Research

This article examines the policy topics and theoretical debates found in Policy Studies Journal (PSJ) articles over the last three decades. PSJ is the premier journal for scholars studying policy processes, seeking to create generalizable theories across the spectrum of specific policy areas. To examine trends in PSJ over time, we collected 1314 abstracts from PSJ articles. We identified abstracts that mention major theories of the policy process and stages of the policy cycle. Next, we measured their policy content using the Comparative Agendas Project codebook, as well as their citations in academic journals and policy documents. We then explore these data, finding that changes in the content of PSJ articles over time correspond with other trends in the policy process field and PSJ's increased impact factor. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12548

We examine the shape of policy change in the US federal bureaucracy. Punctuated equilibrium suggests institutional friction and limited attention as prime influences on policy change. We build on this literature by exploring how organisational forms shape policy change. We also conceptualise the key difference between budgets and laws as measures and use this distinction to motivate our new approach to modelling the shape of policy change. We use the considerable organisational variation in the US federal bureaucracy as the empirical foundation for the analysis, collecting a new data set on the regulatory agenda containing 63,289 items from 2008 to 2016. We use an innovative points-over-threshold approach to show how to move from typical descriptive analysis of policy change distributions to models of tail behaviour. This approach is more amenable to textual data than previous approaches based on percentage change distributions. The findings suggest that departmental bureaucracies, independent boards and commissions, and government corporations experience different patterns of policy change. We relate organisation and delegation to adaptability and resiliency in institutional and policy-system design. Larger organisations exhibit smoother, less disjointed policy dynamics, while smaller organisational forms exhibit fatter tails and less adaptive policy change. Our findings suggest that larger bureaucracies may handle change in task environments and problem definitions more easily than smaller organisations. The findings challenge the typical view that smaller, nimble organisations handle change better.  https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2023D000000013