Working Papers

From Execution to Orchestration: State Capacity in a Privatizing Policy Subsystem

Cheyenne A. Black, Jon Ruff

When a policy field privatizes rapidly, does the state hollow out, or does it reshape itself into a coordinator of distributed expertise? This article examines United States space policy as a strategic case of complex socio-technical governance under uncertainty. Using congressional discourse networks across four eras from 1960 to 2025, we distinguish between two network positions that can both appear as state decline: the loss of degree dominance, where state actors no longer account for most participation in policy debate, and the retention of brokerage, where state actors continue to link otherwise separate coalitions. Preliminary findings show state actors shedding participation on technology and market concepts, where private expertise is increasingly concentrated, while retaining brokerage around coordination, safety, and regulatory concepts. We argue that state capacity transforms in privatizing policy subsystems, migrating from technical execution toward the coordination of distributed knowledge. This migration offers a repeatable signature of the orchestrating state, with implications for emerging technology arenas such as autonomous systems. 

Measuring Subsystem Typology Change: Discourse Networks and the Evolution of U.S. Space Policy

Cheyenne A. Black

Commercial firms, universities, and advocacy organizations have taken part in U.S. space policy since its founding, but they did so at the margins of a subsystem that government actors controlled. That arrangement has changed. Discourse network analysis of 293 congressional hearings from 1960 to 2025, grouped into four policy eras, measures how far it has changed and identifies what produced it. Government witnesses accounted for 91 percent of policy discourse in the early 1960s. By the 2017 to 2025 period their share had fallen to 69 percent, civil society actors generated nearly a fifth of the discourse, and commercial actors held the highest average betweenness centrality, occupying the positions through which information moves across the policy community. Participation diversity, measured by Shannon entropy, rose from 0.246 to 0.746, and a chi-squared test rules out variation in who happened to testify. The turning points were legislative and programmatic rather than exogenous. The Commercial Space Launch Act of 1984, the COTS and CRS programs, and the Artemis partnership model each widened the standing of actors already present at the edges of the subsystem. For policy process research, the study treats subsystem type as an outcome to be explained rather than a background condition and contributes a semi-automated measurement pipeline validated against hand-coded data.

Let there be light? Partisanship differences in light pollution mitigation strategies

Cheyenne A. Black, Andrew Fox, Maggie Leon-Corwin, Hank Jenkins-Smith, Carol Silva

Light pollution is rising with suburban expansion, yet it remains largely absent from state and federal agendas and is regulated mostly at the local level. As attention grows, its politics may come to divide along party lines like other environmental problems. Drawing on the first national survey of U.S. adults on light pollution policy preferences (N = 4,994), we examine public support for mitigation through government action, market tools, and individual responsibility. Partisanship shapes preferences, most sharply over government regulation, but the divide narrows over technological innovation and public awareness, where support is high in both parties. Benchmarked against attitudes measured in the same survey, the partisan gap on light pollution is smaller than the gap on general environmental concern or environmental regulation, and far smaller than the gap on ideology. Awareness and new technology emerge as the ground where bipartisan coalitions are most feasible.