| This study assesses the influence of diverse policy actors in the state reading policy domain, and compares the patterns of influence across eight states. Guided by the social network perspective, I raised five hypotheses regarding the influence structure of the state reading policy domain. The data used for testing the hypotheses came primarily from structured interviews with 320 participants from eight states, which were supplemented by archival documents. I coded each interview transcript and archival document for relationships among state reading policy actors regarding reading-related issues, and created a sociomatrix accordingly for each state reading policy network. The sociomatrices served as the input for network analyses.;My analyses reveal that the state reading policy networks were highly differentiated in terms of actor influence. In all the eight states, government actors were generally significantly more central—based on both degree centrality and closeness centrality—and prestigious than nongovernment actors. Moreover, there existed substantial between-state variations in the distribution of actors' centrality values. I also found that contrary to expectation, teacher organizations were not the most influential nongovernment actors in six of the eight state reading policy networks based on actor centrality results. Further, my study reveals that all the eight state reading policy networks were of a core/periphery structure, with the network cores occupied by both government and nongovernment actors. Finally, visual representations of the state reading policy domain indicate that in all the eight states, government actors tended to interact directly with other government actors, and single-issue interest groups tended to interact directly with other single-issue interest groups. The interactional patterns of general interest groups, however, were not as consistent across the states.;The findings of this study not only offer a structural understanding of the state reading policy domain, but also have important implications for policy actors who wish to influence reading policy. This study also contributes to educational policy research by demonstrating how the social network perspective can serve as a useful lens to understand educational policy processes. |
