User:Evan Collict/sandbox

Lead Section

Policy entrepreneur refers to an individual who takes advantage of opportunities to influence policy outcomes to increase their self-interests. The term was first coined by American political scientist John W. Kingdon in his influential work Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies published in 1995. Kingdon created the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) which outlines that the policy process can be situated into problems, policy and politics. Political entrepreneurs are most active in the policy stream, creating solutions to potential problems and bringing them forth to the agenda setting process. The Multiple Streams Framework is a powerful tool to understand policy making and agenda setting. It was first created to analyze and understand agenda setting in the United States (Knaggard, 2015). Policy entrepreneurs are the most important actors in the Multiple Streams Framework, as they develop policy alternatives and couple them with problems to present solutions to policy makers at the right time. He himself describes them as "advocates who are willing to invest their resources - time, energy, reputation, money - to promote a position in return for anticipated future gain in the form of material, purposive or solidary benefits" (Kingdon, 2003).

Policy entrepreneurs use innovative ideas and non-traditional strategies to influence society, create opportunities, and promote desired policy outcomes. Policy entrepreneurship usually happens over three phases. It starts with a demand in the political landscape for some form of innovation involving a public good (Mintrom, 1997). Secondly, an innovative policy instrument is proposed to supply that demand. Lastly, strategies are used such as team building, problem definition, and leadership by example to make certain that the innovation is placed on the agenda (Mintrom & Norman, 2009). Unlike a public intellect who strives to assert themselves into many different topics and be publicly vocal, a policy entrepreneur will focus on specific topics and possibly work behind the scenes with state and political elite.

Bibliography

Knaggård, Å. (2015), The Multiple Streams Framework and the problem broker. Eur J Polit Res, 54: 450–465.

Mintrom, M. (1997). Policy Entrepreneurs and the Diffusion of Innovation. American Journal of Political Science, 41(3), 738. doi:10.2307/2111674

Mintrom, M., & Norman, P. (2009). Policy Entrepreneurship and Policy Change. Policy Studies Journal, 37(4), 649-667. doi:10.1111/j.1541-0072.2009.00329.x

Multiple Streams Framework

Building on Kingdon's work, Nikolaos Zahariadis defines it as a tool which explains how government policies are created with conditions of ambiguity. Since 2000, it has been cited over 10,000 through Google Scholar and applied in over 1,900 times in peer reviewed articles. (Zahariadis, 2014)

Idea to Implementation

Criticisms

Reviews of Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policy display mixed opinions on the approaches and concepts created by Kingdon. Roger Cobb, former professor of political science at Brown University writes in an article for the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law that Kingdon's garbage can model is a completely random decision-making tool that lacks content.

Policy Entrepreneur Proposal

The article on "Policy Entrepreneur" as it is now is not acceptable or on par with Wikipedia standards of a good article. The lead section is not very clear or easy to understand. What's more concerning is when reading the lead section, and then reading the abstract for the appropriate reference, it is obvious that whoever wrote the lead section both copied verbatim from this journal or copy and pasted it directly onto Wikipedia. This is not how a quality article is written and instead the writer should have read the source thoroughly and paraphrased in his or her own words, citing when necessary. A good Wikipedia article has multiple headings and subheadings that give the article good structure. The article currently only has one subheading that does not provide much information that wasn't already covered in the lead section. Additionally, the article needs a clearer structure with more subheadings relating to different aspects of policy entrepreneurship. The more important viewpoints should have more prominence in the article. Furthermore, the article only references three sources. Two out of the three current sources are outdated as they are about thirty years old. This is a problem for this article as the concept is relatively new and constantly evolving so the information needs to reflect current thoughts and ideas. The only source that is dated and from 2016, is at least a reliable source but there needs to be more recent information. Increasing the amount of sources and the reliability of them will help improve the article and meet the Wikipedia standards of a quality article.

The lead section needs to be edited to provide more clear, paraphrased information from more than one source.The current writing style of the article is likely hard for the average person to comprehend. The article should be written in a way that someone with a high school education can read it and draw some understanding of the subject from the article. This is likely because the lead section is taken directly from another scholarly journal, where there is some language used that some readers may find difficult to understand. If someone is having a hard time understanding what the lead section says, they are most likely not going to continue reading. An important aspect of a quality article is to keep the readers interested in what is in front of them. By improving the writing style of this article and making the information more accessible to reader, the quality of the article will improve and readers will have a straightforward understanding of what a policy entrepreneur is.

