of democratic processes. However, understanding what drives conflict – and how it can be mitigated to a level where negotiation can occur – is essential for fostering productive policy making.

The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) argues that policy conflict is fundamentally driven by belief divergence among coalitions, or groups of policy actors who share beliefs about a policy subsystem and coordinate to achieve their goals. It makes sense, then, that bringing coalitions’ beliefs closer together may also reduce conflict. However, the ACF warns that beliefs are hard to change, especially in high-conflict settings where actors are prone to biased assimilation of information, the devil-shift, and other tendencies that exacerbate conflict.

Collaborative governance is touted as a way to reduce policy conflict under such circumstances by encouraging diverse policy actors to engage in sustained, consensus-oriented deliberation around a shared problem. While collaborative governance may foster some level of belief convergence through information sharing and collective learning, it may also encourage opposing coalitions to negotiate through other mechanisms. For example, as they participate in a collaborative process, coalitions may come to better understand one another’s needs over time, build trust and mutual respect, and support collaborative institutions they perceive to be fair, even as they maintain unique beliefs.

To better understand the relationship between beliefs, conflict, and negotiation, we empirically analyze how two adversarial coalitions’ beliefs changed as they participated in a collaborative water governance process in Colorado, U.S., over the course of a decade. While the collaborative process ended in negotiated agreement, our analyses of longitudinal survey and interview data show that the coalitions’ beliefs actually diverged more at the end of the process than they did at the start – a finding contrary to what we would expect if negotiation was driven primarily by belief convergence.

We then identify several other aspects of the collaborative process and broader policy context that facilitated negotiation among the coalitions. Most importantly, societal value shifts, process norms that institutionalized actor roles and encouraged “multi-purpose” solutions, and the development of respect and social capital among actors appear to have promoted successful negotiation amidst belief divergence. We also found that the trend toward greater belief divergence was primarily attributed to one coalition strengthening their own unique beliefs over time while the other coalition’s beliefs remained fairly stable throughout the process.

Our results demonstrate that while belief divergence was likely a driver of conflict in this policy process, collaborative governance helped adversarial policy actors identify places where they could agree on, or at least consent to, common solutions over time. These findings have important implications for how collaborative processes can be designed to mitigate conflict among opposing coalitions and encourage future research on who changes their beliefs, how, and why while participating in a collaborative process. Scholars should also examine how collaborative governance affects different policy beliefs in different ways, which can help support the development of a more robust typology of beliefs in the ACF literature.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Koebele, Elizabeth A., and Deserai A., Crow. 2023. “ Mitigating conflict with collaboration: Reaching negotiated agreement amidst belief divergence in environmental governance.” Policy Studies Journal, 51, 439–458. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12496.

About the Authors

Elizabeth A. Koebele, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of the Graduate Program of Hydrologic Sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno. She holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Environmental Studies from the University of Colorado-Boulder, and B.A.s in English and Education from Arizona State University. Dr. Koebele researches and teaches about water policy and management in the western United States, with a focus on understanding the impacts of collaborative policy-making processes on governance and environmental outcomes in the Colorado River Basin. She also co-edits the scholarly journal Policy & Politics.

Dr. Deserai Anderson Crow is a Professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver. Her work focuses on environmental policy as well as crisis and disaster recovery, risk mitigation in local communities, and stakeholder involvement in decision-making processes. She earned her PhD from Duke University, and her B.S. and MPA from the University of Colorado.

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Policy Stability and Policy Change in China: A Systematic Literature Review of the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory

by Annemieke van den Dool & Jialin Cammie Li

To what extent do government policies in China change over time? Measuring the magnitude and frequency of policy change is an important step in understanding the driving forces of policymaking in China, which we know surprisingly little about despite the country’s large population and growing role in global governance. To answer this question, we turned to the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, which holds that government policies tend to be stable over time with occasional major change.

