Differentiating Political Brokers and Entrepreneurs, and their Impact on Policy Design

Metz, Florence (8 September 2016). Differentiating Political Brokers and Entrepreneurs, and their Impact on Policy Design (Unpublished). In: European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference. Prague, Czech Republic. 07.-10. Sept. 2016.

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Exceptional actors such as brokers and entrepreneurs have been shown to coexist in policymaking processes and simultaneously influence policy outputs. What remains unclear is how to methodologically disentangle political brokerage and entrepreneurship. The present article elaborates on the conceptual differences between both types of strategic network positions by going back to the theoretical roots in the Advocacy Coalition, the Punctuated Equilibrium, and Multiple Streams Frameworks. It proposes a distinction between brokerage and entrepreneurship by using social network analysis. The added value of the present work is that it does not only consider actors’ centrality measures, but takes into consideration the entire network structure of advocacy coalitions, actors’ embeddedness therein, and actors’ policy beliefs in order to identify brokers and entrepreneurs. In the attempt of a fine-grained analysis to differentiating brokers from entrepreneurs, the paper further studies brokers’ and entrepreneurs’ influence on policy outputs. The study systematically links brokerage and entrepreneurship to six different indicators of policy performance, which are deduced from policy instrument literature. To establish this link, the study performs a cross-sectional comparison between four European countries within the policy field of water protection. The article not only provides more methodological clarity to researchers who wish to study political agency, it also demonstrates the added value of triangulating diverse theories of the policy process in order to better understand the processes guiding policymaking.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Division/Institute:	03 Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Institute of Political Science
UniBE Contributor:	Metz, Florence Alessa
Subjects:	300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology > 320 Political science
Funders:	[42] Schweizerischer Nationalfonds
Projects:	[UNSPECIFIED] How to explain instrument selection in complex policy processes
Language:	English
Submitter:	Florence Alessa Metz
Date Deposited:	28 Jun 2017 12:33
Last Modified:	05 Dec 2022 15:04
Additional Information:	Session "Public Policy, Politics, and Advocacy Coalitions" Titel im Programm: Agency, Advocacy Coalitions, and Network Structure: Differentiating Political Brokers and Entrepreneurs
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/98567