LIST OF PANELS

The aim of this lecture is to provide theoretical lenses on the role of collective actors in the policy process and methodological tools to empirically analyze them. Three main types of collective actors have been highlighted in the literature: institutional actors, organizational actors and informal actors. A key question is the understanding of how individuals belonging to institutions (especially administrations), to organizations (especially interest groups) or sharing policy orientations (like the “programmatic groups” structured around a policy change program) can form a group who participates to the policy process. The lecture starts with showing that this issue are often not directly adressed in the dominant policy processes theories, even when they stress the role of agency, especially in the advocacy coalition framework. Other theories, especially the multiple stream framework, focus more on individual actors than on collective actors. 

The lecture will then present the contribution of sociological approaches, especially organizational sociology, constructivism and pragmatism, for the understanding of the construction (and the deconstruction) of collective actors in the policy process, in a dynamic perspective, taking the temporality strongly into account. It will also present some methodological tools for the empirical analysis of collective actors. 

Preconference Course