| To better understand the role of ideas in the public policy process, this study seeks to clarify how policy actors translate a policy idea into a policy-in-fact. The case study focuses on the 1987-1991 policy subsystem that shaped the Intermodal Surface Transportation and Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA), and draws on archival documents prepared between 1988 and 1991; and on 33 personal interviews conducted between 1992 and 1994.;An interpretive approach is applied in this case study to analyze the "idea-in-use" adopted by actors--the idea of flexible federal transportation policies--to frame transportation program design issues.;Two factors precipitating an issue-framing consensus within the subsystem were: the imminent end of the long, federally-dominated Interstate-building period--a period characterized by rigid federal transportation program rules; and a broad agreement among subsystem actors that the post-Interstate program should afford state and local transportation officials greater decision making latitude than was the case during the Interstate-building era.;The idea of flexible transportation policies manifested itself in a two-step process. First, during the decades preceding the formation of ISTEA policy subsystem, the idea was adopted on a limited scale and gradually accepted by transformation community actors as a legitimate policy end-goal. Then, with the formation of the ISTEA policy subsystem, individual actors and groups of actors across the subsystem used the idea as an issue-framing tool to shape program design issues to fit their worldviews. In this way the actors translated the idea of policy flexibility, and end-goal, into a policy-in-fact. |
