Political Change Part 2 2008 Campaigning for Change

Our last entry on campaign rhetoric basically asserted that talk about (political) change is cheap: proposals for changing public policies generally mean little until they are actually enacted (Political Change Part 1 - 2008 Campaign Rhetoric).

Setting aside the thorny problem of identifying “good” proposals (broadly, those with predominantly positive social, political, and economic impacts), the key challenge for would-be political reformers is to make proposed policy changes actually happen. In the United States, this generally involves passing laws and putting them into effect.

Passing and implementing laws is an arduous process at best. Legislation must be drafted to embody the policy of interest, debated and voted through committees, and passed by both houses of Congress. Upon receiving the President’s signature, bills are relegated to relevant Departments in the Executive branch or other federal agencies, which assume responsibilities for implementing them.

Implementation involves some combination of disbursing government funds; procuring goods and services; drafting (and enforcing) supporting regulations and policies, and administrative actions (creating or modifying organizations, changing missions, hiring and/or training personnel, etc).

This complex process was clearly designed to promote deliberate rather than speedy action. (Of course, in emergency situations such as natural disasters, wars, or economic recessions, Congress seems to be capable of expediting action.) It should also be clear that this process is often transformative: a new law and, later, the regulations and procedures to implement it, often differ significantly from the original draft of the bill; ensuring integrity of the original intent requires significant political skill, effort, and luck.

What is much less obvious is how difficult it is to even reach the policy “starting gate.” This revelation comes courtesy of Dr. John Kingdon and his groundbreaking work Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (first published 1984, second edition 2003).

Kingdon was the first to focus carefully on the early stages of the policy making process, or agenda-setting. Kingdon frames the problem thusly:

“What makes an idea’s time come? That question is actually part of a larger puzzle. What makes people in and around government attend, at any given time, to some subjects, and not to others… We know more about how issues are disposed of [how legislation is enacted] than we know about how they came to be issues on the governmental agenda in the first place, how the alternatives from which decision makers chose were generated, and why some potential issues and some likely alternatives never came to be the focus of serious attention.”

Kingdon performed extensive field research to derive and validate his models of agenda setting and specification of alternative responses to agenda items. This research included repeated interviews with over two hundred government officials and other active participants in health and transportation policy in the late 1970s. This field work was combined with research on government documents on dozens of related case studies in these policy areas.

Kingdon wanted to understand not only why the agenda is composed as it is at any one point in time, but how and why it changes from one time to another. This is critical because public and government attention are both finite and dynamic. Issues arise (or re-surface) to extend the agenda. Other issues are removed from the agenda when they are addressed. Still other issues fade in (relative) importance, run into stalemates, or otherwise drop off the agenda without being resolved.

Kingdon categorized his subject matter into two sets of factors: the participants within and external to the US Government, and the processes through which agenda items and alternatives gain currency.

He divided policy actors into two “clusters” – visible and hidden. “Visible participants are actors who receive considerable press and public attention: including the President, his high-level appointees, prominent members of Congress, the media, and election-related actors such as political parties and campaigners [emphasis mine]. Hidden participants include academic specialists, researchers, consultants, career bureaucrats, congressional staffers, analysts who work for special interest groups, and lobbyists Their work is done in planning and evaluation or budget shops in the bureaucracy or in the staff agencies on the Hill.

Kingdon argues that the visible “cluster” of actors affects the agenda, while the hidden actors affect the alternatives. And with respect to agenda setting, elected officials and their appointees turn out to be more important than career civil servants or participants outside the government. I refer you to his book for the details of his position. The takeaways from Kingdon’s work for our topic of political change are these:

* Presidential candidates represent visible actors in Kingdon’s framework
* As such, they can exert some influence on setting agendas, but less on driving solutions
* Issues that candidates propose for the national agenda may not make it (or remain on the agenda), thanks to the extended durations of modern elections, the time it takes candidates, once elected to establish their administrations, and other intervening factors

Our next installment will review Kingdon’s “garbage can” model of agenda setting processes, which further highlights the limitations of candidates to drive change.