Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T13:42:02.816Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Policies as species

Viewing and classifying policy from an evolutionary biology perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2019

Samantha L. Mosier Open the ORCID record for Samantha L. Mosier [Opens in a new window]
Samantha L. Mosier*
Affiliation:
East Carolina University
Get access

Abstract

This article proposes equating policies as species to develop a better understanding of how policies emerge, change, and diffuse across policymaking environments. Scholars have long shown an interest in understanding policy change and reinvention, whether incremental or nonincremental. The two subfields of public policy that can answer how and why policies change are not unified, leading to difficulty in comprehensively assessing policy emergence and change. The policy species concept bridges knowledge of the policy process and knowledge in the policy process by creating an operationalized definition of public policy and suggesting a process for classifying policies to observe subsequent behavior. Drawing from the field of biology, the policy species framework outlines how policies possess genotypes and phenotypes, which dictate what a policy is and how it can change. In tracing genotypic and phenetic change over time, policy evolution and change is more easily discernible. In turn, a more precise picture of how policies function is painted.

Keywords

public policypolicy classificationpolicy evolutionpolicy species
Type
Article
Information
Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , Fall 2019 , pp. 117 - 131
Copyright
© Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. Sabatier, P. A., “Toward better theories of the policy process,” PS: Political Science and Politics, 1991, 24(2): 147–56.Google Scholar

2. Sabatier, P. A., ed., Theories of the Policy Process (Cooulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999).Google Scholar

3. Meier, K. J., “Policy theory, policy theory everywhere: Ravings of a deranged policy scholar,” Policy Studies Journal, 2009, 37(1): 5–11, at p. 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Nowlin, M. C., “Theories of the policy process: State of the research and emerging trends,” Policy Studies Journal, 2011, 39(S1): 41–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Radaelli, C. M., “The role of knowledge in the policy process,” Journal of European Public Policy, 1995, 2(2): 159–183.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Meier, p. 10.

7. Forscher, B., “Chaos in the brickyard,” Science, 1963, 142(3590): 339.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

8. Birkland, T. A., An Introduction to the Policy Process: Theories, Concepts, and Models of Public Policy Making, 3rd ed. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2010), pp. 7–9.Google Scholar

9. Lowi, T. J., “Four systems of policy, politics, and choice,” Public Administation Review, 1972, 32(4): 298-310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Spitzer, R. J., “Promoting policy theory: Revisiting the arenas of power,” Policy Studies Journal, 1987, 15(4): 675–689.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Anderson, J. E., Public Policymaking: An Introduction, 8th ed. (Boston: Cengage, 2015).Google Scholar

12. Edelman, M., The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985).Google Scholar

13. Wilson, J. Q., Political Organizations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

14. Boushey, G. T., Policy Diffusion Dynamics in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 72–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. Smith, K. B., “Typologies, taxonomies, and the benefits of policy classification,” Policy Studies Journal, 2002, 30(3): 379–395.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. Downs, G. W. and Mohr, L. B., “Conceptual issues in the study of innovation,” Administrative Science Quarterly, 1976, 21(4): 700–714.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Jeans, J., Physics and Philosophy (Ann Arbor: University of Michingan Press, 1966), cited in Downs and Mohr, p. 702.Google Scholar

18. Maske, T. and Volden, C., “The role of policy attributes in the diffusion of innovations,” Journal of Politics, 2010, 73(1): 108–124.Google Scholar

19. Crawford, S. E. S. and Ostrom, E., “A grammar of institutions,” American Political Science Review, 1995, 89(3): 582–600.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. Siddiki, S., Wieble, C. M., Basurto, X., and Calanni, J., “Dissecting policy designs: An application of the institutional grammar tool,” Policy Studies Journal, 2011, 39(1): 79–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21. Cairney, P., “What is evolutionary theory and how does it inform policy studies?,” Policy & Politics, 2013, 41(2): 279–298.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. John, P., “Is there life after policy streams, advocacy coalitions, and punctuations: Using evolutionary theory to explain policy change?,” Policy Studies Journal, 2003, 31(4): 481–498.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. Baumgartner, F. and Jones, B., Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).Google Scholar

