The politics of attention : how government prioritizes problems

386 Pages·2005·1.389 MB·English

by  Baumgartner, Frank R., Jones, Bryan D.

The Politics of Attention
How Government Prioritizes Problems

Bryan D. Jones
University of Washington

Frank R. Baumgartner
Pennsylvania State University

Forthcoming, University of Chicago Press, 2005
Version submitted for copy-editing, October 6, 2004
The Politics of Attention
How Government Prioritizes Problems

Bryan D. Jones
Frank R. Baumgartner

Table of Contents

Preface
1 How Government Processes Information and Prioritizes Problems

Part I: Information and Choice
2 A Behavioral Model of Policy Choice
3 The Intrusion of New Information

Part II: Information-Processing and Policy Punctuations
4 “Understandable Complexity” in Policy Choice
5 Incrementalism, Disproportionate Information-Processing, and Outcomes
6 Cognitive Architectures, Institutional Costs, and Fat-Tailed Distributions
7 Policy Punctuations in American Political Institutions

Part III: Signal Detection, Prioritization, and the Inefficiencies of Agenda-Setting
8 Agenda-Setting and Objective Conditions
9 The Inefficiencies of Attention Allocation
10 Representation and Attention

11 Conclusions

Appendices

References
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Preface

This book is the outcome of a long-run collaborative project that began in the late 1980s,
and in many respects is an extension and elaboration of ideas we originally explored in
Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Chicago, 1993). It is firmly based in the belief that
policy change is driven not only by the seemingly unchanging aspects of politics—institutions,
fixed preferences, resources—and not just by the shifting nature of the policy debate, but by a
complex interaction between elements of each. It is committed to a more-or-less standard
conception of bounded rationality as the decisional underpinning of the analysis. It is unyielding
in its demand that good measurement is a prerequisite for good quantitative political science.
Here, however, we move to a distinctly different perspective than we have used before
for viewing the interactions between institutions and ideas. We adopt a global perspective,
covering the full range of policy topics across a long historical time span. We focus on only a
single part of the process, however: How information is used, and how attention is allocated. If
policy debates matter, then information matters. Viewing political systems as information-
processing instruments yields insights and allows comparisons not possible with other
approaches. Further, the extremely large scope of our empirical project allows us to study
these processes in new ways. Information always involves a sender, a message, and a
receiver. To date, most studies of information in political science have centered on its reliability,
its validity, or the conditions under which it will be communicated. None of these perspectives
examines the responses of the receiver of the information, yet that is exactly what is necessary
in the study of the performance of governments. How do governments respond with policy to
incoming information? This is the key question we pose.
There are two great issues in the processing of information in politics: under what
conditions will it be supplied, on the one hand, and how will it be interpreted and prioritized, on
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the other. The traditional economic view of information is that it is simply another “good” that
will be supplied if the price is right. If someone needs information, they pay “search costs” to
have someone else (an expert in the field, for example) supply it. Surely in politics that is part of
the story, but it cannot be the whole story. In governmental settings, a failure to supply
information means policymakers may rely on information supplied by a competitor. Moreover,
American governmental institutions include an explicit realization that, even when government
agencies are responsible for producing information, organizational cultures can yield one-sided
estimates. Hence policymakers have routinely established independent and competing sources
of information. For example, Congress has its own bureaucracy to estimate budgets and policy
impacts—the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office. If Congressmen
trusted the executive branch, they would rely on the Office of Management and Budget. Trust is
not what the separation of powers system is all about. Rather, competing and independent
sources of information abound in the American political system. This is both by constitutional
design and by the nature of a complex pluralistic society.
In fact, there is so much information in the US political system that winnowing through it
is more of a problem than finding more of it. Unlike in economics, where buyers may need to
search for information, in politics, governmental decisions makers often have large amounts of
information literally thrown at them by those clamoring for policy change (or defending the status
quo). Whether the information stems from government agencies who collect it routinely, from
media or academic analysts who may study the background of many different policy problems,
or from interest groups, citizens, corporations, and others outside of government who may want
to influence a current debate, information is plentiful in politics. The information ranges from
rock-solid to poor in quality, and from neutral to heavily biased in perspective. In short, there
may be many flaws in the nature of the information that abounds in politics, but scarcity is not
typically an issue.
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The major consequence of all this is that policymakers are constantly bombarded with
information of varying uncertainty and bias, not on a single matter, but on a multitude of
potential policy topics. The process by which information is prioritized for action, and attention
allocated to some problems rather than others is called agenda setting. Agenda setting can be
viewed as a process by which a political system processes diverse incoming information
streams. Somehow these diverse streams must be attended to, interpreted, and prioritized. We
address these aspects of information-processing in this book.
In Agendas and Instability, we addressed both information supply and prioritization,
though we did not use those terms. We argued that the pluralistic American political system