Although the PET’s explanatory power is considered to be universal, most English-language studies test the theory in democracies. In late 2021, we found only eight English-language peer-reviewed journal articles that apply the PET to China. These pioneering studies demonstrate the punctuated equilibrium pattern in policymaking in China, yet many questions remain unanswered, especially regarding policy change across different policy issues and venues, the frequency of large policy change, and information processing.

Remarkably, however, the Chinese-language PET literature on mainland China is much larger, albeit fragmented. We decided to conduct a systematic literature review to synthesize existing findings and identify research priorities, before we purposively design new studies. This is important given the effort and time required to conduct PET studies, which is exacerbated by limited data transparency and availability in China.

Through CNKI – China’s largest academic research database – we found 88 China-focused PET journal articles, which we analyzed in terms of methodology, operationalization, and patterns of policy change. We found that Chinese-language PET research is increasing. Moreover, contrary to the English-language PET literature, most Chinese studies are qualitative. Like in the English-language PET literature, weak operationalization of the PET core concepts is common.

One important takeaway from our systematic review is the consensus that government policymaking in China follows a punctuated equilibrium pattern with long periods of stability alternated with bursts of major policy change.

However, contrary to our expectations, our dataset contains only limited evidence in support of the hypothesis that government budgetary change in autocracies is more intensified compared to democracies, i.e., less frequent but larger budgetary adjustments. This hypothesis was first proposed by Chan and Zhao’s (2016) pioneering study on budget change in China. They and others have argued that state control over information flows inhibits the capacity of policymakers in autocracies to respond to problems in a timely and proportional manner because they miss out on important problem signals.

However, our analysis shows that there are very few studies that have tested this hypothesis in a systematic way. Moreover, we observed methodological variation in existing China-focused PET literature, which is illustrated in the table below. In our dataset, only one article (Li et al., 2019) is similar to Chan and Zhao (2016) in terms of methods and findings. All other studies are either qualitative in nature or differ in terms of period, scope (i.e., including only selected policy areas rather than the entire budget), data, and calculation methods. This makes it difficult to compare existing research findings.


Table 1. Regional-level punctuated equilibrium theory budget studies on China (Chinese and English)

To better understand policymaking in China and how it differs from other countries, we advocate for more quantitative PET studies on China that are broad in scope (rather than focusing on selected policy areas), cover a long period of time, and use the exact same methods as existing studies on democracies.A study that does this is Qin & Huang’s (2023) impressive analysis of national-level agenda diversity in China, which is methodologically similar to existing studies in democracies. In this study, the authors manually coded 40 years of State Council Gazettes and found a higher intensity of punctuations in China compared to democracies. We look forward to more such long-term studies across different policy venues.

References

Chan, K. N., & Zhao, S. (2016). Punctuated Equilibrium and the Information Disadvantage of Authoritarianism: Evidence from the People’s Republic of China. Policy Studies Journal, 44(2), 134-155.

Qin, X., & Huang, J. (2023). Policy punctuations and agenda diversity in China: a national level analysis from 1980 to 2019. Policy Studies, 1-21.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal

van den Dool, A., & Li, J. (2023). What do we know about the punctuated equilibrium theory in China? A systematic review and research priorities. Policy Studies Journal. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12502

About the Authors

Annemieke van den Dool is an assistant professor in the Social Sciences Division at Duke Kunshan University in Jiangsu, China. Her research focuses on policymaking, policy process theories, and crisis management in China, especially in the areas of health and the environment. Learn more about her research at: http://www.annemiekevandendool.com.

Follow her on X @PubPolicyChina or on BlueSky @avandendool.bsky.social.

Jialin Li is an undergraduate student at Duke Kunshan University in Jiangsu, China. Li majors in Political Economy with a minor in Public Policy. Her research focuses on policy process theories and policy change in China.

Follow her on X @li_cammie or on BlueSky @cammieli.bsky.social.

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Analyzing the Association of Policy Narratives with Problem Tractability in the Implementation of EU Decisions: Evidence from the Phytosanitary Policy Area

by Marco Schito 

Stories can help us make sense of this world by building compelling narratives in which the motives of and interactions between heroes, victims, and villains weave a plot, resulting in the resolution of the problem. However, a growing number of policy issues are becoming “intractable” in the sense that there is no easy way to address and solve the problem.

