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One characteristic of the contemporary policy studies is to consider that ideas play an independent role. The Advocacy Coalition Framework is an attractive sample of this as it tries to explain policy change, paying special attention to cognitive aspects: ideas, beliefs, values, learning, knowledge¿ However, the Advocacy Coalition Framework considers cognitive aspects as a part of a more extensive framework that allows us to verify the real function of the ideas through empirical analysis. It is very respectful with methodological aspects and offers a theoretical framework that helps policy analysis and political science to obtain a better understanding of the policy complex processes. The Advocacy Coalition Framework focuses on the study of policy change based on three premises: a) understanding policy change and the role of policy-oriented learning therein requires a time perspective of at least one decade; b) it is important to study policy change through a focus on policy subsystems (that is the interaction of those actors from public and private organizations, and from different levels of government, who are actively concerned with a policy problem or issue); c) public policies can be conceptualized in the same manner than beliefs systems, that means as sets of value priorities and causal assumptions about how to realize them. Based on this, and regarding the difference between policy subsystem and the global political system in which the subsystem is inserted, and between the stable and dynamic parameters, policy change is considered the result of several variables: A) Relatively stable parameters: basic attributes of the problem area, basic distribution of natural resources, essential sociocultural values as well as social and constitutional structure; B) Dynamic system events: changes in socio-economic conditions and technology, changes in the systemic governing conditions, policy decisions and impacts from other subsystems; C) And the inner dynamic of the subsystem: the competitive interaction of advocacy coalitions formed by those actors who share basic beliefs and are sufficiently coordinated for changing rules, budgets, etcetera, in order to achieve their aims through the time, or in other words, to transfer their beliefs systems into public policies. We concentrate our attention on this last group of factors, because they include the cognitive aspects. The basic argument of the Advocacy Coalition Framework is that, while policy-oriented learning is an important aspect of policy change and can often alter secondary aspects of a coalition's belief system, changes in the core aspects of a policy are usually the results of perturbations in noncognitive external factors to the subsystem such as macro-economic conditions or the rise of a new systemic governing coalition. This is because to be able to translate their beliefs into public policies o programs, advocacy coalitions need resources and opportunities and these mainly depend on not cognitive parameters. The Advocacy Coalition Framework makes possible the empirical study of the beliefs systems by developing carefully their structure. And it investigates the role of policy oriented learning through the analysis of needed conditions to enable this learning in each individual, within an advocacy coalition and between different coalitions. All these aspects are based on a model of individual that emphasizes that people are not only guided by their interests and that their conception of the world is deeply affected by the limited human capacity to process and analyse information, and by all the problems related with cognitive dissonance.
