The Multiple Streams Framework and the problem broker

John Kingdon's Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) constitutes a powerful tool for understanding the policy process, and more specifically, agenda‐setting, through three separate streams: problems, policies and politics. This article argues that the MSF would benefit from further development of the problem stream. It introduces a clearer conception of agency into the problem stream by suggesting the inclusion of the problem broker. The problem broker is a role in which actors frame conditions as public problems and work to make policy makers accept these frames. The problem broker makes use of knowledge, values and emotions in the framing of problems. The use of these three elements is seen as a prerequisite for successful problem brokering – that is, for establishing a frame in the policy sphere. Other important factors are: persistence, access to policy makers, credibility and willingness. Problem brokers also need to know who to talk to, how and when in order to make an impact. The context, in terms of, for example, audience and national mood, is also crucial. The inclusion of the problem broker into the MSF strengthens the analytical separation between streams. According to Kingdon, policies can be developed independently from problems. The MSF, therefore, enables a study of policy generation. The inclusion of the problem broker, in the same sense, makes it possible to investigate problem framing as a separate process and enables a study of actors that frame problems without making policy suggestions. The MSF is, in its current form, not able to capture what these actors do. The main argument of this article is that it is crucial to study these actors as problem framing affects the work of policy entrepreneurs and, thereby, agenda‐setting and decision making.     

多源流框架:探究模糊性对政策过程的影响

多源流框架是由政治学家金登首次提出,他在借鉴决策理论研究者科恩、马奇和奥尔森提出的组织选择的垃圾桶决策模型基础上,开发出从问题源流、政策源流和政治源流来理解政策过程,探究议程设定、备选方案与公共政策之间关系。他认为,一旦政策之窗开启,政策企业家促进问题源流、政策源流和政治源流实现三流合一,新的公共政策就会被选择,或者新的公共政策取代旧的公共政策,政策变迁得以实现。多源流框架在提出之后,被不同政策领域、层次和地域广泛使用。多源流框架在未来是否能够具有持续性的生命力,一个重要的因素是该理论通过进行适应性调整,主动与一些成熟的理论进行对话,尽早发展具有普适性的理论命题,为共同研究和知识积累创造条件。     

Understanding Policy Networks: towards a Dialectical Approach

This article has two aims. First, we develop a dialectical model of the role that policy networks play in any explanation of policy outcomes. Our model is based upon a critique of existing approaches and emphasizes that the relationship between networks and outcomes is not a simple, unidimensional one. Rather, we argue that there are three interactive or dialectical relationships involved between: the structure of the network and the agents operating within them; the network and the context within which it operates; and the network and the policy outcome. Second, we use this model to help analyse and understand continuity and change in British agricultural policy since the 1930s. Obviously, one case is not sufficient to establish the utility of the model, but the case does illustrate both that policy networks can, and do, affect policy outcomes and that, in order to understand how that happens, we need to appreciate the role played by the three dialectical relationships highlighted in our model.     

Multiple Streams in Hawaii: How the Aloha State Adopted a 100% Renewable Portfolio Standard

Renewable portfolio standards (RPS) are an important policy tool for reducing carbon emissions and advancing the global shift toward renewable energy. As the U.S. federal government backs away from commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, subnational governments play an increasingly important role in mitigating climate change. In June 2015, Hawaii became the first state in the United States to adopt a 100% RPS. Through understanding the conditions that gave rise to Hawaii’s RPS, policy actors will be better informed as they navigate policy processes in other states and jurisdictions. This study uses Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) to explore the policy process that led to Hawaii’s 100% RPS. Data were collected during the summer of 2016 via interviews with 25 key policy actors and informants in Hawaii. Expectations based on the MSF are confirmed, and the results suggest factors that might be included or explored in future studies of RPS adoption.     

《校车安全条例(草案)》的政策议程分析——基于多源流模型的视角

校车安全问题何以进入决策者的视野是理解《校车安全条例(草案征求意见稿)》得以快速发布的关键。采用案例分析法,从多源流理论视角对校车安全的源流发展、焦点事件和政策行动者等方面进行整体分析,研究表明:校车安全政策议程是政策企业家在政策窗口开启之时推动问题、政策和政治三大源流汇合的结果。相比垃圾桶模型、触发机制模型和议程设置理论,多源流模型在本案例中更具解释力。同时,多源流模型面临中国情境,源流之间存在相关性,而非完全独立。拥有双重身份的政策企业家具有从政府机构中打开"政治窗口"的可能性,这为多源流模型的本土化应用与后续研究提供了一个可供考察的角度。最后,指出阻碍校车安全政策议程设置的主要因素包括,制度性利益表达通道不通畅、政府部门对焦点事件处理能力和水平不高、管理权限划分模糊。为此,应创建有效的制度性利益表达通道、积极关注媒体舆情,扩大问题来源、科学合理划分管理权限。这些问题及对策对于其他政策领域也具备一定的借鉴意义,这也是本研究对政策制定者的启迪所在。     

Streams and stages: Reconciling Kingdon and policy process theory

Use of metaphors is a staple feature of how we understand policy processes – none more so than the use of ‘policy stages’/'cycles’ and ‘multiple streams’. Yet even allowing for the necessary parsimony of metaphors, the former is often criticised for its lack of ‘real world’ engagement with agency, power, ideology, turbulence and complexity, while the latter focuses only on agenda‐setting but at times has been utilised, with limited results, to understand later stages of the policy process. This article seeks to explore and advance the opportunities for combining both and applying them to the policy‐formation and decision‐making stages of policy making. In doing so it examines possible three, four and five stream models. It argues that a five stream confluence model provides the highest analytical value because it retains the simplicity of metaphors (combining elements of two of the most prominent models in policy studies) while also helping capture some of the more complex and subtle aspects of policy processes, including policy styles and nested systems of governance.     

