The Hierarchy of Beliefs and Coordination: A “Chicken and Egg” Problem

This article revolves around the hierarchy of beliefs and coordination. The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) emphasises political actors’ role and their beliefs in public policymaking. As soon as actors share beliefs, they coordinate actions to affect policy outputs and outcomes decisively. Thus, according to the ACF, beliefs are a key driver of coordination, and manifold studies have tested this relationship. However, does coordination also affect beliefs, i.e., contribute to adopting similar beliefs? The literature, which comprises political and policy network studies, may argue so, referring to social influence and contagion. In this article, we combine the ACF with social and political network analysis to disentangle causality between coordination and beliefs in both directions and investigate whether a mutual relationship exists between the two concepts. To do so, we utilise the same policy subsystem with the same set of actors over several points in time and analyse how beliefs and coordination coevolve over time. We draw on data from the Swiss climate policy subsystem, spanning almost two decades. Specifically, we build a network coevolution model to assess how the political network (ties reflecting coordination) and belief network (ties reflecting belief similarity) influence each other over time. Our results do not definitively answer the “chicken and egg” question: What comes first—beliefs or coordination? Instead, they demonstrate that coordination and belief change mutually reinforce each other.