Re-Visiting the New Orthodoxy of Policy Dynamics: The Dependent Variable and Re-Aggregation Problems in the Study of Policy Change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The new orthodoxy in studies of policy dynamics, including those of Baumgartner and Jones, Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, and Hall, is that policy change occurs through a homeostatic process. “Perturbations” occurring outside of an institutionalized policy subsystem, often characterized as some type of societal or political upheaval or learning, are critical for explaining the development of profound and durable policy changes which are otherwise limited by ‘endogenous’ institutional stability. These homeostatic assumptions, while useful for assessing many cases of policy change do not adequately capture the historical patterns of policy development found in many sectors. The roots of this problem are traced back to the origins of the new orthodoxy in comparative policy research whereby different levels (orders) of policy-making have been incorrectly juxtaposed, providing a parsimonious, but sometimes empirically incorrect, view of policy change. Revising existing taxonomies of policy levels provides a superior identification of the processes of change, and uncovers more than one mechanism through which significant policy change can occur. Three of these alternative mechanisms - a “neo-homeostatic” one in which paradigmatic changes occur through endogenous shifts in goals; a ‘quasi-homeostatic’ in which exogenous factors influence changes in objectives and settings; and a ‘thermostatic’ one in which durable policy objectives require that settings adapt to exogenous changes - are discussed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.051 | 0.061 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".