PPA 503 – The Public Policy-Making Process

1. PPA 503 – The Public Policy-Making Process Lecture 5a – Agenda Setting

2. Introduction • Schattscheider – “The definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power.” • The definition of alternative issues, problems, and solutions is crucial, because it established which issues, problems, and solutions will gain the attention of the public and decision makers and which, in turn, are most likely to gain broader attention.

3. Introduction • Elite theory suggests that relatively few people in key positions in government, industry, academe, the media, and other institutions control a disproportionate share of the nation’s economic and political resources. • However, while the system is biased, often the disadvantaged interests can coalesce and, when the time is right, find avenues for the promotion of their ideas.

4. Agenda Setting • Agenda setting is the process by which problems and alternative solutions gain or lose public and elite attention. • Group competition to set the agenda is fierce because no society or political system has the institutional capacity to address all possible alternatives to all possible problems that arise at any one time. • Groups must therefore fight to earn their issues’ places among all the other issues sharing the limited space on the agenda or to prepare for the time when a crisis makes their issue more likely to occupy a more prominent space on the agenda.

5. Agenda Setting • An agenda is a collection of problems, understandings of causes, symbols, solutions, and other elements of public problems that come to the attention of members of the public and their governmental officials. • Agendas exist at all levels of government. Every community and every body of government has a collection of issues that are available for discussion and disposition.

6. Agenda Setting • Levels of the agenda. • Agenda universe – all ideas that could possibly be brought up and discussed in a society or a political system. • Systemic agenda – all issues that are commonly perceived by members of the political community as meriting public attention and as involving matters within the legitimate jurisdiction of existing governmental authority. • Institutional agenda – the list of items explicitly up for the active and serious consideration of authoritative decision-makers. • Decision agenda – items about to be acted on by a governmental body.

7. Agenda-Setting

8. Agenda Setting • Because the agenda is finite, interests must compete with each other to get their issues and their preferred alternative policies, on the agenda. • They must also compete with each other to keep their issues off the agenda, using the power resources at their disposal.

9. The Idea of Political Power • We know instinctively that some groups are more powerful than others. • But, what does power mean in this context. • Two faces of power. • One face – the power to compel people to do things, even against their will, a coercive power. • Second face – the ability to keep a person from doing what he or she wants to do, a blocking power. • In the first face of power, “A” participates in the making of decisions that affect “B”, even if B does not like the decisions or their consequences. • In the second face of power, A prevents B’s issues and interests from getting on the agenda or becoming policy, even when actor B really wants these issues raised.

10. The Idea of Political Power • The blocking form of power does not arise simply because of A’s superior resources, but usually because the system itself (the nature and rules of the game) is biased against B. • Mobilization of bias – Schattschneider.

11. Groups and Power in Public Policy • Issues are more likely to be elevated to agenda status if the scope of conflict is broadened. • Two key ways that disadvantaged groups expand the scope of conflict. • Going public by using symbols and images to induce greater media and public sympathy. • Appeal to a higher decision level. • Conversely, dominant groups work to limit the scope of conflict. • The dominant groups do so through policy monopolies, which attempt to keep problems and underlying policy issues low on the agenda. • Policy monopolies use agreed-upon symbols and images to construct their visions of problems, causation, solution. These agreements limit agenda access for other groups, symbols and ideas.

12. Groups and Power: Overcoming the Power Deficit • Baumgartner and Jones argue that when powerful groups lose their control of the agenda, less powerful groups can enter policy debates and gain attention to their issues. • This greater attention tends to increase negative public attitudes toward the status quo, which then allows lasting institutional and agenda changes.

13. Groups and Power: Overcoming the Power Deficit • Several ways that groups can bring issues to public attention. • Kingdon’s streams metaphor. • Policy, politics, problem streams. • Crossing of streams – windows of opportunity. • Driven by group action and policy entrepreneurs. • Indicators, focusing events, and agenda change. • Kingdon suggests that changes in indicators and focusing events are two ways in which groups and society as a whole learn of problems in the world. • Changes in indicators are usually changes in statistics about a problem. • Focusing events are sudden, relatively rare events that spark intense media and public attention because of their sheer magnitude or, sometimes, because of the harm they reveal. • Can energize new problems or existing, dormant problems.

14. Groups and Power: Overcoming the Power Deficit • Several ways that groups can bring issues to public attention. • Group coalescence and strategies for change. • Disadvantaged groups are not all passive and elite groups are not all monolithic. • Pro-change groups will often coalesce into advocacy coalitions (groups with shared interest in a particular problem definition). • Brings countervailing power to bear. • Venue shopping. • Institutional – executive (rulemaking), legislative (hearings), judicial (litigation). • Vertical – federal (scope expansion), state, local (grassroots). • News media.

15. Social Construction of Problems and Issues • Humans and their governments are problem solvers. • Many of the social and technological advances are solutions to social problems. • At the same time, there are many social problems that people believe should be “solved” or, at least, made better. Poverty, illiteracy, racism, immorality, disease, disaster, crime, and any number of other ills will lead people and groups to press for solutions. • Many of the these problems are “public” goods or bads.

16. Social Construction of Problems and Issues • The process of defining problems and of selling a broad population on this definition is called social construction. • How we structure and tell stories about how problems come to be the way they are. • A group that can create and promote the most effective depiction of an issue has an advantage in the battle over what, if anything, will be done about a problem.

17. Social Construction of Problems and Issues • Stone – People tell stories about how problems come to be by using symbols, numbers, and stories about causes. • The key to problem definition is not just reducing policy uncertainty because one person’s solution is another person’s problem. • The key to problem definition is persuading others that the problem is real or that the problem cited is the real problem. • The social construction of a problem is linked to the existing social, political, and ideological structures at the time.

18. Social Construction of Problems and Issues • Conditions and problems. • Conditions can develop into problems as people develop ways to address conditions. • The advancement of technology turned polio from an unavoidable condition into a social problem. • The interruption of a solution (power failure) can lead to a problem.

19. Social Construction of Problems and Issues • Symbols. • A symbol is anything that stands for something else. • Politics and policy are full of symbols. • Stone- four elements of the use of symbols. • Narrative stories – told about how things good or bad happen. Things are getting worse or declining. Simple solutions to complex problems. • Helplessness and control – something could not be done in the past, but now it can. • Synecdoche – a figure of speech in which the whole is represented by one of its parts. Use of anecdotes or prototypical cases. Cheating welfare queens, etc.

20. Social Construction of Problems and Issues • Causal stories. • The telling of causal stories. These stories attempt to explain what caused a problem or an outcome. Four categories of causes: mechanical, accidental, intentional, and inadvertent. • Contestants in policy disputes will fight over the depiction of the cause of a problem that is most consistent with their goals.

21. Social Construction of Problems and Issues • Causal stories (contd.).

22. Social Construction of Problems and Issues • Causal stories. • Exxon-Valdez. • Act of God (accident). • Drunken captain (inadvertent). • Willfully negligent company (intentional). • Numbers as indicators of problems. • Aggregate data appears to give problem legitimacy. • The decision to use numbers is a policy decision in itself. • Political pressure to keep gathering numbers so that we can see if problems are getting better.

23. Social Construction of Problems and Issues • Numbers as indicators of problems. • But numbers are not necessarily objective indicators of a problem. • Numbers are only indicators, not the problem. • Numbers are of questionable accuracy (census, achievement tests, UCR). • Is the indicator the best (most valid) measure of the problem? • The choice of statistic has a big impact on how the problem is portrayed (median versus mean income). • Numbers are political weapons and a number is not the same as its interpretation.