Tag: Advocacy Coalition Framework

Examining emotional belief expressions of advocacy coalitions in Arkansas’ gender identity politics

by Allegra H. Fullerton & Christopher M. Weible

Policy studies have increasingly incorporated emotions to better understand a range of essential questions, from how people make sense of their world to why people engage in policy and even how power or legitimacy manifests. However, most established theories of the policy process, including the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), have largely neglected the role of emotions in shaping political behavior.

We develop a distinct means for applying emotional analysis within the ACF. Using the ACF’s conception of belief systems via “dyads”, we create emotion-belief dyads that marry theories of emotions with the theoretical arguments found in the ACF. Specifically, we theorize about the types of discrete (e.g., fear or compassion) or diffuse emotions (e.g., negative or positive) that interact with different categories of ACF’s belief systems (e.g., deep core or policy core) in explaining coalition membership or policy positions.

We analyze the political discourse through legislative testimony on one of the first gender-affirming care (GAC) bans in the United States, the Arkansas legislative debate about the proposed “Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act” (HB2021-1570), which would make GAC for minors illegal in the state. GAC has become one of the battles in the ongoing and intensifying political culture war in the U.S. and remains a policy arena wrought with disinformation. In using GAC as the setting to explore the interplay of beliefs and emotions, this study builds on existing literature showing that emotions are pivotal in how individuals learn, form opinions, and mobilize politically.

To guide our study, we asked ourselves: What combinations of emotions and beliefs explain both 1) coalition membership and 2) member positions on Arkansas’ proposed gender-affirming care (GAC) policy ban?

Utilizing Emotional Belief Analysis (EBA), a coding approach used in past ACF applications of news media and legislative testimony, we gathered self-narrated statements from the audio testimony of all hearings held for the 2021 Arkansas bill. We identified 45 unique actors and classified them into anti-GAC and pro-GAC coalitions using a Girvan–Newman algorithm (further confirmed using three additional approaches) that identified actors based on their emotion-belief dyads.

We then tested two foundational arguments within the ACF (conceptualized in Figure 1): one that states policy core beliefs (compared to deep core beliefs) serve as a principal glue binding coalitions, and the other that advocacy coalitions overcome threats to collective action through negative emotions (i.e., via the devil shift).

By calculating the proportion of the four dyads expressed by each coalition’s members, we obtained a measure of coalition density. We then calculated the Krackhardt E–I Index of each coalition to determine its level of emotion-belief cohesion (with a value of -1 indicating complete cohesion within a coalition). We found that, as expected, coalitions had more cohesion around both policy core belief dyads and negative emotion dyads (Figure 2b). 

Lastly, we sought to determine whether negative and policy core emotion-belief dyads show a bigger effect than positive and deep core emotion-belief dyads in coalition membership and policy position on the anti-GAC bill. Running a series of multiple regression quadratic assignment procedures (MRQAP) as well as two significance models (Table 4), we found that shared negative emotions were more significant than positive emotions in coalition membership and explained expressions about the bill with larger effect sizes than the other belief-emotion combinations.

In using GAC as the setting to explore the interplay of beliefs and emotions, this study shows emotions are pivotal in how individuals learn, form opinions, and mobilize politically. By developing theory around the dyadic expressions of both beliefs and emotions, we pave future pathways for improving understanding of belief systems, coalition dynamics, policy change, and policy learning.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Fullerton, Allegra H. and Christopher M. Weible 2024. “ Examining Emotional Belief Expressions of Advocacy Coalitions in Arkansas’ Gender Identity Politics.” Policy Studies Journal 52 (2): 369–389. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12531.

About the Authors

Allegra H. Fullerton is a PhD Candidate at the University of Colorado Denver School of Public Affairs. The bulk of her research examines the intricate relationships between emotions, beliefs, and coalition dynamics within marginalized communities. She has published in Policy Studies Journal, Review of Policy Research, International Review of Public Policy, and more on gender policy, policy feedback in the US and Germany, transgender healthcare, power, and policy learning. She teaches courses on policy processes and democracy, as well as negotiation. She sits on the organizing committee for the Conference on Policy Process Research, a community dedicated to advancing policy process theories and methods internationally. She also serves as the Digital Associate Editor at Policy and Politics.

