Investigating ACF Policy Change Theory in a Unitary Policy Subsystem: The Case of Ghanaian Public Sector Information Policy
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2019, the government of Ghana overhauled its access to public information rules through the Right to Information Act. Prior to this legislation, access to public sector information was not formally regulated and the new legislation provided a legal framework for making public sector information accessible to the general public. From an Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) perspective, the passage of the Right to Information Act represents a major policy change and provides a case in which the ACF theory of major policy change can be investigated. This case is also interesting because it took place in a unitary policy subsystem, as opposed to a competitive or collaborative subsystem. Unitary subsystems are characterized by a single, dominant advocacy coalition, in this case a pro-transparency coalition, and are relatively uncommon in the ACF literature. The purpose of this paper is to investigate ACF policy change theory in the Ghanaian public sector information policy subsystem – as a unitary subsystem – to determine whether it can explain the major policy change that took place with the passage of the Right to Information Act. The investigation finds strong empirical support for the ACF’s ‘pathways’ hypothesis and moderate support for the ‘power’ hypothesis.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it