Instruments as Belief-Driven Entities: Reconceptualizing the Interplay of Beliefs and Policy Instruments

In order to understand the processes of policy instrumentation, it is of crucial importance to understand the reasoning and motivation of policymakers’ choices. In this contribution, we combine the belief system approach of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) with insights from constructivist policy instrument theory and develop an analytical tool for analyzing the role of policymakers’ beliefs in instrumentation. We argue that policy instruments are not only empirical “tools” but are cognitive and political entities to which policymakers assign meaning. Policy instruments are value-laden carriers of beliefs and embody problem representations, values, objectives, instrument-impact expectations and strategies of individual policymakers. Their selection is not solely based on technical criteria; instrumentation as a process is characterized by contention regarding problem representations and their appropriate solutions. This suggests that the belief levels within the ACF may not be strictly hierarchical, but rather interrelated in a web and inform each other mutually. As a result, we call for a reconsideration of the hierarchical conceptualization of belief levels within the ACF’s concept of belief systems. This has the following consequences: a change in secondary beliefs may affect changes in core beliefs. Moreover, we argue strategic considerations should be added to the belief system concept as its own category.