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In Search of 'Dialectic' Process Models: From 'Funnel of Causality' to an Integrated Theory of Policy Regimes

This paper surveys how far policy theorizing has come since the ‘funnel of causality’ metaphor popularized in the 1970s by Richard Hofferbert and Richard Simeon. Scholarly attention to institutions, subsystems, networks, and regimes has brought sophistication to early accounts of the impact of structure on policy formulation and outcomes, but arriving at a holistic ‘dialectical’ theory of the policy process has not been without challenges. The literature on policy regimes, having integrated insights from both political economy and theorizing on networks and subsystems, holds promise in moving toward a dialectical theory of the policy process. Deficiencies remain, however, in our understanding of how structures that exist at multiple levels of policymaking condition behaviour. The paper proposes that a focus on ‘policy image dynamics’ across three levels of analysis (micro, meso, and macro) is a viable way to proceed in developing an integrated and dialectic theory of policy regimes.