Policy Entrepreneurship and Policy Change

This article reviews the concept of policy entrepreneurship and its use in explaining policy change. Although the activities of policy entrepreneurs have received close attention in several studies, the concept of policy entrepreneurship is yet to be broadly integrated within analyses of policy change. To facilitate more integration of the concept, we here show how policy entrepreneurship can be understood within more encompassing theorizations of policy change: incrementalism, policy streams, institutionalism, punctuated equilibrium, and advocacy coalitions. Recent applications of policy entrepreneurship as a key explanation of policy change are presented as models for future work. Room exists for further conceptual development and empirical testing concerning policy entrepreneurship. Such work could be undertaken in studies of contemporary and historical policy change. Scholars of public policy often seek to explain how particular policy ideas catch on. The dynamics of policy change have been theorized and explored empirically from a range of perspectives during the past few decades. In these investigations, the role played by specific advocates of policy change has been frequently noted. Highly motivated individuals or small teams can do much to draw attention to policy problems, present innovative policy solutions, build coalitions of supporters, and secure legislative action. Of course, no political activity or policy initiative can go anywhere without many actors getting involved. The question then arises: By what means can advocates of policy change come to have broad influence? Several policy scholars have argued that such advocates achieve success because they exhibit a high degree of entrepreneurial flare. According to this line of argument, by closely observing the practices of advocates of policy change, we can come to appreciate how they perform a function in the policy process equivalent to entrepreneurs in the business context. Following an emerging convention, we here define such advocates of policy change as policy entrepreneurs. This article foregrounds policy entrepreneurship as an explanation of policy change. While the activities of policy entrepreneurs have received close attention in several studies (Crowley, 2003; Kingdon, 1984/1995; Mintrom, 2000; Roberts & King, 1991; Weissert, 1991), the concept of policy entrepreneurship is yet to be broadly integrated within studies of policy change. We contend that new applica