Policy entrepreneurs and individuals: Influence and behavior in pandemic response

• Published date: 01 September 2023
• Author: Kristin Taylor,Rob A. DeLeo,Elizabeth A. Albright,Elizabeth A. Shanahan,Meng Li,Elizabeth A. Koebele,Deserai Anderson Crow,Thomas A. Birkland
• Date: 01 September 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13629

SYMPOSIUM ARTICLE

Policy entrepreneurs and individuals: Influence and behavior

in pandemic response

Kristin Taylor

1

| Rob A. DeLeo

2

| Elizabeth A. Albright

3

|

Elizabeth A. Shanahan

4

| Meng Li

5

| Elizabeth A. Koebele

6

|

Deserai Anderson Crow

7

| Thomas A. Birkland

8

1

Department of Political Science, Wayne State

University, Detroit, Michigan, USA

2

Department of Global Studies, Bentley

University, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA

3

Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke

University, Durham, North Carolina, USA

4

Department of Political Science, Montana State

University, Bozeman, Montana, USA

5

Department of Health and Behavioral Sciences,

University of Colorado Denver, Denver,

Colorado, USA

6

Political Science, University of Nevada, Reno,

Reno, Nevada, USA

7

School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado

Denver, Denver, Colorado, USA

8

School of Public and International Affairs, North

Carolina State University, Raleigh, North

Carolina, USA

Correspondence

Kristin Taylor, Department of Political Science,

Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA.

Email: kristin.taylor@wayne.edu

Abstract

Policy entrepreneurs have traditionally been recognized for their ability to influ-

ence policymakers by framing policy problems and pairing them with preferred

solutions. Does their influence extend to the public? We examine this question in

the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. We analyze whether

an individual’s perception of a visible, national-level policy entrepreneur, director

of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Dr. Anthony

Fauci, influences their perceived risk of contracting the virus and their uptake of

recommended COVID-19 risk mitigation behaviors. Findings indicate that approval

of Dr. Fauci predicts individual risk perceptions and uptake of mask wearing prac-

tices, with his influence particularly strong among conservatives. However,

Dr. Fauci’s influence as a policy entrepreneur waned over time and was moderated

by a host of factors such as an individual’s worldview, perceptions of policy envi-

ronment, and media consumption.

Evidence for practice

•Policy entrepreneurs use resources such as expertise, time, and networks to

advocate for their preferred policy solutions.

•Policy entrepreneurs can influence individuals with diverse political preferences

to engage in risk-mitigating behaviors.

•Policy entrepreneurs with high public approval may be particularly influential in

encouraging risk-mitigating behaviors during a crisis.

•The relative influence of policy entrepreneurship wanes across time; those seek-

ing to influence individual behavior must act quickly during the early stages of a

crisis.

•Information dissemination about the severity of a crisis and ways to address it is

key to encouraging the uptake of risk-mitigating behaviors.

INTRODUCTION

Understanding how policy change occurs is central to pub-

lic policy and administration giventhat the goal of policy is

to improve society. Policy change is said to result from an

array of factors, ranging from the availability of solutions to

the framing of solutions, the mobilization of coalitions to

seemingly exogenous events that draw policymaker atten-

tion to previously ignored issues (Cobb & Elder, 1983;

Hilgartner & Bosk, 1988; Schattschneider,1975). In addition,

virtually every major theory of the policy process, including

the Advocacy Coalition Framework (Ingold & Varone, 2011;

Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1999), Punctuated Equilibrium

Theory (Baumgartner & Jones, 2010), policy innovation and

diffusion (Capano & Galanti, 2020; Vallett, 2021), and the

Multiple Streams Framework (Herweg, Huß, &

Zohlnhöfer, 2015; Kingdon, 2011), underscores the critical

role so-called “policy entrepreneurs”play in promoting

policy change. Policy entrepreneurs are broadly defined as

individuals or organizations who devote considerable

resources toward securing a desired policy output

(Herweg, Zahariadis, & Zohlnhöfer, 2018; Kingdon, 2011;

Received: 1 April 2022 Revised: 23 December 2022 Accepted: 6 March 2023

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13629

1246 © 2023 American Society for Public Administration. Public Admin Rev. 2023;83:1246–1265.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/puar

Mintrom, 2000; Mintrom & Norman, 2009;Rabe,2004;

Zahariadis, 2003). Policy entrepreneurs are important

because they help frame issues, cultivate policy coalitions,

and bring policy solutions to the attention of busy policy-

makers (Anderson, DeLeo, & Taylor, 2020; Kingdon, 2011;

Mintrom, 2000).