In this study, I employ the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to understand how the stories recounted during a mysterious epidemic decimating the population of olive trees in South-Eastern Italy were associated with the tractability of this policy problem. I analyze 79 editorials, opinion pieces, and guest columns published between 2014 and 2020 from five local and national news outlets across the political spectrum.

The study focuses on the debate surrounding the implementation of EU decisions aimed at tackling this epidemic. EU implementing decisions are normally a very drab and straightforward affair that should leave little space for competing narratives to take root. Nevertheless, several competing narratives did emerge about the causes of the problem, the best practices of implementation, and even the policy solution. Theories of policy implementation offer a theoretical hook to the NPF to address the association between narratives and tractability by suggesting that problems may become more tractable if a theory about the causes of the problem the implementing policy is addressing is developed.

In the study, I first test whether narratives that attribute different roles to characters and emphasize disagreements about the causes and solutions of the problem are suggestive of a higher degree of problem intractability. Secondly, I test whether the accumulation of scientific knowledge to generate a valid causal theory linking problems, means and solutions is associated with changes in the usage of narrative strategies.

The strongest differences in the use of characters were found for heroes, especially between the most ideologically opposed news outlets. Moreover, the analyzed documents differed in the way they weaved their plots, presented differing solutions, and made appeals to science to solve the problem. All but one news outlets also displayed a stronger use of blame-apportionment strategies (the so-called “devil shift”) as opposed to highlighting problem-fixers. Hence, these narrative elements created a vicious cycle of polarisation based on disagreements about the facts and theories and on the way forward, contributing to making this policy problem all the less tractable. 

To assess whether the tractability of the problem changed over time thanks to the presence of established theories about the causes of the epidemic, I took a temporal approach to the devil shift. While scientists did manage to establish the causes of the epidemic in May 2017, Figure 1 shows that the news outlets continued to employ blame-apportionment strategies throughout the entire period of analysis. 

From a substantive standpoint, the results of this study cast doubt on the ability of policy actors to engage in fruitful debates in an increasingly polarised world. Theoretically, however, the article represents a first attempt to bring the NPF together with the literature on problem definition and implementation. The three partly share a common language, and insights from each can add to the others’ theoretical and empirical developments.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Schito, Marco. 2023. Analyzing the association of policy narratives with problem tractability in the implementation of EU decisions: Evidence from the phytosanitary policy area. Policy Studies Journal, 51, 869–886. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12500

About the Author

Marco Schito is a researcher at the Public Policy and Management Institute (PPMI) in Vilnius, Lithuania. His research interests involve socio-economic issues and state-business relations. He was most recently involved in studies about the effect of inflation on small and medium enterprises in the EU-27.
E-mail: marco.schito@ppmi.lt

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Drivers of (In)equity in Collaborative Environmental Governance

by Kristin Babson Dobbin

In recent decades, collaborative governance has reshaped environmental policy by encouraging horizontal cooperation among stakeholders in an effort to create more mutually beneficial, locally appropriate policies. However, despite its potential advantages, there is a lack of empirical evaluation of the approach, particularly regarding equity. Our study focuses on California’s groundwater management overhaul, known as the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), to examine the conditions under which equity is or is not promoted in collaborative processes.

The chronic groundwater management challenges in California, especially in the San Joaquin Valley, contribute to the state’s widespread drinking water inequities disproportionately affecting low-income rural communities. The severe drought from 2012 to 2016 exacerbated these issues, leading to the implementation of SGMA. Under SGMA, local agencies formed Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) to manage groundwater and develop Groundwater Sustainability Plans (GSPs) addressing undesirable groundwater outcomes. Our study analyzes GSPs in critically overdrafted basins to assess their impact on vulnerable drinking water users and environmental justice communities.

