Advocacy Coalition Framework
observations regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the ACF as a descriptive and explanatory lens in Sweden .
Results
Substantive Topic
The first application of the ACF in Sweden was a research report published by the Finnish Forest Institute in 1998 ( Berggren 1998 ). This was about ten years after the inception of the framework and just as European applications were starting to emerge ( Weible , Sabatier , and McQueen 2009 ). Figure 2 displays the count of publications over time by the substantive topic area .
forestry , and carnivore management . Cases involving issues related to energy policy , such as nuclear energy and hydraulic fracturing , followed closely at seven applications . The six social policy applications display a wide diversity , from e-government initiatives to alcohol and drug treatment policy . Finally , there have been three applications related to environmental policy , which would seem to represent somewhat of a departure for the ACF , as it is most often applied in the area of environmental policy ( Weible , Sabatier , and McQueen 2009 ). However , we see this pattern as resulting from our coding procedure , which defined natural resource management as a stand-alone category separate from environmental
Figure 2 : Applications by Substantive Topic Area Over Time ( 1998 – 2015 )
After the first application in 1998 , there were only four applications until 2007 . Since that time , the number of applications has increased markedly with a steady stream of publications in recent years . Nine of the 25 applications involve cases of natural resource management , primarily policy . By contrast , other ACF reviews ( Jang , Weible , and Park 2016 ; Jenkins- Smith et al . 2014 ; Weible , Sabatier , and McQueen 2009 ) have incorporated natural resource management into environmental policy . If defining natural resource management as environmental policy , the empirical basis for Swedish
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