Policy process research and the causal mechanism movement: reinvigorating the field?

Schlager and Blomquist’s paper comparing three “emerging theories of the policy process.” It examined the ACF, Elinor Ostrom’s Institutional Rational Choice (IRC, which later became IAD), and Terry Moe’s politics of structural choice approach. Issues of mechanisms and causality were briefly discussed, with ACF touted as a more sophisticated incorporation of the roles of information and learning; it challenges the other frameworks to consider the “ideological filtering of information, and changes in individuals’ beliefs, as mechanisms promoting or inhibiting policy change” (p. 666).