We derive five hypotheses for factors influencing equity in collaborative governance derived from the existing literature— the extent of collaboration, representation, elite capture, stakeholder engagement, and problem severity/salience. We then test these hypotheses using Boosted Regression and Classification Trees (BRCT) comparing results across three models, each with a distinct measure of drinking water equity used as the dependent variable. 

Across all three models, our results support the hypotheses, underscoring the importance of collaboration, representation, elite capture, stakeholder engagement, and problem severity/salience in influencing the distribution of benefits, costs, and risks for vulnerable drinking water users in groundwater plans(see Figure 1). Nonetheless, the raw change in the dependent variables associated with these factors is in most cases quite limited. For example, when moving from zero to eighty percent representation for drinking water users on the GSA board of directors, we only predict a six-percentage point increase in environmental justice rubric score from 40.65 to 46.60. Thus, we assert additional interventions beyond the scope of the factors studied herein are likely essential if we are to increase social equity in decentralized collaborative decision making. 

Comparing the influence of these five factors within and among the models lends additional important insights. Among them, our findings suggest that it might be easier to improve equity in the distribution of collaborative governance benefits than in the distribution of risks or burdens. Also notable is that across equity measures, representation in decision-making roles is consistently more influential than traditional stakeholder engagement. Finally,  given that many of the estimated associations are nonlinear, our findings underscore the importance of addressing threshold effects and optima, rather than presence or absence, when seeking to advance specific collaborative outcomes.

Future research should focus on a nuanced understanding of local institutional design as well as the potential role of external linkages with outside organizations given that some research indicates they may increase accountability. Such work can help us understand the potential and limits of collaborative governance for ensuring positive environmental outcomes for all.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Dobbin, Kristin Babson, Kuo, Michael, Lubell, Mark, Bostic, Darcy, Mendoza, Jessica, and Echeveste, Ernest 2023. “ Drivers of (in)equity in collaborative environmental governance”. Policy Studies Journal 51, 375–395. https://doi-org.echo.louisville.edu/10.1111/psj.12483

About the Authors

Kristin Dobbin (she/her) is an assistant professor of cooperative extension in water justice policy and planning at UC Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. Her work focuses on understanding the causes of, and solutions to, drinking water inequities in California. Kristin holds a PhD from the University of California Davis and was a NSF Social, Behavior and Economic Sciences postdoctoral fellow at UCLA.

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Measuring the Stasis: Punctuated Equilibrium Theory and Partisan Polarization

by Clare Brock & Daniel Mallinson

Gridlock and partisan polarization are popularly blamed for every American social and political ill–from the inability of Congress to pass much needed policy reform on a variety of issues, to the inefficacy of bureaucracy, to the divisive rhetoric espoused in presidential debates. The headlines are not inaccurate in their assessment of the division and dysfunction that currently plagues American politics; however, they do not tell the entire story either.

Partisan polarization and gridlock are always high salience, high attention problems. But they do not operate the same way across all policy areas, nor is it appropriate to explain all outcomes (or lack thereof) in terms of these two phenomena. Total gridlock as a result of polarization, for example, is simply not an accurate way to describe American governance. Congress does pass important legislation, including, but not limited to, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, and the 2010 Affordable Care Act. In short, Congress can legislate. The question is then, when and on what issues can Congress act, and why does it seem so incapable of moving forward on so many other issues?

In “Measuring the stasis: Punctuated equilibrium theory and partisan polarization,” we use punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) to explore the role of partisan polarization in a stop-and-go policy process. PET predicts that the policy process is characterized by long periods of stability (gridlock), interspersed with brief periods of drastic change. In other words, the policy process is neither completely gridlocked, nor is it incremental; rather, policymaking tends to be alternatively highly stable and highly volatile. The degree of volatility is, in part, a function of how much friction is built into the governing system. Higher levels of friction will mean a more extreme pattern of punctuation – longer periods of stasis, but also, larger policy changes when sufficient pressure does build up to generate change.

We look at partisan polarization as a source of increasing friction in the political system, relying on annual data from federal budget authority and the passage of public laws from the Comparative Agendas Project to capture policy change, and NOMINATE scores that measure partisan polarization. These data stretch from 1948 to 2020 and allow us to evaluate how partisan polarization has affected budget-making and public law passage across multiple policy areas over the years.

