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We know relatively little about the conditions that encourage people to jump into the political fray as policy entrepreneurs, advocates who devote substantial time, energy, and resources to campaigning for a policy goal. This paper aims to fill that gap by investigating the catalysts of policy entrepreneurship in municipalities across the State of New York, where between 2008 and 2012, hundreds of local jurisdictions passed measures opposing or supporting high-volume hydraulic fracturing (fracking). These local policy actions were often enthusiastically encouraged and, in some cases, vociferously opposed, by enterprising advocates. I propose a threat-centered theory of policy entrepreneurship, emphasizing the role of loss aversion in pushing actors toward advocacy. The empirical analysis shows that oppositional advocacy within a polity draws would-be policy entrepreneurs into battle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most scholars conceive policy integration (PI) as a top-down process steered by governmental bodies and consider the formulation stage to be the decisive step for achieving PI. Adopting a different stance, this article hypothesizes that PI can also occur throughout the implementation stage thanks to "integration entrepreneurs" who are able and willing to bring together policies that were designed in silos. I test this hypothesis by analyzing the evolution of federal legislation intended to curb urban sprawl in Switzerland over four decades (1980–2020) and investigate three major urban renewal projects that concretely reduced urban sprawl in the cities of Zurich, Bern and Geneva. In line with my hypothesis, these urban renewal projects succeeded thanks to an ex post integration of several policies that occurred during the implementation stage. This integrative process was an unintended outcome of the transformation of the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) from a federal government institution into a state-owned company. Since then, the SBB has become an "integration entrepreneur" who brings together three federal policies that were previously poorly integrated: the spatial planning policy, the railway policy and the agglomeration policy. Case study evidence thus shows that PI can also happen unintentionally, namely through coordination mechanisms that were not foreseen by policymakers at the formulation stage. This finding challenges the top-down sequential approach of the policy process that is dominant among PI studies and calls for more research on the role and the strategies of "integration entrepreneurs" throughout the implementation stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our aim is to probe the applicability of multiple streams approach (MSA) on the case of the Czech Social Democratic Party modernization's project (2006-2008), as well as to extend it to settings beyond the government. This case offers not only a different domain to test MSA, but also a good case of problem solving under conditions of crisis. We argue that it is possible to apply MSA to political parties because they represent the same kind of organizations as governments, i.e., organized anarchies. Applying the MSA framework helps us understand the organizational transformation of the party. We identified favorable essential elements of three streams that were coupled in two opportunity windows by a skillful policy entrepreneur, the party chair Paroubek. His designation to the party leadership opened the window for successful adoption and realization of the narrow modernization project focusing on the introduction of political marketing and managerial methods. The defeat in the 2006 elections unlocked the window for adoption of the broad modernization project, but ambiguity of the issue hindered implementation leading to a loss of attention by party decision makers, the main entrepreneur and the dominant vote-seeking orientation of the party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Illustrates the unique and complex process of social capital formation in reform-era China among the emergent Chinese business elite. Rise of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial associations; Information on the Suzhou Association for Factory Directors and Company Managers; Relationship between entrepreneurs and the state in the late 1990s.

This article describes the decision-making process that is involved in introducing innovations to local public organizations. It defines six stages of the process of innovating in the public sector, as well as the four sets of actors involved in the process. The article is based on the findings of a study conducted for the National Science Foundation, entitled Adoption and Utilization of Urban Technology: A Decision-Making Process (1976). In this study, twenty case histories of urban innovation in Syracuse and Rochester, New York, provided an in-depth data base on decision-making with respect to new technology in the local public sector. The findings in these twenty cases are cited, together with an analysis of the factors that lead to success or failure. The role of urban entrepreneurship and coalition-building and its vital impact on the introduction of new technology is also examined. Some previous misconceptions regarding innovation in urban government are revealed in the conclusions. Also, the skills of key actors, especially bureaucratic entrepreneurs, that are necessary for succesful local innovation are depicted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]