
doi: 10.1111/psj.12223
One purpose of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is to explain policy change. Previous holistic reviews of the ACF by Weible, Sabatier, and McQueen (2009) and Pierce, Peterson, Jones, Garrard, and Vu (2017) of the framework have not explicitly analyzed all the concepts and their interactions in a systematic manner. To address this gap and inform scholars and practitioners about past findings, strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for future research, this article analyzes how the ACF's theory of policy change is applied to 148 policy processes among 67 journal articles from 2007 to 2014. Similar to Weible et al. (2009), this research finds the frequent use of multiple primary pathways to policy change, infrequent use of many of the ACF's concepts, a plurality of applications in the environment and energy domain, comparison of subsystems, and a need for greater clarity and transparency among applications. Unlike Weible et al. (2009), this article explores associations between primary pathways and policy domains, the frequency of associations between primary pathways and secondary components, policy change and stasis, and identifies threats to internal validity of key ACF concepts.
| selected citations These citations are derived from selected sources. This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | 69 | |
| popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network. | Top 1% | |
| influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | Top 10% | |
| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Top 10% |