Figure 1 shows the trends over time in partisan polarization (it is increasing) and budgetary and public law kurtosis. Kurtosis is a common way to measure the degree of policy punctuation. When it is high, there are long periods of incremental changes (i.e., stasis) that are punctuated by large policy changes. The higher the kurtosis, the more extreme the pattern of stasis and punctuation. As indicated by the trend lines, partisan polarization has been steadily rising since the 1960s, but underwent a considerable jump during the mid-1990s and again in the early-2000s. Likewise, while budget kurtosis was high in the 1950s and 60s, it dropped for the next two decades before a large and rapid increase between 1996 and 2012. Public law kurtosis remained steady until the 199s when it increased and then became more volatile. Notably, these dynamics settled back down after 2012.

Figure 1: Changes in U.S. National Government budget kurtosis and congressional polarization, 1957–2020.

Much like the increased budgetary kurtosis and declining passage of public laws illustrated in Figure 1, the same results were found when controlling for the presence of divided government (i.e., when one party controls the Presidency and the other controls at least one chamber of Congress). In other words, the observed effects were most likely caused by the increase in polarization and not by other political factors expected to cause gridlock. This suggests that polarization has contributed to a more volatile policy process, with prolonged periods of stasis and reactively large moments of change.

It is worth noting that there were differences in these effects depending on the policy area. For example, polarization seemed to increase volatility more in energy policy than in transportation policy. Future research could do more to investigate the nuances uncovered in our analysis, and we hope that scholars will continue examining how polarization impacts our society.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Brock, Clare and Mallinson, Daniel. 2023. “Measuring the Stasis: Punctuated Equilibrium Theory and Partisan Polarization.” Policy Studies Journal 00(0): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12519.

About the Authors

Clare Brock is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Colorado State University. Her research interests include public policy process, interest groups and advocacy, food politics, and the impact of polarization on policymaking.


Daniel J. Mallinson is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and Administration at Penn State Harrisburg. His research interests include policy process theory (particularly policy diffusion and punctuated equilibrium theory), cannabis policy, energy policy, and the science of teaching and learning.

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“Mobile Shooting”: The Shifting Anticorruption Attention in China

by Jing Vivian Zhan & Jiangnan Zhu

Anticorruption agencies in authoritarian regimes are constrained by scant resources, particularly attention. Attention is the prime scarce resource in governing; it guides the flow of other resources, such as budgets and manpower. Therefore, the allocation of anticorruption attention becomes especially important in influencing both the allocation of corresponding resources and the level of corruption control in authoritarian countries. Existing research has told us to some extent when authoritarian leaders may pay more attention to certain cases or corrupt officials due to political calculations. However, little is known about whether and how anticorruption agencies allocate their attention across policy areas in autocracies. This question warrants investigation because anticorruption programs targeting specific sectors treat the root causes of corruption more directly and are more effective than broad anticorruption policies.

Our article, “Policy Coordination and Selective Corruption Control in China,” answers this question by scrutinizing the case of China. An understudied facet of selective corruption control is that the Chinese procuratorate, the state judicial branch responsible for the investigation, prevention, and prosecution of corruption.  The procuratorate has constantly shifted its anticorruption attention across different policy sectors. Figure 1 visualizes this tendency.

Figure 1. Anticorruption Attention by Area (1998-2016)

Note: Policy areas are listed in descending order by the overall degree of anticorruption attention of each area (i.e., sum of anticorruption attention across years). Darker colors indicate more anticorruption attention.

The shifting attention is especially puzzling given the widespread corruption across Chinese industries and the low likelihood that serious sectoral corruption will be resolved once and for all.

