Policy-Centered Entrepreneurship Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Policy-centered entrepreneurship, or simply policy entrepreneurship, refers to opportunity-driven activity with the aim to influence policy. Policy entrepreneurship is a discrete and observable process in politics consisting of recognizing an opportunity to change policy, acting on the opportunity, and, consequently, materially affecting policy.

The policy-entrepreneurship process begins with any sort of political actor—be it a politician, civil servant, interest group, a citizen activist, or anyone with a stake in a particular policy—being alert to an opportunity to influence policy in some meaningful way and then seizing that opportunity. The recognized opportunity must be acted on; simply being aware of an opportunity is not by itself sufficient to constitute policy entrepreneurship. There is little evidence that

policy-centered entrepreneurs are a select group. Rather, policy-centered entrepreneurship is better characterized as a universal behavior that can be carried out by any political actor in the policy process, ranging from “street-level” bureaucrats and lobbyists to legislators and presidents. The nature of the opportunity to change policy can be objective (e.g., becoming aware of new needs of a community or demands from a constituency) or subjective (e.g., realizing that sudden attention to a policy area or a shift in the political winds makes it the right time to introduce specific policy change). Some well-known examples of policy entrepreneurship in the United States include Robert Moses leading the establishment of the New York Port Authority, William Mulholland setting up the water supply system for Los Angeles in the early 1900s, and Admiral Hyman Rickover’s reinvention of the U.S. Navy. The idea of policy entrepreneurship in political science and policy studies has evolved differently than the modern conception of entrepreneurship in economics, though there are some recent indications of possible convergence in the future.

The Modern Conception Of Entrepreneurship In Economics

The modern conception of entrepreneurship in economics principally derives from the work of three economists: Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises, and Israel Kirzner. In his two major works The Theory of Economic Development (1934) and Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1950), Schumpeter conceives of creative destruction, in which entrepreneurship consists of new combinations of existing resources that drive economic development, such as introducing a new good or a new method of production, opening of a new market, taking over a new source of supply of raw materials or half manufactured goods, and carrying out the new organization of any industry.

The other two economists—Mises and Kirzner—belong to what is usually considered the Austrian school of economics. In his magnum opus Human Action (1949), Mises identifies entrepreneurship as a behavior universal to all activity. Entrepreneurship, he writes, “is not the particular feature of a special group or class of men; it is inherent in every action and burdens every actor.” Consciously expanding on Mises’s conception, Kirzner in his primary works on entrepreneurship theory—Competition and Entrepreneurship (1973), a book chapter in Method, Process, and Austrian Economics: Essays in Honor of Ludwig von Mises (1982), and a journal article in Journal of Economic Literature (1997)—locates entrepreneurship as the driver of all market processes in that entrepreneurial market participants acquire “more and more accurate and complete mutual knowledge of potential demand and supply attitudes,” thus equilibrating, or stabilizing, a market by moving it closer to equilibrium between supply and demand. Only a few recent political scientists—including Mark Schneider, Paul Teske, and Adam Sheingate—explicitly incorporate the modern conception of entrepreneurship in economics into their research involving policy entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship In Political Science And Policy Studies

The idea of policy entrepreneurship in political science and policy studies originated independently and evolved separately from the modern conception of entrepreneurship in economics. The earliest conceptions of policy entrepreneurship appeared in the 1960s and continued through the 1970s as largely public choice conceptions. For example, Richard Wagner in his review of Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action identifies political entrepreneurs as the broad group of individuals who supply collective benefits for an unspecified “political profit.” For another example, Norman Frohlich, Joe Oppenheimer, and Oran Young amplify this public choice conception by arguing that public sector entrepreneurs should be considered economic actors, rationally calculating the personal costs and benefits of providing public goods hoping for later political payoff. These earliest conceptions of policy entrepreneurship are significant in recognizing that there is significant public sector activity with material policy impact not adequately accounted for with the available stock of political science and policy studies terminology and concepts.

The idea of policy entrepreneurship began to solidify into a powerful theoretical construct with the work of William Riker and John Kingdon in the 1980s as they both developed distinct functional conceptions. Riker endows his conceptualization of policy entrepreneurship with the function of destabilizing previously stable voting situations, culminating in The Art of Political Manipulation (1986) and its notion of her esthetics as the art of “managing and manipulating and maneuvering” a voting situation in order to accomplish a desired policy outcome. Kingdon in Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (1986) offers an influential conception of policy entrepreneurship with the function of coupling, or joining the streams of problems, policies, and politics either by promoting preferred policy alternatives or by “[lying] in wait for a [policy] window to open.” Riker and Kingdon also can be jointly credited with conceiving of the term policy entrepreneurship.

Since the 1990s, political scientists and policy researchers continue to develop Riker and Kingdon’s construct of policy entrepreneurship while pushing the idea in new directions. Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones explicitly build their theory of policy entrepreneurship for punctuated equilibrium theory on Riker and Kingdon’s previous work. In Agendas and Instability in American Politics (1993), policy entrepreneurs seek out alternative, more receptive institutional venues for their policies in the hope of favorably influencing the policy image. Daniel Carpenter devises a theory of bureaucratic entrepreneurship, which he defines as “the incremental selling of new program ideas through experimentation and piecemeal coalition building,” in order to account for the forging of bureaucratic autonomy. In addition, Adam Sheingate renders political entrepreneurs as “individuals whose creative acts have transformative effects on politics, policies, or institutions.” Sheingate’s political entrepreneurship is one of the recent works that incorporates Schumpeter and Kirzner, potentially indicating some future convergence between the modern conception of entrepreneurship in economics and policy-centered entrepreneurship in political science and policy studies, as well as providing a boundary for the term.

Bibliography:

Carpenter, Daniel P. The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputation, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Frohlich, Norman, and Joe A. Oppenheimer. “Entrepreneurial Politics and Foreign Policy.” World Politics 24 (1972): S151–S178.
Frohlich, Norman, Joe A. Oppenheimer, and Oran R.Young. Political Leadership and Collective Goods. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.
Kirzner, Israel M. “Entrepreneurial Discovery and the Competitive Market Process: An Austrian Approach.” Journal of Economic Literature 35, no. 1 (1997): 60–85.
“Uncertainty, Discovery, and Human Action: A Study of the Entrepreneurial Profile in the Misesian System.” In Method, Process, and Austrian Economics: Essays in Honor of Ludwig von Mises, edited by I. M. Kirzner, 139–159. Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1982.
Koppl, Roger, and Maria Minniti. “Entrepreneurship and Human Action.” In Non-market Entrepreneurship: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by G. E. Shockley, P. F. Frank, and R. R. Stough, 10–27. Northampton, Mass: Edward Elgar, 2008.
Schneider, Mark, and Paul Teske. “Toward a Theory of the Political Entrepreneur: Evidence from Local Government.” American Political Science Review 86, no. 3 (1992): 737–747.
Schneider, Mark, Paul Teske, and Michael Mintrom. Public Entrepreneurs: Agents for Change in American Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Sheingate, Adam D. “Political Entrepreneurship, Institutional Change, and American Political Development.” Studies in American Political Development 17 (2003): 185–203.
Wagner, Richard E. “Pressure Groups and Political Entrepreneurs: A Review Article.” Public Choice 1, no. 1 (1966): 161–170.

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