Understanding Advocacy Coalitions: Coordination and Belief Segregation in the United States Environmental Risk Management Subsystem

Abstract

Policy making, at its core, occurs across networks of policy stakeholders as they communicate, debate, learn, compromise, and fight in an effort to promote their views. The ways in which policy networks form and persist has a tremendous impact on the opportunities available to stakeholders as they undertake policy advocacy activities. In this dissertation, we focus on a key network characteristic, segregation according to beliefs, and study its presence and impacts in the United States environmental risk management subsystem. The Advocacy Coalition Framework provides a theoretical foundation for our expectations surrounding belief segregation and motivates the research questions investigated. This dissertation presents three distinct studies that contribute to the study of belief segregation in policy networks. The first study is a comparison of the policy networks in the United States environmental risk management subsystem in 1984 and 2014. The second investigates the interaction of advocacy coalition membership, which is partially determined by shared beliefs, and policy activity coordination. The third study explores the Distribution of Egocentric Correlations method for detecting heterogeneous preferences for segregation.