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Abstract
Over the past four decades, higher education has assumed amplified importance in states’ economic development efforts. Known as technology-based economic development (TBED), state economic growth policies explicitly involving postsecondary institutions have undergone a remarkable degree of both innovation and institutionalization as science has assumed greater commercial relevance. TBED efforts now comprise the largest and most expensive items in some states’ development arsenals and these policies have broadly impacted public higher education, particularly research universities. While analyses of TBED policies show that large, wealthy states most aggressively invest in TBED programs, recent research reveals that disadvantaged states pursue a variety of TBED strategies, as well. Given their touted capacity to lift impecunious states to new economic heights, along with their significant up-front costs, how these policies come to occupy governmental agendas in disadvantaged states is an important question. A conspicuous gap in the literature exists, however, with respect to how developing states come to embrace TBED policies – strategies which are often particularly ambitious and expensive given these states’ educational and financial profiles. This gap engenders important questions. How do TBED policies arrive on the governmental agendas of developing states? Given the panoply of options, why are distinctive TBED policies embraced? How do theoretical frameworks of the policymaking process encapsulate this activity? To answer these questions, a comparative case study of West Virginia (WV) and Mississippi (MS) is employed using three theoretical frameworks that encapsulate the policymaking process.