Contingent Valuation (CV) is a tool employed by decision-makers, policy analysts, and social scientists to estimate public preferences related to a policy issue and elicit values they assign to nonmarketed public goods. In the past, CV has been employed to study issues ranging from recreation, water quality, and aesthetic benefits of intangible goods such as air quality.

In this paper we use the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) and the case of the Glen Canyon Dam to study the way in which CV analysis: 1) is influenced by the policymaking process; and 2) influences the policymaking process. With respect to the former, we assess the extent to which coalition belief systems influenced the design, implementation, interpretation, and use of a particular CV study published by Welsh, Bishop, Phillips, and Baumgartner in 1995. With respect to the latter, we examine the extent to which the same study altered the balance of resources between competing coalitions within the Glen Canyon Dam subsystem, which ultimately influenced the decision to alter the operations of the dam.

In so doing, we contribute to extant theoretical work on the endogenous relationship between policy analysis and the policymaking process (e.g., Jenkins-Smith 1991) by using the ACF to explicate the political context that often surrounds policy analysis and this particular case to specify the way in which policy analysis can influence policy change.