Transcript SOC 8311 Basic Social Statistics

Historical Development of the
National Policy Domains Studies
&
Comparing Policy Networks Methods
David Knoke
University of Minnesota
COMPON Conference
January 25-28, 2007
Collective Action Systems
Collective action systems – such as legislatures, courts,
regulatory agencies – make public policy decisions
about numerous proposed laws and regulations.
Organized interest groups hold varying pro- and conpreferences across multiple policy decisions. Coalitions
lobby public officials to choose outcomes favorable to
coalitional interests. Decision makers may also hold
policy preferences, and may change their votes on
some events to gain support for preferred decisions.
Models of socially embedded policymaking explore how network ties shape
collective decisions through information exchanges, political resource,
persuasion, vote-trading (log-rolling), and other dynamic processes.
“Je weniger die Leute davon wissen, wie Würste und Gesetze gemacht
werden, desto besser schlafen sie.” Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815-98)
[The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they'll sleep.]
Community Power Structure Beginnings
Edward O. Laumann & Franz Urban Pappi’s “New Directions in the
Study of Community Elites” (1973, 1976) demonstrated how multiple
networks connecting the elites of a small German city facilitated and
constrained their collective capacity to affect community policies.
Replications in two middle-size Illinois cities
revealed that organizations occupying central
network positions were more influential in
community affairs, more likely to mobilize for
action in political controversies, and better able
to achieve their preferred outcomes in public
policy disputes (Laumann, Marsden and
Galaskiewicz 1977; Galaskiewicz 1979).
► Laumann and Marsden (1979) simplified large networks into collective actors,
structural positions that are jointly occupied by several organizations with close
communication ties and holding identical preferences for a policy event outcome.
► Marsden and Laumann (1977) showed that James Coleman’s mathematical
model of collective action could explain the outcomes of five policy controversies
in the “Towertown” data. Others (Stokman, Koenig) have extended this model.
► See Knoke (1998) for a brief history of U.S. policy network research.
National Policy Domains & Networks
Policy network analysts seek to explain the formation of state-interest
organization networks, their persistence and change over time, and the
consequences of network structures for public policy-making outcomes.
Developers included British (Rhodes, Marsh), German (Pappi, Schneider,
Mayntz), and American (Laumann, Knoke) political scientists & sociologists
“A policy network is described by its actors, their linkages and its boundary.
It includes a relatively stable set of mainly public and private corporate actors.
The linkages between the actors serve as channels for communication and for
the exchange of information, expertise, trust and other policy resources. The
boundary of a given policy network is not in the first place determined by
formal institutions but results from a process of mutual recognition dependent
on functional relevance and structural embeddedness.” (Kenis and Schneider 1991)
POLICY DOMAIN: “A set of interest group organizations, legislative
institutions, and governmental executive agencies that engage in
setting agendas, formulating policies, gaining access, advocating
positions, organizing collective influence actions, and selecting among
proposals to solve delimited substantive policy problems, such as
national defense, education, agriculture, or welfare.”
(Laumann and Knoke. 1987. The Organizational State)
The Organizational State
The Organizational State (1987) conceptualized a national policy
domain’s power structures as multiplex networks among formal
organizations, not elite persons. These connections enable
opposing coalitions to mobilize political resources in collective
fights for influence over specific public policy decisions.
Power structure is revealed in patterns of multiplex networks of information,
resource, reputational, and political support among organizations with partially
overlapping and opposing policy interests.
Action set is a subset of policy domain orgs that share common policy
preferences, pool political resources, and pressure governmental decisionmakers
to choose a policy outcome favorable to their interests. After a policy decision,
the opposing action sets typically break apart as new events give rise to other
constellations of interest orgs.
Lobbying Coalitions
When its interests are at stake in a Congressional bill or
regulatory ruling, a political org can lobby alone or in coalition
• Most political orgs work in coalitions; a division of labor
• Coalitions are short-lived affairs for specific narrow goals
EX: impose or lift restrictions on Persian rug imports
• Partners in next coalition change with the specific issues
“Politics makes strange bedfellows” EX: Patriot Act
• Orgs that lobby together succeed more often than soloists
• Broad cleavages emerge within some policy domains
EX: Business vs Unions in labor policy domain
Who Wins Policy Fights?
We know much less about the systematic influence of
political action on the outcomes of public policy fights
• No single political organization or enduring coalition prevails on
every issue & event of importance to it; incrementalism prevails
What implications for Ruling Class, Elite, & Pluralist models?
• Biggest PAC contributors & campaign workers may enjoy greater
access, easier victories on uncontested policy & pork proposals
But why Big Tobacco’s setbacks? Union failure to block NAFTA?
• Roll-call analyses of Congressional votes find small lobbying effects
relative to other factors
• Lobbying impacts greatest in particular policy events, depending on
strength of opposition’s resources & political arguments
• Elected officials also pay attention to unorganized voter opinions
• Shockingly, some even hold ideological principles & hobby-horses!
Dialectical Influences
Marsh & Smith’s dialectical model depicts policy outcomes
as feeding back to change actors and network structures
Policy outcomes may
affect networks by:
1. Changing network
membership or the balance
of resources within it
2. Altering social contexts
to weaken particular
interests in relation to a
given network
3. Causing agents, who
learn by experience, to
pursue alternative policy
influence strategies &
actions
Comparing Policy Networks Methods
The theoretical principles and the empirical data
collection and analysis methods developed in The
Organizational State were adapted and applied in a
study of national labor policy domains in the U.S.,
Germany, and Japan, Comparing Policy Networks
(Knoke, Pappi, Broadbent & Tsujinaka 1996).
They could be used by the COMPON project:
 Identify organization population from public-source activities
 Compile sets of issues & dated events from public records
 Construct identical national questionnaires by cross-translation
 Interview key informant from each org: attribute & network data
Complete networks require 90%+ response rates
 Network methods to analyze, compare national policy domains
Communication Distances in the Core
+1.5
NLRB
HD
ACLU
SD
SR
NEA
UAW
ABC
AARP
CHAM
NAM
0.0
BRT
DOL
HR
AFL-CIO
TEAM
OSHA
ASCM
NGA
WHO
-1.5
-1.5
0.0
+1.5
SOURCE: Knoke. 2001. Changing Organizations. Westview.
Political Cleavages on Policy Events
Memberships in action
sets for 3 U.S. labor
policy domain events
revealed overlapping
patterns of organizational
interests in influencing
these policy decisions.
The labor and business
coalitions comprise a
core set of advocates
(AFL vs. Chamber of
Commerce) plus eventspecific interest
organizations,
particularly nonlabor
allies of unions.
SOURCE: p. 354 in Knoke. 2001. Changing Organizations.
Implications for Future NPD Studies
“The results from the three national labor policy domain analyses may be
boldly, perhaps imprudently, extrapolated to modern organizational
states in general:

