Punctuated Equilibrium and Advocacy Coalitions: Toward a Post Carbon Policy Paradigm for the Automobile in North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Addressing climate change will require breaching the well-fortified redoubts of America’s energy and transportation policy monopolies. This paper explores how such policy transformation might actually unfold, drawing upon the case of recent policy innovations in automotive fuel economy regulation. Even before the economic crisis triggered a government led restructuring of Chrysler and General Motors, the advocacy groups in America’s auto policy subsystem recognized that “things are moving,” and that the status quo of 1980s era fuel economy standards could not be preserved indefinitely. Following the 2006 Congressional elections, the coalition behind Detroit’s policy monopoly became more open to policy changes that would avoid the most damaging outcome of sharp increases in fuel economy regulations. Once Detroit’s lock on policy change was opened, environmental and transportation reform advocates found they needed to quickly elaborate many practical and political details of a “new paradigm” if they were to successfully replace the old policy monopoly, not just add some incremental refinements to a modified status quo. This paper explores the relatively neglected phenomenon of what happens during and soon after the termination of a policy monopoly. This mode (and moment) of policy transformation fits Peter Hall’s (1993) “third order” of policy change when policy goals are refashioned and become the new reference point for subsequent implementation. Such pivotal periods of policy reformulation are, like punctuations, few and far between, at least in American politics. Applying Hall’s typology to this episode of policy punctuation enables us to distinguish between changes in a policy monopoly from changes to a policy monopoly. They represented two different modes of punctuation, we suggest. And they generally lead to different policy outcomes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".