Advocacy Coalition Framework

Foundation

The structural underpinnings that the ACF begins with are a set of assumptions involving a central role for scientific and technical information in policy processes, a time perspective of 10 years or more to understand policy change, and the assignment of policy subsystems as the primary unit of analysis. Policy subsystems are subunits of political systems, focused on a topical area and involving specialized actors. The ACF guides researchers to study a broad set of subsystem actors including officials from all levels of government, nongovernment actors, consultants, scientists, and members of the media. For these subsystem actors, the ACF assumes a mental model based on limited abilities to process stimuli, a tendency to remember losses more than gains, and a need to rely on beliefs as the principal heuristic to simplify, filter, and sometimes distort stimuli.

The ACF assumes that actors are politically driven by their beliefs and that their policies and programs are best thought of as translations of those beliefs. A three-tiered model of a belief system for its actors is depicted. Within the belief-systems model, the broadest, most rigid, and predominately normative are deep core beliefs, such as liberal and conservative beliefs or the relative concern for the welfare of present versus future generations. Of moderate scope and spanning the substantive and geographic breadth of a policy subsystem are policy core beliefs. Policy core beliefs are rigid but are more adaptive in response to new experiences and information than deep core beliefs. The most substantively and geographically narrow and the most empirical are secondary beliefs. Compared with deep core and policy core beliefs, secondary beliefs are more likely to change.

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