Chris Weible is a professor at the University of Colorado Denver School of Public Affairs. His research and teaching center on policy process theories and methods, democracy, and environmental policy. He is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Center for Policy and Democracy (CPD) and Co-Editor of Policy & Politics. He teaches courses in environmental politics, public policy and democracy, policy analysis, and research methods and design. Recent and current research includes studying policy conflicts in energy issues (e.g., siting energy infrastructure and oil and gas development), the role of emotions in public discourse, the institutional configurations of public policies, politics involving marginalized communities, and patterns and explanations of advocacy coalitions, learning, and policy change. He has published over a hundred articles and book chapters and has been awarded millions of dollars in external funding. His edited volumes include “Theories of the Policy Process,” “Methods of the Policy Process,” and “Policy Debates in Hydraulic Fracturing.” He regularly engages and enjoys collaborating with students and communities in research projects. Professor Weible earned his PhD in Ecology from the University of California Davis and a Master of Public Administration and a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Washington. He has an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy and a Visiting Professor position at Luleå University of Technology (LTU), Sweden.

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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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The Advocacy Coalition Index: A New Approach for Identifying Advocacy Coalitions

by Keiichi Satoh, Antti Gronow & Tuomas Ylä-Anttila

Often the first step to finding a solution is knowing what the problem is.

In April 2018, Antti Gronow, Tuomas Ylä-Anttila and Keiichi Satoh were attending the Joint Sessions of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) in Nicosia, Cyprus. The session in question was organized by Chris Weible, Karin Ingold and Daniel Nohrstedt and it made Gronow and Ylä-Anttila think of how problematic it is to study advocacy coalitions in a comparative context. Coalitions among political actors are central to politics and policy, which is a fact long recognized within the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF).

In Cyprus, Gronow and Ylä-Anttila realized that previous research lacks a consistent way of identifying and measuring advocacy coalitions. During a break in the sessions, Gronow and Ylä-Anttila shared their concerns regarding the lack of a consistent method for identifying advocacy coalitions with Keiichi Satoh. Three months later, inspired by a figure explaining the fuzzy sets used in the qualitative comparative analysis, Satoh showed an initial sketch of a way to identify coalitions to Gronow and Ylä-Anttila. After intensive discussions, this sketch evolved into the Advocacy Coalition Index (ACI).

How does the ACI work?

The ACI is a combined measure of policy beliefs and coordination of action, based on techniques of social network analysis. It is a standardized method for identifying and analyzing advocacy coalitions that can be applied to comparative research and also to other research contexts involving attribute and relational data.

To use the index, researchers must first obtain information about policy actors’ beliefs and coordination relationships between these actors. Such data can be collected through a survey, public statements, or any reliable method of data collection. Next, the method focuses on identifying homophilous ties (in which like-minded actors coordinate with one another), cross-coalition ties (coordination between actors holding diverging beliefs), and missing ties (ties that do not exist between like-minded actors). The ACI can be expressed as a formula in the following way:

ACI= 1 – (Cross-coalition ties + Missing ties)

Political subsystems with typical, adversarial advocacy coalitions are likely to be closer to the value of one as a result of the calculation. In addition, to characterize different kinds of advocacy coalitions within subsystems, scholars can analyze variation in the homophilous ties score and in the ratio of cross-coalition ties and homophilous ties (the CCH ratio), as illustrated in the figure below. For example, in the case of adversarial coalitions (i.e. typical advocacy coalitions), there are many homophilous ties between like-minded actors (i.e., few “missing ties”), and almost no ties between actors with dissimilar beliefs.

The ACI can be applied in many different contexts in a consistent way. A standard way of measuring advocacy coalitions thus allows scholars to compare their results with studies conducted in other countries or other policy subsystems.

Our work also has implications outside academia. Policymakers and analysts now have a tool to reliably detect coalitions involved in policy processes, which helps in designing policy proposals that are politically feasible. Policy can be designed, implemented, and evaluated with a clearer understanding of the kinds of coalitions that are involved, as long as appropriate data exists. 

We are confident that our systematic, data-driven approach will be a useful contribution to the field of public policy research. We also hope that the ACI will be used as a tool in the policy process.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Satoh, K., Gronow, A. and Ylä-Anttila, T. 2023. “The Advocacy Coalition Index: A new approach for identifying advocacy coalitions.” Policy Studies Journal 51: 187–207. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12450

About the Authors

Keiichi Satoh is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Hitotsubashi University, Japan. His research interests include climate and energy policy, social movements, and political processes using network theory and methods. His research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Social Movement Studies, Urban Studies, and Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis.

Antti Gronow is a Senior Researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. His research interests include climate policy, advocacy coalitions, social network analysis, and political polarization. His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Global Environmental Change, Governance, Policy Studies Journal, Public Administration, and JPART. Follow him on X: @AnttiGronow

Tuomas Ylä-Anttila is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Helsinki. He currently leads four research projects on policy networks, communication networks and climate change politics, and chairs the 14-country comparative research effort Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks (see compon.org). His work has appeared in journals such as Global Environmental Change, Public Administration, Policy Studies Journal, Governance, and British Journal of Sociology.

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