Concepts of core policy actors, policy interests, political exchange
relations, and collective actions are essential to analyzing national
policy domain social structures and processes.

Common patterns of domain social organization occur among
advanced capitalist, industrial democracies; for example, the
centrality of action sets and exchange processes in collective
decision making.

Historical, cultural, and institutional factors generate important
variations in structures across national policy domains.

Combining both informal institutions (power structures) and formal
governmental institutions (constitutions) is necessary to explain
variations across the national policy domains in forms of the modern
organizational state.”
(Knoke. 1998:158-159)
References
Galaskiewicz, Joseph 1979. Exchange Networks and Community Politics. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Kenis, Patrick and Volker Schneider. 1991. “Policy Networks and Policy Analysis: Scrutinizing a
New Analytical Toolbox.” Pp. 25-62 in Policy Networks: Empirical Evidence and Theoretical
Considerations, edited by Bernd Marin and Renate Mayntz. Boulder/Frankfurt: Campus/Westview
Press.
Knoke, David. 1998. “The Organizational State: Origins and Prospects.” Research in Political
Sociology 8:147-163.
Knoke, David. 2001. Changing Organizations: Business Networks in the New Political Economy.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Knoke, David, Franz Urban Pappi, Jeffrey Broadbent and Yutaka Tsujinaka. 1996. Comparing
Policy Networks: Labor Politics in the U.S., Germany, and Japan. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Laumann, Edward O. and David Knoke. 1987. The Organizational State: Social Choice in National
Policy Domains. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Laumann, Edward O., Peter V. Marsden, and Joseph Galaskiewicz. 1977. “Community Influence
Structures: Replication and Extension of a Network Approach.” American Journal of Sociology
31:169-78.
Laumann, Edward O. and Franz Urban Pappi. 1976. Networks of Collective Action: A Perspective
on Community Influence Systems. New York: Academic Press.
Marsh, David and M. Smith. 2000. “Understanding Policy Networks: Towards a Dialectical
Approach.” Political Studies 48(4):4-21.