A Quarter Century of the Advocacy Coalition Framework: An Introduction to the Special Issue

About two decades ago, Paul Sabatier (1991) urged scholars to develop better theories and empirics for understanding policy processes. Sabatier's proposition, in collaboration with Hank Jenkins-Smith, became the advocacy coalition framework (ACF). The original version of the ACF sought to make important contributions to the policy process literature by responding to several perceived needs: a need to take longer-term time perspectives to understand policy change; a need for a more complex view of subsystems to include both researchers and intergovernmental relations; a need for more attention to the role of science and policy analysis in public policy; and a need for a more realistic model of the individual rooted more deeply in psychology rather than microeconomics. This article introduces a special edition of this journal that offers a collection of eight ACF applications that continue to test and develop the theories within the framework. Adapted from the source document.