Agenda Dynamics

This research project centers on the changing nature of the national American public policy agenda since the Second World War, using several datasets that are coded by project staff to ensure the highest standards of reliability and comparability across data sources. Data are fully described at http://www.policyagendas.org/

While governmental policies and institutions may remain more or less the same for years, they can also change suddenly and unpredictably in response to new political agendas and crises. What causes stability or change in the political system? What role do political institutions play in this process? To investigate these questions, this research program draws on the most extensive data set yet compiled for public policy issues in the United States . Spanning the past half-century, these data make it possible to trace policies and legislation, public and media attention to them, and governmental decisions over time and across institutions.

Completed Research:

Bryan D. Jones and Frank R. Baumgartner. 2005. The Politics of Attention: How Government Prioritizes Problems. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.

Politics today is conducted in an information-rich world. Government seldom has to seek out information; policymakers are bombarded with demands for action. How political leaders prioritize these many potential problems is at least as important as the preferences, ideologies, and party allegiances that these political leaders harbor in determining public policy. Problem-prioritization is related to the objective conditions that policymakers face, how they interpret these conditions, and how governing institutions act to focus attention on some problems rather than others. This is information-processing, and The Politics of Attention is the first study of American politics based in an information-processing perspective.

The Politics of Attention examines the allocation of attention and the operation of governing institutions making extensive use of the Policy Agendas datasets. The operation of attention allocation within the American system of separated powers invariably leads to disjoint and episodic policy outputs, even in the absence of ‘triggering' events. It asks how the system solves, or fails to solve, problems rather than address how preferences are realized through political action, the prevailing analytical approach in the discipline of political science. It asks that we put aside the blinders of a preference-centered political science in favor of a problem-solving perspective. And it is based on the pattern-recognition approaches of stochastic process analyses—critical to the study of unpredictable punctuations and disproportionate information processing--rather than the prediction-based regression models of standard political science.

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Bryan D. Jones & Frank R. Baumgartner. 2004. Representation and Agenda Setting. Policy Studies Journal 32: 1-25.

Bryan D. Jones, Tracy Sulkin, and Heather A. Larsen. 2003. Policy Punctuations in American Political Institutions. American Political Science Review 97: 151-70.

Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, eds. 2002. Policy Dynamics. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.

Policy Dynamics presents a radical vision of how the federal government evolves in response to new challenges - and the research tools that others may use to critique or extend that vision. Some chapters analyze particular policy areas, such as health care, national security, and immigration, while others focus on institutional questions such as congressional procedures and agendas and the differing responses by Congress and the Supreme Court to new issues.

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