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27 Pol'y Stud. J. 6 (1999)

handle is hein.journals/plyssjnl27 and id is 1 raw text is: Policy Studies Journal, 27:1 From the Editors We would like to express our thanks to all of the authors who have contributed to the Policy Studies Journal over the past year, to the staff of the Journal who have contributed so much effort to its publication, and to all of the reviewers of PSJ manuscripts. The staff members to whom we owe special thanks are indicated, as usual, on the inside front cover. This issue also contains a listing of the authors who were published in each of the four issues of volume 26 of PSJ, and a distinguished list of our manuscript reviewers during the past year. No journal can thrive without the contributions of these three key components: authors, reviewers, and staff. We look forward to continuing-and enhancing-our interactions with PSJ's authors and reviewers, and to the excellent help provided by the staff of PSJ. In This Issue In Policy Feedback: The Comparison Effect and Small Business Procurement Policy, Sandra M. Anglund examines the comparison effect of policy learning through her analysis of federal programs to help small businesses gain government contracts. In contrast to studies of policy learning that have been focused on policy instruments, the comparison effect focuses on how dissatisfaction with policy outcomes leads to policy change and how policy problems are redefined to influence agenda setting. Anglund demonstrates through historical analysis that the key to understanding the comparison effect lies in knowing how the reaction to existing policy gives rise to comparisons of differential government treatment by societal groups or sectors of the economy and contribute in turn to programs that compensate those who are perceived as being on the losing end of the comparison. Hajime Sato, in The Advocacy Coalition Framework and the Policy Process Analysis: The Case of Smoking Control in Japan, uses the advocacy coalition framework and what he identifies as the policy process analysis to examine smoking control policymaking in Japan. While he finds that the advocacy coalition framework explains changes in Japanese smoking policies and policymaking as resulting from the emergence of, and the competition among, antagonistic advocacy coalitions favoring and opposing tobacco, he concludes that the policy process analysis, which conceives of the process of policy change as a set of processes mediated by agency mobilization and the key role played by policy brokers, better explains this Japanese policy domain. The article, Alive and Kicking: Municipal Affirmative Action Policy in Texas Cities, 1980s-1990s, by Rodolfo O. de la Garza, Scott Graves, and Mark H. Setzler, evaluates the impact of national-level opposition to affirmative action on the scope and implementation of such policies in 13 Texas cities in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The authors find that increased national hostility to affirmative action in hiring and contracting had little effect on the content and strength of affirmative action programs in Texas municipalities, and that most programs actually have been maintained or strengthened. However, they do not find any pronounced relationship between the strength of municipal affirmative action programs and either minority political representation or the size of a city's minority population. They find that policy time lag and bureaucratic insulation 6