1. Hunting Haggis? In Search of the 'Hollow Core' in Scottish Public Policy.
- Author
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Halpin, Darren, Thomas III, Herschel F., and Baxter, Graeme
- Subjects
- *
GOVERNMENT policy , *PUBLIC administration , *AGRICULTURE , *AGRICULTURAL policy , *TIME series analysis - Abstract
A longstanding debate exists with respect to whether the mobilisation of organised interests in public policy issues can be characterised as elite or pluralist. Are policy issues dominated by a small 'core' of actors? Or, alternatively, are issues characterised by a hollow-core, as a changing set of actors mobilises? Most US studies confirm the hollow-core thesis, namely that groups tend to pursue narrow issue niches (there are few domain wide generalists) and that the role call of actors changes from issue to issue (issue overlap is low). Like hunting haggis, the extant literature suggests that the search for a core is likely to be a futile effort. We are not yet convinced. This paper scrutinises the hollow-core thesis in a new political context, public policy in Scotland. It uses a new Scottish data-set that examines actual group activity on Executive consultations over a 25 year period. It tracks over 130,000 'influence events' by over 19,000 discrete actors across 1696 distinct issues across the entire policy system. This paper examines part of the data from the agricultural policy domain and argues that there is a core of central actors. Agriculture is a salient case, as it is explicitly used by Heinz. et al. (1993) to demonstrate the thesis. By virtue of the time-series nature of the data, we can tell a detailed story of the 'reordering' of the agricultural domain, which is also suggestive of system-wide patterns. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2009