allowed many often-competing policy images to survive simultaneously, ready to expand at the
right moment. The “right moment” was governed by attention indexed by changes in the
perceived validity of a competing policy image. The traditional elements of the American
political system and its complex set of policy subsystems act as a drag, creating large scale
inefficiencies in how information is used. Policy subsystems are often based on extremely
incomplete models of the policy issue at hand. Essentially, they filter out many relevant bits of
information (those bits of information, judged to be “irrelevant” to the dominant paradigm, as
when environmental issues were once ignored in the search for more agricultural production in
the case of pesticides or scientific “progress” in the area of civilian nuclear power). These
subsystems can insulate policymakers from competing information, or from new information that
does not correspond with their vision, understanding of the policy, or goals.
Like water running downhill, new information has a way of finding its voice through the
complex interplay of competing venues, however. While this process is by no means
guaranteed, we showed in that earlier book many examples when these cozy arrangements
were successfully challenged. The strength of the existing arrangements meant that when a
policy subsystem was disturbed, policy punctuations occurred. Information is at the core of
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these processes. But information is not used efficiently in politics. Rather, there are powerful
forces that mean that some bits of information are ignored; others, given disproportionate
attention and credence. Further, as we will show in the chapters to come, this is inevitable in all
complex institutions. Indeed, the process has its roots in the inefficiencies of human cognition
itself. Therefore, it is unavoidable. It is time that we develop a theory of it and a more complete
understanding of its sources and consequences. That is what we attempt to do here.
In this book, we address how information is used in politics, and we focus on how it is
prioritized. Why do we focus on some information while ignoring or discounting other bits of
information that we collectively deem to be less relevant? We demonstrate the information-rich
nature of the political system and discuss its implications, but we do not assess here how the
system became that way. We have explored the connection between information supply and
pluralism in at least one setting, congressional committees, elsewhere (Baumgartner, Jones,
and McLeod 2000), and continue this exploration in a related project. But, as we shall see,
trying to understand how the American political system detects uncertain and ambiguous
signals pouring in from many diverse sources, interprets those signals and prioritizes them for
policy action is plenty to occupy us in this book. Other projects, which we continue, will address
related issues.
In working through our theory of information-processing in politics, we have accumulated
numerous debts. First we appreciate the Political Science Division of the National Science
Foundation for its steadfast support of various phases of this project, and especially to several
directors of the division and our program officer there, Frank Scioli. Second, we owe a big debt
to the graduate students who collaborated with us on this project, many of whom have gone on
to productive careers during the long course of this project, who displayed the best virtues of
patience, hard work, and generally good humor. Several were co-authors on some of the
articles that we have drawn from in various places in this book. They all bear mention: Jens
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Feeley, who superbly managed the Policy Agendas Project during the last several years;
Valerie Hunt, Tracy Sulkin, Heather Larsen, Erin de la Mare, and most recently Sam Workman,
at the University of Washington; James True, Michael MacLeod, and Jeff Talbert at Texas A&M
all were valuable contributors to the project. At the University of Washington, several
generations of Center for American Politics and Public Policy Undergraduate Research Fellows
who helped us collect, code, and manage the datasets. Finally, we appreciate those friends
and scholars who read all or parts of the manuscript in one form or another. These include Jeff
Berry, Kevin Esterling, John Kingdon, Beth Leech, Christine Mahoney, John McCarthy, John
Padgett, Mark Smith, Bat Sparrow, Jim Stimson, Tracy Sulkin, John Wilkerson, Walter Williams,
and others who due to our own limited memories and attention spans, we are certainly omitting
here. We owe a special debt of gratitude to Jim Stimson, who not only gave the manuscript a
careful critical review, but also suggested a new computer simulation to supplement those we
had done, and even wrote the code for that simulation.
At several points in the manuscript, we have integrated analyses originally presented in
articles published previously. In all cases, these have been extensively re-written and up-dated
with the most recent data we have available to us. Nevertheless, we are indebted to our
collaborators, and they bear special mention. In particular, we appreciate the collaboration over
the years with James True, whose knowledge of US budgeting and appreciation of punctuated
equilibrium has contributed immeasurably to the theory of budgeting that is central to our work.
We also appreciate the willingness of Jim, Mike MacLeod, Tracy Sulkin, and Heather Larsen, all
of whom collaborated on papers that have been re-drafted for this volume, to allow us to
incorporate that work into this volume.
Readers of this book may be struck by its extremely large empirical scope. We have
been fortunate to work together for over 15 years now. During this time, with the support of
those mentioned above, we have organized the creation and development of some massive and
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comprehensive indices of the activities of the US national government. These data collection
projects continue. For the first time, they allow us to address some issues, such as the overall
distribution of policy change, which have never been addressed before in American politics.
This means that our analyses will appear unfamiliar to most readers. On the other hand, we
hope that many will appreciate the global perspective that these many years of work have
allowed us to take.

