Political actors form coalitions around their joint normative beliefs in order to influence the policy process on contentious issues such as climate change or population ageing. Policy process theory maintains that learning within and across coalitions is a central predictor of coalition formation and policy change but has yet to explain how policy learning works. The present article explains the formation and maintenance of coalitions by focusing on the ways actors adopt policy beliefs from other actors in policy debates. A policy debate is a complex social system in which temporal network dependence guides how actors contribute ideological statements to the debate. Belief adoption matters in three complementary ways: bonding, which exploits cues within coalitions; bridging, which explores new beliefs outside one's perimeter in the debate; and repulsion, which reinforces polarization between coalitions and cements their belief systems. We formalize this theory of endogenous coalition formation in policy debates and test it on a micro-level empirical dataset using statistical network analysis and event history analysis.

翻译：政治行动者围绕其共同的规范性信念形成联盟，以影响气候变化或人口老龄化等争议性议题的政策进程。政策过程理论认为，联盟内部及跨联盟的学习是联盟形成与政策变革的核心预测因素，但尚未阐明政策学习的具体作用机制。本文通过聚焦行动者在政策辩论中采纳其他行动者政策信念的方式，阐释了联盟的形成与维系机制。政策辩论是一种复杂的社会系统，其中时序网络依赖性引导着行动者如何向辩论贡献意识形态陈述。信念采纳通过三种互补方式发挥作用：联结——利用联盟内部的线索；桥接——探索辩论中自身边界之外的新信念；以及排斥——强化联盟间的极化并巩固其信念体系。我们形式化了这一政策辩论中的内生联盟形成理论，并运用统计网络分析与事件史分析方法，在微观实证数据集上对其进行了检验。