Testing the Multiple Streams Framework in US State Legislatures 

by Rob DeLeo & Clifton Chow

The Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) was originally developed to explain agenda setting within national government institutions and the United States Congress in particular. However, the last decade plus has seen an explosion of research applying the theory to new governing contexts (e.g., authoritarian states, transnational institutions, local governments) while extending it to the latter stages of the policy process (e.g. policy formulation and implementation). Yet few studies have applied the framework to subnational governments—and U.S. states in particular—a curious omission given the critical role they play in driving policy change within federal systems.  

Our recent article just published in Policy & Politicsfills this gap by applying the MSF to the case of climate change adaptation policymaking in the State of Massachusetts. We specifically rely on a mixed methods research design combining a negative binomial regression analysis with process tracing to assess the effect of all three streams as well as policy entrepreneurship on agenda change.  

One of the biggest barriers to conducting agenda setting research at the subnational level is the dearth of granular data documenting changes in issue attention across time. We overcome this by using data from State House News Service, an independent wire service that provides “gavel-to-gavel” coverage of policymaking within the Massachusetts State government. Although our study focuses specifically on Massachusetts, a cursory review of the public record suggests similar news agencies exist in other states as well, although it is unclear whether their coverage is as a comprehensive as State House News Service Massachusetts.  

Our findings suggest that MSF provides a useful framework for assessing U.S. state policymaking. Very few theoretical assumptions needed to be relaxed for the Massachusetts case. We also show agenda change was largely driven by changes in the political stream, namely the election of a Republican Governor. Perhaps most importantly, our study points to a methodological path forward for scholars hoping to comprehensively test the framework in a single study. The increased methodological sophistication of MSF research has, at times, come at the expense of comprehensive applications of the theory, a testament to the myriad challenges associated with reducing such a conceptually rich theory to a single, parsimonious model. In turn, many scholars have opted for a piecemeal approach to studying the theory, focusing on one or two of the streams as opposed to the entire framework. Our study suggests a mixed method design that quantitatively assesses the effect of all three streams on agenda change while qualitatively exploring the opening of coupling, windows, and policy entrepreneurship can open up a rich new seam of enquiry on the MSF research agenda.  

You can read the original research in  Policy & Politics  at:DeLeo, R. A., & Chow, C. (2024). Testing the Multiple Streams Framework in US state legislatures. Policy & Politics (published online ahead of print 2024). Retrieved Nov 20, 2024, from https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2024D000000044

If you enjoyed this blog post, you may also be interested to read:Goyal, N., & Howlett, M. (2024). Types of learning and varieties of innovation: how does policy learning enable policy innovation?. Policy & Politics, 52(4), 564-585 from https://doi.org/10.1332/030557321X16841388707452

van den Dool, A., & Qiu, T. (2024). Policy processes in China: a systematic review of the multiple streams framework. Policy & Politics (published online ahead of print 2024) from https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2024D000000038