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Chapter 1
How Government Processes Information and Prioritizes Problems

On Monday, July 28, 2003, Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Chairman of
the Committee on Environment and Public Works, rose to deliver a speech on global warming
on the Senate floor. He began by stating, “One very critical element to our success as
policymakers is how we use science.” He went on to claim that environmental extremists
dismiss science as “irrelevant” because they are “prophets of doom who peddle propaganda
masquerading as science in the name of saving the planet from catastrophic disaster.” The
Senator continued: “The evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of those who don’t see global
warming posing grave harm to the planet and who don’t think human beings have significant
influence on the climate system.” Inhofe ended his speech by saying “Over the past two hours,
I have offered compelling evidence that catastrophic global warming is a hoax.... Natural
variability, not fossil fuel emissions, is the overwhelming factor influencing climate changes; …
no meaningful warming has occurred over the last century; and climate models predicting
dramatic temperature increases over the next 100 years are flawed and highly imperfect”
(Infhofe 2003).
Senator Inhofe certainly has a point: Scientific information is very often distorted,
ignored, mis-used, and cited selectively in the heat of political debate. And of course when one
side does this type of thing, we can expect the other side to respond in kind. Just as he
accused his opponents of distorting the facts in support of their agenda, his statements can be
seen in a similar vein. They are clearly “propaganda masquerading as science” although his
distortion serves the purpose of saving America from “an agenda of energy suppression” (as he
might put it). Almost all of the evidence he cited as supporting his claim to sound science is
either misleading or outright wrong. Prevailing evidence clearly supports the thesis of global
warming since the mid-1800s, and there is ample evidence that humans have influenced the
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climate cycle—through there is scientific debate on this point (Alley 2000; Mayewski and White
2002).
It is indeed true that the earth’s climate is highly cyclical, and climatologists must take
great care in separating natural cycles and trends from human-caused (or at least more recent)
changes. Moreover, Inhofe is on target with his critique that the Kyoto Treaty on Global
Warming will do little (he says “nothing”) to lower the earth’s temperature through setting
greenhouse gas emission targets. Inhofe’s claim that predictive climate models “are flawed and
highly imperfect” is entirely correct. But his conclusion, that his position that no meaningful
warming has occurred in the last century is “supported by the painstaking work of the nation’s
top climate scientists,” is not just misleading. It is not true.
Such misuse of information is quite common in politics, and it’s been done on all sides of
the climate debate. Luckily for us all, no single Senator, just like no single interest group or no
single scientist or anyone else solely determines what we collectively determine to be “the facts”
relating to any complex issue of public policy. Information matters. It enters the political
process imperfectly; policy advocates and government officials often attempt to distort it; and
there is no guarantee that all relevant pieces of information will enter the political debate on any
given subject. But the policy process, and government in general, is rife with information, and
this provides a critical but generally overlooked dynamic in politics.
The Role of Information in Political Systems
This book is about how political systems, and in particular the American political system,
processes information in producing public policies. It may seem strange to use a “J’accuse”
speech full of distortions and misleading accusations by an energy-state politician with an axe to
grind as a starting point for this exploration. Yet through his severely selective use of evidence
and downright fabrications, surely Inhofe has scored a major point: many environmentalists
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