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Public policy emerged as an academic subfield in the United States after the second World War. The theoretical foundations of the discipline are essentially based on analyses of Anglo-Saxon policies and politics and were originally aimed at providing knowledge for the policy process of pluralistic democracies. Given the increasing transfer of the subject and related approaches to other countries, it is necessary to clarify how suitable theories, goals, and methods of policy research are applied in other contexts. What needs to be considered when transferring theories of the policy process, and what can be learned from existing applications of the various approaches in different settings? The compilation of contributions on selected theoretical public policy lenses and their transfer to other countries and regions provides a nuanced answer to these questions., Competing Interests: Conflict of interestN.C. Bandelow, N. Herweg, J. Hornung, and R. Zohlnhöfer declare that they have no competing interests., (© The Author(s) 2022.)

The Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) builds on the concepts of timing and ambiguity and their effects on the policy process. Since its introduction to agenda-setting in the U.S. presidential system, scholars have transferred the MSF's core ideas to multiple issue areas, policy stages, and political systems. However, what has been lacking so far is a thorough discussion of the MSF's travelling capacity to nondemocratic forms of government. Building on a brief summary of the MSF's main ideas, this article discusses the challenges that policy-making in autocracies poses for MSF applications and ways to adapt it to the peculiarities that are typical for these regimes. The article focuses on the agenda-setting stage in which formal institutions are less important and introduces falsifiable hypotheses explaining agenda change. Due to tremendous differences regarding the organization of the decision-making process in autocratic regimes, the article only sketches out how the MSF could be adapted to explain policy change in this institutional setting. The article concludes with a discussion of whether the MSF is stretched too far by applying it to nondemocratic systems. It turns out that in theoretical and conceptual terms, the MSF travels surprisingly well to these systems., Competing Interests: Conflict of interestN. Herweg, N. Zahariadis, and R. Zohlnhöfer declare that they have no competing interests., (© The Author(s) 2022.)