From policy entrepreneurs to policy entrepreneurship: actors and actions in public policy innovation (original) (raw)
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Over the past decades, research on policy formulation, especially research on agenda-setting, has demonstrated that the actions of individuals (or groups) labelled ‘policy entrepreneurs’ constitute a central aspect of the public policy process. Agenda-setting theoretical models (John Kingdon’s multiple streams model and Baumgartner and Jones’s punctuated equilibrium theory) view those actors from different perspectives, stressing different features of their role in the policy process. Both models consider the policy entrepreneur an essential actor in their explanations of policy maintenance or change. In Brazil, although the study of public policy has experienced periods of strong expansion during the past decades, there is still a lack of detailed data on the application of such models and the role of policy entrepreneurs in such analyses. This paper aims to present and discuss the centrality of policy entrepreneurs in agenda-setting models by analysing this important actor and the...
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What role do individual agents play in the policy process? Theories of the policy process either specify or leave room for a special class of individuals that drive the policy process. These individuals are often vaguely described as policy entrepreneurs. This paper uses pragmatist method to examine the claims of scholars about what policy entrepreneurs do—what actions they take, as opposed to their characteristics or positions. Using immigration enforcement law in the US states in the 2010s as a case, the paper lays out a plan for using interview-based process tracing and network analysis of news media to test scholars' claims against the actions of political actors viewed as instrumental to passing or blocking those laws. Such a study would explore (1) who took actions that determined policy outcomes; (2) which theories of public entrepreneurship prove most predictive of that behavior; and (3) whether public entrepreneurship is the most useful metaphor for describing those actions. This paper aims to contribute to conversations about the role of individual agency in the policy process.
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