Development law: Squaring the circle, advancing human rights in Africa

Development law is an ethos-driven law reform paradigm that examines conditions from within the country and provides a frame of reference in which to evaluate the legal regime in the political, economic, social and cultural context. Moreover, development law provides a fresh approach to assessing existing national laws effectiveness generally; it assesses whether modifications are required to promote economic, political, and social progress, including protecting the rights of minority ethnic groups and disenfranchised peoples. By protecting rights, law can be an instrument of social development and will not be alien to large segments of the population. Development law as a paradigm is the result of decision making within the country after careful examination by trained professionals whose sole interest is political, economical, social, cultural and national development. The enactment of laws and integration of customary norms that are embraced by the ruling authority, political elites, and other stake holders will best advance human rights. I thank Professor Mary Wright for reviewing and providing helpful comments on a previous draft of this article.     

Building Consensual Institutions: Networks and the National Estuary Program

Currently, many approaches to solving policy problems seek to create community-based, less coercive solutions that are creating the conditions for the birth of new regional governmental institutions. We argue that networks form the core of these emergent structures and that federal programs can play a positive role in developing local networks. Our empirical work compares networks in estuaries included in National Estuary Program with networks in comparable estuaries that were not. We find that the networks in NEP areas span more levels of government, integrate more experts into policy discussions, nurture stronger interpersonal ties between stakeholders, and create greater faith in the procedural fairness of local policy, thus laying the foundation for a new form of cooperative governance.     

Learning to Cooperate: Learning Networks and the Problem of Altruism

We explore how two populations learn to cooperate with each other in the absence of institutional support. Individuals play iterated prisoner's dilemmas with the other population, but learn about successful strategies from their own population. Our agent-based evolutionary models reconfirm that cooperation can emerge rapidly as long as payoffs provide a selective advantage for nice, retaliatory strategies like tit-for-tat, although attainable levels of cooperation are limited by the persistence of nonretaliatory altruists. Learning processes that adopt the current best response strategy do well only when initial conditions are very favorable to cooperation, while more adaptive learning processes can achieve high levels of cooperation under a wider range of initial conditions. When combined with adaptive learning, populations having larger, better connected learning relationships outperform populations with smaller, less connected ones. Clustered relationships can also enhance cooperation, particularly in these smaller, less connected populations.     

政策网络：流派、类型与价值

网络分析方法是西方社会科学界近几年兴起的一种理论分析工具,具体到政治学和行政学领域,形成了政策网络的理论体系。政策网络理论本身是庞大而复杂的,一般而言,可以划分为美国学派、英国学派和欧洲学派。政策网络既是一种治理模式,也是一种利益中介结构。由于政策网络理论的复杂性,学者们根据不同的标准对政策网络进行了分类,为其在政治科学中的进一步运用奠定了基础。     

政策网络：概念、类型及发展前景

随着传统政府治理模式的衰微,20世纪70年代末以来政策网络逐渐成为政策分析领域的主流话语和研究途径.政策网络是一群互赖行动者之间建立某种稳定程度的社会关系形态,以促成政策方案的形成或发展.学术界普遍认为可以将政策网络划分为作为分析工具的利益协调模式和作为实践创新的治理模式两种典范.尽管作为政策网络理论仍存在种种缺陷,但是它已经展现出巨大的生命力,对于理解公共政策以及国家与社会关系具有重要的意义.     

Connecting the Congress: A Study of Cosponsorship Networks

e-mail: jhfowler{at}ucdavis.edu Using large-scale network analysis I map the cosponsorship networksof all 280,000 pieces of legislation proposed in the U.S. Houseand Senate from 1973 to 2004. In these networks, a directionallink can be drawn from each cosponsor of a piece of legislationto its sponsor. I use a number of statistics to describe thesenetworks such as the quantity of legislation sponsored and cosponsoredby each legislator, the number of legislators cosponsoring eachpiece of legislation, the total number of legislators who havecosponsored bills written by a given legislator, and networkmeasures of closeness, betweenness, and eigenvector centrality.I then introduce a new measure I call "connectedness" whichuses information about the frequency of cosponsorship and thenumber of cosponsors on each bill to make inferences about thesocial distance between legislators. Connectedness predictswhich members will pass more amendments on the floor, a measurethat is commonly used as a proxy for legislative influence.It also predicts roll call vote choice even after controllingfor ideology and partisanship.     

Political differentiation and the problem of dominance: Segmentation and hegemony

At first glance, one might view the political differentiation in the European Union as a reflection of the autonomy of its member states, signifying flexibility and the dispersion of democratic control. However, under conditions of complex interdependence and economic integration, political differentiation can undermine the fundamental conditions for democratic self‐rule. Political differentiation may cause dominance. It is argued in this article that we must move beyond Philip Pettit's conception of dominance as the capacity to interfere with others on an arbitrary basis, in order to properly identify the undemocratic consequences of differentiation. Political freedom is also a question of institutional provisions to co‐determine laws. From this vantage point, differentiation raises the spectre of dominance in the form of decisional exclusion and the pre‐emption of political autonomy. Drawing on a re‐conceptualisation of dominance, the effects of differentiation on the possibility of self‐rule are examined, and two systematic effects of political differentiation are identified. It is argued that segmentation is the systemic effect of differentiation in the vertical dimension of integration. Here, dominance occurs in the form of exclusion from decision‐making bodies and the denial of choice opportunities. In the external horizontal dimension, the systemic effect of differentiation is hegemony. Some states are vulnerable to arbitrary interference and the pre‐emption of public autonomy. The article discusses developments within the Eurozone as a case of segmentation and the statues of associated non‐members as a case of hegemony. With regard to the latter, we are faced with the phenomenon of self‐incurred dominance.