Testing the Multiple Streams Framework in US state legislatures

Despite a robust literature applying the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) to national government institutions, there remains a dearth of research examining the theory’s explanatory power in US state legislative contexts. This omission is problematic given the critical role state legislatures play in driving policy change in a host of policy domains, including healthcare, emergency preparedness and voting rights policy, to name a few. To fill this gap in the research, this study applies the MSF to the case of climate adaptation policy making in the Massachusetts State Legislature. Using a mixed methods design, it assesses the effect of all three of the MSF’s streams (the problem, politics and policy streams), as well as the concept of policy entrepreneurship on the climate adaptation policy agenda of the Massachusetts State Legislature between the years 2001 and 2020. The findings suggest that agenda activity was largely driven by changes within the political stream, namely the election of a Republican governor. In addition to advancing the MSF by providing one of the most comprehensive quantitative analyses of the framework to date, this article draws on new data from the State House News Service and other sources of state legislative floor debates to present a new methodological approach for measuring agenda change. In this way, the article makes a clear theoretical contribution to the MSF literature as well as providing new analysis of state-level climate adaptation policy adoption.