Compare methods

	Political Feasibility Analysis	Advocacy Coalition Framework
Field	Public Policy	Public Policy
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1972	1993
Originator	Arnold J. Meltsner	Paul Sabatier & Hank Jenkins-Smith
Type	Assessment of the political viability of policy options	Theory of the policy process
Seminal source	Meltsner, A. J. (1972). Political feasibility and policy analysis. Public Administration Review, 32(6), 859–867.	Sabatier, P. A., & Jenkins-Smith, H. C. (Eds.) (1993). Policy Change and Learning: An Advocacy Coalition Approach. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. ISBN: 9780813316499
Aliases	Political Feasibility Assessment, Feasibility Analysis for Policy, Politics of Policy Analysis	ACF, Sabatier-Jenkins-Smith Framework, Advocacy Coalition Approach
Related	4	4
Summary	Political feasibility analysis assesses whether a policy option can realistically be adopted, enacted and sustained given the political environment — the actors involved, their interests and beliefs, the resources they command, and the arenas in which they act. Arnold Meltsner's classic 1972 article 'Political Feasibility and Policy Analysis' argued that analysts who attend only to economic or technical merit and ignore politics produce recommendations that are dead on arrival. By systematically appraising the political viability of options, the method helps distinguish proposals that are merely good on paper from those that can actually survive the political process.	The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is a theory of the policy process developed by Paul Sabatier and Hank Jenkins-Smith from the late 1980s and consolidated in their 1993 volume Policy Change and Learning. It explains policy stability and change over long periods by analysing competing coalitions of actors within a policy subsystem who are bound together by shared beliefs. Policy change is understood as a function of the interaction among these belief-based coalitions, the policy-oriented learning that occurs over time, and external events and shocks that can shift the balance of power among them.