- The Politics of Attention: How Government Prioritizes Problems
Is our democratic system of government responsive to the concerns of the public? Why or why not? Some say that it is responsive, evidencing the best of American democracy; others contend that the political system only responds to the wishes of the powerful. This book contributes to the debate with a focus on how information is used and allocated by American policymakers and institutions.
The authors contend that cognition and information processing is at the core of stability and change in public policy. Focusing on government as the receiver of information, they ask how government responds with policy to incoming information: Why do policymakers focus on some aspects of information while ignoring or discounting other bits of information? The ambition of the present volume, which is but the latest output in a long and productive collaboration, is the development of a full theory about how human cognitive processing interacts with political institutions to produce the long periods of policy stability that are punctuated infrequently by change.
The authors develop a model of individual and institutional decision making that starts with recognizing that there is a problem, assesses the dimensions of the problem, sorts through potential solutions, and then makes the final policy choice. Policy actors and institutions generally maintain a status quo in policy because institutional processes (such as the need for supermajorities in Congress to move issues forward) combine with the individual cognitive factors outlined above to act as filters and controls. Some information is ignored while other information receives a great deal of attention. This process adds friction and makes the policymaking process inefficient in the sense that institutions do not respond quickly and proportionately to changes in the environment. But the insertion of new signals or new framings of old issues has the ability to disrupt this stability. A disproportionate response then occurs because after we decide to focus on an issue, we not only reevaluate our prior policy choice but also our understanding of the problem, our weighting of the relevant dimensions of the issue, the consideration of possible solutions, and our goals in addressing the issue in the first place. The authors illustrate these patterns of stability and change by analyses of various data sources covering more than 50 years of U.S. policymaking.
While some decry this state of affairs as gridlock or thwarting the will of the people, the authors note that the framers of our political institutions strove for a balance between representation and liberty, navigating between acting when there is no need and failing to act when the need is clear. Moreover, such a process strengthens signals from outside policy subsystems as policy proponents know that they must transmit information in a way that will overcome the inertia within political subsystems and institutions. Finally, a political process that responds efficiently in the short run to all inputs through a pure division of [End Page 1042] labor may encourage information monopolies that in the long run will constrain diversity and adaptability.
This work is a commendable and important work at several levels, not least of which is the variety and scope of data used in support of the authors' arguments (which the authors have made available at www.policyagendas.org). The authors theorize about the broad scope of policy over five decades, and their thesis pulls together different theories of policy and politics.
For these reasons, sociologists interested in political life will find this book engaging, but some questions could be raised. For example, is the system really awash with too much information as the authors contend? As one of the authors noted in previous research, only a few issues attract a great number of interest groups while many other issues are the object of attention of a small number of lobbyists (Baumgartner and Leech 2001). Burstein (2006) suggests that public policy does not completely reflect public opinion because the public may not have formed opinions on every issue before the Congress...