Policy Actor Belief Systems and Democracy in Municipal Housing Policy Subsystems

• In Event: The Use of Narratives in Shaping Discourse and Beliefs in the Policy Process

Abstract

Democracy is widely lauded as a model of governance that best assures citizens certain rights, protecting them from exploitation by politically and economically powerful entities. The concept of protection from exploitation generally involves some notion of equity among people and the individual freedom of self-determination. Political leaders and decision-makers are expected to come from the people and be responsive to the needs and concerns of the public. However, the inherent fragility of democracy, the contested nature of how democracy is defined, and the logistical challenges associated with realizing ideals of democracy have long been serious concerns. The theorized necessity for citizens and political leaders alike in democratic societies to subscribe to the concepts and tenets of democracy is integral to these concerns.

Leaders in modern democratic political systems, collectively referred to as policy actors, comprise not only elected officials, but also non-elected bureaucrats and innumerable individuals from non-governmental sectors that seek to influence policy decisions in myriad ways. While the beliefs and motivations of citizens, the public more broadly, elected officials, and bureaucrats have been extensively studied, the beliefs of policy actors, as a conceptual group, have been less widely studied to understand how their beliefs relate to democratic principles. This dynamic has produced a critical gap in our analysis of democratic systems by ignoring the beliefs of many policy actors who routinely engage to influence public policy outside of electoral processes. The proposed research addresses this gap by using the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) in coordination with democratic theory.

The ACF is a popular policy process theoretical framework that provides conceptual guidance for studying policy actors with belief systems that shape their policy preferences. Policy actor belief systems are also assumed to motivate how policy actors coordinate and clash within policy subsystems to get their policy preferences adopted. As such, it is uniquely situated to guide research addressing policy actor belief questions in relation to democratic theory and in democratic contexts.

This paper asks how policy actors understand democracy and how these understandings are integrated (or not) with their internal policy belief system. Interview data from twenty-five policy actors and field observations from housing policy-related events in two U.S. cities, one right-leaning and one left-leaning, are analyzed using a grounded theory approach. This research suggests that while the ACF’s traditional three-tier conceptualization of policy actor beliefs is a useful starting point, it does not fully encompass the ways in which policy actors’ understandings of democracy motivate their policy preferences. This research is part of a larger project analyzing up to 90 interviews across six cities.

In addition to making contributions to the literature on subnational democracy, the proposed research provides two unique contributions to the ACF literature. First, the proposed research responds to critiques of the ACF for ignoring normative concerns in the policy process (e.g. Ingram et al., 2016) by focusing on policy actor beliefs and their own understandings of democracy using traditional qualitative methodology. Second, the proposed research contributes to answering recently raised validity questions about the ACF’s conceptual construction of belief systems (e.g. Weible et al., 2020) by using a grounded theory approach to explore policy actor belief systems and how their beliefs about democracy integrate into these systems in two municipal housing policy subsystems.

Author

• Jill Yordy, University of Colorado Denver