We coin a theory of “cross-organizational policy coordination under a single-party authoritarian regime” to explain the puzzle: Single-party regimes can use the centralized party discipline and personnel management system as leverage to direct bureaucratic attention toward the signals given by top policymakers. The policy objectives prioritized by top leaders not only prompt the directly responsible functional sectors to act, but also motivate other bureaucracies, including anticorruption agencies, to coordinate their policies with the national agenda. Thus, the Chinese procuratorate has been mobilized to align anticorruption work with central policy agendas to facilitate the Chinese Communist Party’s major policy initiatives by preventing corruption and investigating more cases in those areas.

We test the correlation between anticorruption attention and policy significance, respectively measured by analyzing voluminous government documents. As shown in Figure 2, except in a few areas chronically ignored by the procurators between 1998 and 2016 (e.g., culture), anticorruption attention and policy significance have similar fluctuating patterns in most areas, with near-matching trend lines in areas such as land & real estate, state-owned enterprise, people’s livelihood, and work safety. Greater policy significance is usually accompanied by augmented anticorruption attention, whereas a steady decrease in policy significance often leads to reduced anticorruption attention.

Figure 2. Anticorruption Attention and Policy Significance by Area

Note: For each policy area, the horizontal axis is year; the vertical axis on the left and the red line represent anticorruption attention, while the vertical axis on the right and the green line represent policy significance.

We are among the first to explore authoritarian anticorruption enforcement from the perspective of attention allocation to policy issues. Our study brings a new perspective to understanding anticorruption endeavors in authoritarian regimes by showing that in addition to being motivated by political calculations such as elite power competition, single-party authoritarian regimes can strategically deploy anticorruption efforts as a policy tool to facilitate grand policy portfolios. Our findings resonated with research in predemocratic Brazil and Mexico, Kazakhstan, and Vietnam, in which the state could use political appointments to instrumentalize regulatory bureaucracies with expertise to serve government policies.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Zhan, Jing Vivian, and Zhu, Jiangnan. 2023. Policy coordination and selective corruption control in China. Policy Studies Journal 51: 685–702. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12487

About the Authors

Jing Vivian Zhan is a Professor at the Department of Government and Public Administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Email: zhan@cukh.edu.hk, Facebook: @Vivian Zhan, X: @jvzhan1


Jiangnan Zhu is an Associate Professor at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong.

Email: zhujn@hku.hk, Facebook: @Jiangnan Zhu, X: jian_nan_zhu

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The Executive Lawmaking Agenda: Political Parties, Prime Ministers, and Policy Change in Australia

by Andrew Gibbons & Rhonda Evans

Governments can pursue their public policy objectives through various means. What do they seek to accomplish through the lawmaking process? The executive’s role in the legislative process varies widely across political systems. In Westminster systems, like Australia’s, institutional rules allow executives to dominate the legislative agenda, though governments do face constraints, such as the need to balance competing interests, contend with bureaucratic processes, and attend to unforeseen events. 

Drawing from the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) and analyzing a data set of government bills in Australia, our research offers a new perspective on agenda-setting in Westminster systems, shedding light on the distinct agenda space we call the executive lawmaking agenda.

We addressed four research questions:

RQ1: What policy areas comprise the executive lawmaking agenda?

RQ2: How stable is the executive lawmaking agenda?

RQ3: Do the major political parties pursue different lawmaking agendas when in government? 

RQ4: Does a change in prime minister affect which issues receive executive lawmaking attention? 

Our study utilized an original dataset of 3,982 bills introduced into the Australian Federal Parliament between 2000 and 2017, focusing on government bills introduced by ministers. We coded each bill based on its policy content using the Australian Policy Agendas Codebook (APAP), measuring policy attention by counting the number of bills devoted to specific policy areas. We assessed agenda stability by using Sigelman and Buell’s measure of issue convergence, which calculates the degree of overlap in legislative attention distribution between different years. 

The results, illustrated in Figure 1, show that government operations and macroeconomics were the two largest policy areas on the executive lawmaking agenda, accounting for nearly 10% and over 8% of the agenda, respectively. Health, banking, and labor policy rounded out the top five policy areas, collectively making up over 40% of the entire executive lawmaking agenda. On the other hand, issues related to civil rights, minority concerns, civil liberties, housing, and community development, and cultural matters received limited attention. We also found a high degree of stability in the executive lawmaking agenda over time, with around 78% of the agenda overlapping from one year to the next.

