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Policies as species

Viewing and classifying policy from an evolutionary biology perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2019

Samantha L. Mosier Open the ORCID record for Samantha L. Mosier [Opens in a new window]
Samantha L. Mosier*
Affiliation:
East Carolina University
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Abstract

This article proposes equating policies as species to develop a better understanding of how policies emerge, change, and diffuse across policymaking environments. Scholars have long shown an interest in understanding policy change and reinvention, whether incremental or nonincremental. The two subfields of public policy that can answer how and why policies change are not unified, leading to difficulty in comprehensively assessing policy emergence and change. The policy species concept bridges knowledge of the policy process and knowledge in the policy process by creating an operationalized definition of public policy and suggesting a process for classifying policies to observe subsequent behavior. Drawing from the field of biology, the policy species framework outlines how policies possess genotypes and phenotypes, which dictate what a policy is and how it can change. In tracing genotypic and phenetic change over time, policy evolution and change is more easily discernible. In turn, a more precise picture of how policies function is painted.

Keywords

public policypolicy classificationpolicy evolutionpolicy species
Type
Article
Information
Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , Fall 2019 , pp. 117 - 131
Copyright
© Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 2019

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