There are a few areas that we would like to focus on to bring more information to the article. Currently, it is very vague and not clear of how policy entrepreneurs innovate or influence policy. We would like to provide more information that gives readers a real understanding of the role these actors can play. It currently provides information that "Policy Entrepreneur" is a coin termed by John Kingdon in his work. We would like to expand this area to provide information on Kingdon's Multiple Streams Framework. The Multiple Streams Framework is an analysis tool that separates problem, policy and politics into three different areas. Policy entrepreneurs directly relate and fall under this concept and providing a more detailed insight will effectively explain the intent, decision making process and effects policy entrepreneurs have in policy making as well as agenda setting. Providing more information about political actors and the process of how political entrepreneurs actually try to influence policy setting will make things more clear for the reader. Some other things that can be added to the article are adding a picture of John Kingdon since he created the term as well as adding more articles similar to the "See Also" heading such as lobbying and economist. By adding more credible and recent information that is properly paraphrased, we hope to change this from being only partially completed to a complete and reliable article that can be published on Wikipedia.

Annotated Bibliography

Beeson, M., & Stone, D. (2013). The Changing Fortunes of a Policy Entrepreneur: The Case of Ross Garnaut. Australian Journal of Political Science, 48(1), 1-14.

Stone uses the case of Ross Garnaut to explore the reasons why some policy ideas are enthusiastically taken up by policymakers, while others struggle to gain traction while being backed up by the government. Stone's piece provides potential answers to this by identifying potential factors that impact policy entrepreneurs. Drawing from John Kingdon's 'Multiple Streams' model of policy making, Stone offers some insightful answers to how the policy agenda is influenced. Offers a rather helpful distinction between 'policy entrepreneurs' and 'public intellectual', terms that can be easily confused but are very unique from each other. — Preceding unsigned comment added by JCarson5 (talk • contribs) 00:33, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

Hopkins, V. (2015). Institutions, Incentives, and Policy Entrepreneurship. Policy Studies Journal, 44(3), 332-348.

Hopkins explores the gaps in our understanding of what motivates policy entrepreneurs. Specifically, the article investigates the relationship between incentives and institutional encouragement of innovation. Hopkins finds that incentives stimulate greater encouragement of policies and innovation. Using rational choice theory, Hopkins emphasizes the importance of material and non-material incentives in driving policy. This article is very detailed and useful in understanding the big role that incentives play in policy making.

Knaggård, Å. (2015), The Multiple Streams Framework and the problem broker. Eur J Polit Res, 54: 450–465.

Knaggård analyzes the factors that go into the policy making process using John Kingdon's Multiple Streams Framework. Kingdon's (MSF) model separates three different areas: problem, policies and politics. This source talks about the "problem banker" which can be paralleled with policy entrepreneurs. This will be a useful source of information for our article as we can further explore the role the policy entrepreneurs have in this process as they relate to the policy stream of Kingdon's model.

Sabatier, P. A., & Weible, C. M. (2014). Theories of the policy process. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, a member of the Persus Books Group.

Sabatier and Weible lay out the history, approach and framework for public policy making. By analyzing various methods and relating historical policy making conventions, the authors show how manipulation is a major process in policy making. Kingdon is extensively covered in this source. This source will provide information that can be applied to the article in terms of different approaches and things a policy entrepreneur might use to gain influence on policy making.

Sætren, Harald, (2016), From controversial policy idea to successful program implementation: the role of the policy entrepreneur, manipulation strategy, program design, institutions and open policy windows in relocating Norwegian central agencies, Policy Sciences, 49, issue 1, p. 71-88,

This research article examines how the Norwegian government implemented seemingly poor policy into a successful results. It examines how they formulated and created their policy through 'policy windows' and made it into a legitimate policy that gave results using the Multiple Streams Framework. This research, especially looking into policy windows can be incorporated into our article. Policy windows can be seen as the windows a political entrepreneur has to see and use to potentially capitalize and push their own self-interests.

Stone, D. A. (1989). Causal Stories and the Formation of Policy Agendas. Political Science Quarterly, 104(2), 281.

This article looks at how agenda setting can be seen as causal responses to human action and intervention. It focuses on political actors and their attitudes, resources and opportunities to set agendas, how political actors evaluate the risk/reward of their actions and finally how the employ specific language tactics to influence policy. This article and analysis will provide more information into the actions and process political entrepreneurs take when looking to influence policy. It also will provide a basis of causal actions and reactions to political entrepreneurs asserting themselves into agenda setting.