Recent work has begun to explore role of policy entre-

preneurs across the entirety of the policy cycle (Anderson

et al., 2020; Petridou & Mintrom, 2021), notably in policy

adoption and change (Hawkins & McCambridge, 2020;

Herweg et al., 2018; Mintrom & Norman, 2009; Petridou,

Becker, & Sparf, 2021), as well as in processes of policy

design, implementation, and institutionalization (Bakir,

Akgunay, & Coban, 2021;Sætren, 2016). Moreover, policy

entrepreneurs can be external to an organization

(Mintrom & Vergari, 1998), meaning that their activities

can extend into a broader network of influence. This

scholarship has substantially expanded the idea of who

can be a policy entrepreneur, and how they may

influence the policy process, beyond policy elites to

street-level bureaucrats (Arnold, 2015,2021) and even

individual citizens (Callaghan & Sylvester, 2021; Koebele

et al., 2015).

Much less attention has been paid, however, to who

policy entrepreneurs influence, how they are influential,

and whether they are successful (Arnold, 2020). Most

studies primarily focus on policy entrepreneurs’influence

on policymakers and other elites, excepting Koebele et al.

(2015), who sought to understand how individuals seek

to influence their neighbors to comply with wildfire miti-

gation measures recommended by governments (see also

Callaghan & Sylvester, 2021). This omission is problematic

since policy success often hinges not only on elite opin-

ion and action (Van Meter & Van Horn, 1975), but also on

the willingness of the public to adhere to recommenda-

tions. This latter consideration is particularly important

when a policy is voluntary or difficult to enforce, espe-

cially when it is also highly politicized or controversial. We

thus note a critical omission in the literature on policy

entrepreneurship: the influence of policy entrepreneurs on

individual uptake of recommended behavior.

We address this gap by examining, in the context of

the COVID-19 pandemic, whether factors such as an indi-

vidual’s approval of a policy entrepreneur influences their

perceived risk of contracting the virus or their adoption of

recommended COVID-19 risk mitigation behaviors. The

COVID-19 case provides a fruitful empirical context for

assessing the link between entrepreneurship and individ-

ual behavior because effective infectious disease manage-

ment hinges on private citizens’choices to voluntarily

comply with recommended public health practices as

“solutions”to the COVID-19 problem, even if they are not

formally enshrined in policy (Ai, Adams, & Zhao, 2021;

Lennon et al., 2020). Thus, we use the term solution to

describe an individual behavior designed to address the

COVID-19 policy problem by reducing community trans-

mission of the virus, whether or not it was formally

mandated or recommended through a policy, such as an

indoor mask mandate. Because such policies were imple-

mented with varying levels of stringency and enforce-

ment across the United States (Birkland, Taylor, Crow, &

DeLeo, 2021; Taylor, DeLeo, Crow, & Birkland, 2022), indi-

viduals were often making choices to engage in certain

behaviors within a fragmented, uncertain, and rapidly

changing policy context. Therefore, we focus on individ-

uals’uptake of widely recommended public health

behaviors rather than their compliance with changing

state policy mandates.

We specifically assess the influence of Dr. Anthony

Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and

Infectious Diseases (NIAID), as a public-facing, national-

level policy entrepreneur. We argue that Dr. Fauci demon-

strates the characteristics of a policy entrepreneur and

that his actions during the early stages of the COVID-19

pandemic had the potential to influence choices made by

members of the public as much as they did policymakers

and other elites. Importantly, we found that the approval

of Dr. Fauci predicts individual risk perception and the

uptake of mask-wearing practices. Dr. Fauci’s influence is

particularly strong on political conservatives.

The following section explores the extant literature on

policy entrepreneurship, including the concepts inte-

grated into major theories of policy change, as well as

scant research on entrepreneurship and individual behav-

ior. We introduce our data, methods, and analytical strate-

gies before presenting the key findings of our analysis.

We then consider both the theoretical and practical impli-

cations of our findings. The paper closes by acknowledg-

ing the limitations of our study and considering future

research directions.

Theory: policy entrepreneurship and the

dynamics of policy change

Policy entrepreneurs and the policy process

While political scientists have long recognized the poten-

tial power of the individual in stimulating social and polit-

ical change, John Kingdon is credited for developing the

concept of policy entrepreneurship in Agendas, Alterna-

tives, and Public Policies (2011). Kingdon analogizes policy

entrepreneurs to business entrepreneurs; their defining

characteristics are “their willingness to invest their

resources–time, energy, reputation, and sometimes

money–in the hope of a future return”(p. 122). That

future return is policy change, such as legislation or other

actions, that advance their desired policy solution. Unlike

problem brokers, whose primary function is to draw

attention to an issue (Knaggård, 2015), policy entrepre-

neurs couple streams of policy activity by defining prob-

lems, cultivating coalitions, proposing, and advocating for

a specific solution, and capitalizing on moments ripe for

change (Kingdon, 2011).

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW 1247