Our analysis suggests that this stability persists even after power is shifted between political parties, as indicated in Figure 2. We also find that a change in prime minister is statistically related to a change in policy attention, but more work needs to be done to understand why. These findings seem to align with existing CAP research.

Further research needs to be done on executive policy agendas. Though we primarily looked at legislation, it is not the only kind of policy. Many executives have the ability to enact laws outside of the typical legislative process. Future research should focus on executive power in different stages of the policy process, non-legislative executive policy agendas, and examining alternative agenda spaces to deepen our understanding of executive lawmaking power.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Gibbons, A., and Evans, R.. 2023. “The executive lawmaking agenda: Political parties, prime ministers, and policy change in Australia”. Policy Studies Journal, 51, 307–325. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12503

About the Authors

Dr. Andrew Gibbons holds a PhD in political science from the University of Melbourne. His published research focuses on political communication and public policy, including policy responses to mis/disinformation, policy agendas, and the communication of policy ideas. 

Dr Rhonda Evans is an Associate Professor of Instruction in the Department of Government and Director of the Edward A. Clark Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds a J.D. and a Ph.D. in Government and studies agenda-setting politics, focusing on the Australian Human Rights Commission and Federal Parliament of Australia, as well as judicial politics in Australia and New Zealand. She is co-author of Legislating Equality: The Politics of Antidiscrimination Policy In Europe with Oxford University Press. 
Find her on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rhonda-evans-305aa4105/

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Buzzworthy Updates from the PSJ Editorial Team

Greetings! As the year draws to a close, the Policy Studies Journal (PSJ) is excited to announce the upcoming release of its final issue of the year, PSJ 51(4). This November issue will feature ten exceptional articles that explore a wide range of themes within policy theory and substantive policy domains. We are confident that these articles will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in policy process research.

In addition to the exceptional contributions in this PSJ issue, we would like to take this opportunity to announce some significant developments and updates in PSJ’s operations. Firstly, we are thrilled to welcome Dr. Saba Siddiki from Syracuse University as our new Associate Editor. Dr. Siddiki is an accomplished scholar with expertise in policy theory and institutional analysis. We are confident that she will bring a wealth of experience to our editorial team and contribute to maintaining PSJ’s reputation as a leading publication outlet in the field.

We are also proud to have Drs. Heasun Choi from the University of Arkansas, Briana Huett from Drexel University, and Davor Mondom from Syracuse University join us as Managing Editors. Their diverse experiences and expertise will play a crucial role in shaping the course of the journal and ensuring that we keep up with emerging trends in policy research.

Aligned with our commitment to nurturing a vibrant community of policy scholars, practitioners, and citizens, we are excited to announce the launch of the PSJ Blog. Led by Dr. Melissa Merry, our Associate Editor, the PSJ Blog provides a platform for authors to extend the reach and impact of their research and encourages dialogue between policy researchers and practitioners. 

To facilitate meaningful conversations within the policy community, we are now accepting short article manuscripts (3,000-5,000 words) that meet the same rigorous standards for theoretical depth and methodological sophistication as full PSJ articles. This initiative is led by Dr. Gwen Arnold, our Associate Editor and PSJ Short Article Editor. We invite policy scholars to submit their innovative research on policy issues in concise and impactful ways.

Finally, we are pleased to announce that we will be publishing a PSJ special issue on homelessness in the coming year. Homelessness presents one of the most pressing social problems of our time and requires innovative and resolute policy solutions. We are eagerly looking forward to receiving impactful policy research that contributes to the policymaking process in this area.

We are proud of the exceptional contributions that have made PSJ a leading publication outlet in the field. We would like to express our gratitude to our contributors, reviewers, and readers for their support and involvement in making our journal a success. We look forward to continuing to promote high-quality policy research and providing a platform for valuable discussions on policy issues. Thank you!