24. Hacker, J. S., “Privatizing the welfare state: The hidden politics of social policy retrenchment in the United States,” American Political Science Review, 2004, 98(2): 243–260.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25. Kingdon, J., Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984).Google Scholar

26. Sabatier, P. A. and Jenkins-Smith, H. C., eds., Policy Change and Learning: An Advocacy Coalition Approach (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993).Google Scholar

27. Darwin, C., On the Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859).Google Scholar

28. Mayr, E., The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).Google Scholar

29. Mayr, E., What Evolution Is (New York: Basic Books, 2001).Google Scholar

30. Mayr, E., “Darwin’s influence on modern thought,” Scientific American, 2000, 238(1): 78–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31. Mallet, J., “Darwin and species,” in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Darwin and Evolutionary Thought, Ruse, Michael, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 109–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32. Mallet, J., “Why was Darwin’s view of species rejected by twentieth century biologists?,” Biology and Philosophy, 2010, 25(4): 497–527.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33. West-Eberhard, M. J., Developmental Plasticity and Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).Google Scholar

34. West-Eberhard, M. J., “Developmental plasticity and the origin of species differences,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2005, 102(Suppl. 1): 6543–6549.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

35. De Queiroz, K., “Species concepts and species delimitation.” Systematic Biology, 2007, 56(6): 879–886.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

36. Birkland, p. 9.

37. deLeon, P., “A theory of policy termination,” in The Policy Cycle, May, J. A. and Wildavsky, A. B., eds. (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1978), p. 283.Google Scholar

38. Linder, F., Desmarais, B., Burgess, M., and Giraudy, E., “Text as policy: Measuring policy similarity through bill text reuse,” Policy Studies Journal, published online October 15, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12257.Google Scholar

39. Basurto, X., Kingsley, G., McQueen, K., Smith, M., and Weible, C. M., “A systematic approach to institutional analysis: Applying Crawford and Ostrom’s grammar,” Political Research Quarterly, 2010, 63(3): 523–537.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40. Baekkwan, P., Colaresi, M., and Greene, K., “Beyond a bag of words: Using PULSAR to extract judgments on specific human rights at scale,” Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy, 2018, 24(4), https://doi.org/10.1515/peps-2018-0030.Google Scholar

41. U.S. Census Bureau, “Census Bureau reports there are 89,004 local governments in the United States,” August 30, 2012, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/governments/cb12-161.html, accessed July 1, 2019.

42. Bardach, E., “Policy termination as a political process,” Policy Sciences, 1976, 7(2): 123–131.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43. Kirkpatrick, S. E., Lester, J. P., and Peterson, M. R., “The policy termination process,” Review of Policy Research, 1999, 16(1): 209–238.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44. Cohen, M. D., March, J. G., and Olsen, J. P., “A garbage can model of organizational choice,” Administrative Science Quarterly, 1972, 17(1): 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45. Jones, B. D. and Baumgartner, F. R., “A model of choice for public policy,” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2005, 15(3): 325–351, at p. 325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46. Vernot, B. and Akey, J. M., “Resurrecting surviving Neandertal lineages from modern human genomes,” Science, 2014, 343(6174): 1017–1021.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

47. Sankararaman, S., Mallick, S., Dannemann, M., Prüfer, K., Kelso, J., Pääbo, S., Patterson, N., and Reich, D., “The genomic landscape of Neanderthal ancestry in present-day humans,” Nature, 2014, 507(7492): 354.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

48. Shipan, C. R. and Volden, C., “Policy diffusion: Seven lessons for scholars and practitioners,” Public Administration Review, 2012, 72(6): 788–796.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49. Scott, S. E., Inbar, Y., and Rozin, P., “Evidence for absolute moral opposition to genetically modified food in the United States,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2016, 11(3): 315–324.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

50. World Health Organization,“Frequently asked questions on genetically modified foods,” May 2014, https://www.who.int/foodsafety/areas_work/food-technology/faq-genetically-modified-food/en/, accessed July 2, 2019.

51. U.S. Food and Drug Administration,“Food standards and the 1906 act,” January 31, 2018, https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/histories-product-regulation/food-standards-and-1906-act, accessed July 2, 2019.