What Do We Know About the Relationship Between Brokerage and Policy Outcomes? A Literature Review

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 9:00 am
  In Roundtable Session: Advancing Critical Social Network Analysis to Address Issues of Equity in Education Policy and Politics (Table 35)

Abstract

The concept of network brokerage has seen widespread use in the education policy literature (Daly & Finnigan, 2010; Author, 2021; Galey-Horn et al., 2020; Hodge et al., 2020; Scott & Jabbar, 2013). These works begin from the assumption that brokers play a crucial role in the policymaking process by coordinating action, relaying information, and serving as a bridge between policy actors and ideas. Given this core assumption, a substantial portion of the literature has focused on identifying brokers in policy networks and trying to understand how these actors facilitate policy network formation.

Despite numerous insights about brokers and brokerage processes in policy contexts, relatively little is known about the ways that brokers actually influence outcomes in education policy or the specific measures of brokerage that should be used when attempting to understand this relationship. Identifying the causal relationship between brokerage and policy outcomes is especially challenging given the potential for bias from selection and simultaneous causality. Yet, even establishing a correlation in this context is difficult given the longitudinal nature of brokerage processes and associated data requirements to model such relationships.

This paper addresses this limitation in the literature through a multidisciplinary review of the literature focusing on brokerage and policy-relevant outcomes. The review covers a wide variety of policy domains, including public health, communications, business, environment, and education. A Web of Science search yielded 1,001 articles using the terms “broker OR brokerage OR "boundary span" OR "structural hole" OR "tertius seperans" OR "tertius iungens" and “policy.” Some disciplinary refinements were made to exclude fields such as electrical engineering and others for which the term “broker” has a non-applicable meaning. The authors then reviewed 100 randomly selected abstracts to ensure the search criteria were aligned with the objectives of the review.

The primary objectives of this literature review are twofold: (1) to catalog the ways that researchers in these domains measure brokerage, and (2) to understand the various ways that brokers and brokerage processes influence (or are at least associated with) exogenous policy outcomes. The paper then concludes with recommendations for a research agenda in education policy that moves beyond descriptive accounts of brokers and brokerage to estimate how these processes ultimately shape policy outcomes.

Authors

• Elizabeth N. Farley-Ripple, University of Delaware

• Matthew Weber, Rutgers University

• Joseph J. Ferrare, University of Washington - Bothell