Making a Policy Problem of Water Export in Canada: 1960–2002

The article explores how political tensions developed around the issue of Canadian water export, how policy solutions and alternatives to the problem were offered, and how finally it came to be recognized by the national government. The water export issue reached the formal agenda after a lengthy period of being denied serious consideration. However, it is arguable that agendas are set if an issue receives attention from policy decision makers. This is because an issue's ascension to agenda status is not an indication of how it is actually going to be decided upon. The case of water export demonstrates that the government adopted a policy solution consistent with assumptions prevalent at the time and acceptable among elected decision makers. Yet, the solution was contrary to the expectations of those who demanded a complete water export ban in Canada.     

News Photographs and Environmental Agenda Setting

Who and what influences the issues that policymakers attend to is central to the question of how power is exercised in politics. This study builds upon research by Soroka that proposes an expanded model of agenda setting as a means to examine how the media influences issue salience for the public and policymakers. It expands on Soroka's model by investigating the hypothesis that photographic attention to environmental issues in the news media influences issue salience for the mass public and governmental decision makers. There is little research that substantiates the idea, but it is widely believed that photographs have influence on the policy agenda. I use a dynamic, multidirectional model to estimate whether the volume of news photographs, in addition to news stories, influences issue salience among the mass public and policymakers. Data are longitudinal and measures of attention are operationalized as the number of congressional committee meetings, concern for the environment as a “most important problem” in public opinion polls, environmental news stories in The New York Times, and environmental news photographs in Time magazine. Results suggest that photographic attention does influence environmental policy agenda dynamics in some counterintuitive ways that are distinct from the effects of the news stories. While news stories appear to increase public attention toward the environment, they have little influence on policymaker attention. News photographs, on the other hand, appear to drive congressional committee attention but elicit an ambivalent public response.     

Policy Entrepreneurship and Policy Change

This article reviews the concept of policy entrepreneurship and its use in explaining policy change. Although the activities of policy entrepreneurs have received close attention in several studies, the concept of policy entrepreneurship is yet to be broadly integrated within analyses of policy change. To facilitate more integration of the concept, we here show how policy entrepreneurship can be understood within more encompassing theorizations of policy change: incrementalism, policy streams, institutionalism, punctuated equilibrium, and advocacy coalitions. Recent applications of policy entrepreneurship as a key explanation of policy change are presented as models for future work. Room exists for further conceptual development and empirical testing concerning policy entrepreneurship. Such work could be undertaken in studies of contemporary and historical policy change.     

Understanding Local Policymaking: Policy Elites' Perceptions of Local Agenda Setting and Alternative Policy Selection

Despite the increasing interest in policy agenda research in recent years, very few studies have focused their attention on the relevant processes at the local level. Drawing on agenda-setting research, particularly Kingdon's multiple-streams framework, this study examines the key forces and factors, as well as their relative importance, in local agenda setting, problem identification, and alternative policy selection. Data are collected from 271 in-depth interviews with local policy stakeholders in three U.S. Gulf Coast areas. Interview materials are coded using a protocol focused on capturing stakeholders' perceptions of the key elements and forces in local policy dynamics. Our interview data indicate that (i) governmental actors and various interest groups have relatively more influence in shaping local agendas than the general public, experts, and election-related actors, while the mass media are found to have little agenda-setting power in local policy processes; (ii) budgetary consideration and various forms of feedback to local government are more important than objective problem indicators and focusing events in setting local policy priorities; (iii) policy alternatives that are deemed compatible with existing policies and regulations are more likely to be selected than those relying on other criteria such as technical feasibility, value acceptability, and future constraints; and (iv) consensus and coalition building is perceived as the most important political factor in local policy processes. Limitations of our study and recommendations for future research are discussed in the concluding section.     

The President as Agenda Setter‐in‐Chief: The Dynamics of Congressional and Presidential Agenda Setting

In this paper, we investigate the agenda leadership capability of two American political institutions, Congress and the presidency, in an array of issue areas that include both domestic and foreign policy. The president has long been considered to have the most significant role in setting the policymaking agenda, but there is limited empirical research to support that claim. Examining the issue areas of defense, environment, health care, international affairs, law and crime, and macroeconomics from 1956 to 2005, we find statistically significant positive influence by the president on the congressional agenda in all six of the policy areas under examination, providing compelling evidence of presidential agenda leadership and a reactive Congress. Additionally, we find that the agenda relationship between the president and Congress is issue dependent, in that presidential attention has the largest substantive effect on the congressional agenda in the area of international affairs.     

Moral Panics and Punctuated Equilibrium in Public Policy: An Analysis of the Criminal Justice Policy Agenda in Britain

How and when issues are elevated onto the political agenda is a perennial question in the study of public policy. This article considers how moral panics contribute to punctuated equilibrium in public policy by drawing together broader societal anxieties or fears and thereby precipitating or accelerating changes in the dominant set of issue frames. In so doing they create opportunities for policy entrepreneurs to disrupt the existing policy consensus. In a test of this theory, we assess the factors behind the rise of crime on the policy agenda in Britain between 1960 and 2010. We adopt an integrative mixed-methods approach, drawing upon a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. This enables us to analyze the rise of crime as a policy problem, the breakdown of the political-institutional consensus on crime, the moral panic that followed the murder of the toddler James Bulger in 1993, the emergence of new issue frames around crime and social/moral decay more broadly, and how—in combination—these contributed to an escalation of political rhetoric and action on crime, led by policy entrepreneurs in the Labour and Conservative parties.     

A Micro Model of Problem Definition and Policy Choice: Issue Image,Issue Association,and Policy Support of Power Plants

Past research on problem definition and public policy primarily focuses on the macro-system level. In this study, we propose a micro model of problem definition and policy choice at the individual level. We argue that while individual citizens' problem definitions and policy preferences are rooted in and filtered through their predisposition characteristics (such as socioeconomic status, political orientation, and informational base), their policy choices also strongly depend on how they define public issues, particularly how they perceive the image of an issue at hand and how they associate the issue with other public issues. Our empirical analyses, based on data from a national public survey on energy and power plant issues, support the key propositions derived from our theoretical model. Key contributions to and implications for policy studies are discussed in conclusion.     

Punishment Policy in the American States from 1890 to 2008: Convergence,Divergence, Synchronous Change,and Feed‐Forward Effects

This analysis of the patterns of change in the use of incarceration by the American states from 1890 through 2008 focuses on multiple themes particularly relevant to an understanding of policy arenas in which the social constructions of target populations play an important role. Specifically, the study examines whether the states have adopted more similar incarceration levels over time (converged), whether they tend to change in the same direction at the same time (synchronous change), and whether they tend to stay in the same relative positions vis‐à‐vis one another, such that the historical policy position has long‐term implications for later policy positions (“feed‐forward” effects). The results indicate that, in spite of a century of social, political, and economic integration, the policy positions of the states have not exhibited a sustained convergence toward a common level of incarceration, but have undergone cycles, with some periods of convergence followed by periods of divergence. Change has generally been synchronous—as states tend to move in the same direction at the same time as if propelled by national forces even though incarceration levels are determined by state and local policy and the use of discretion by criminal justice officials. The results also indicate a profound “feed‐forward” effect in that the position of the states vis‐à‐vis one another historically has substantial predictive power for their position in subsequent years.     

Facts and Myths about Research on Public Policy Implementation: Out-of-Fashion, Allegedly Dead, But Still Very Much Alive and Relevant

Despite several decades of research on public policy implementation we know surprisingly little, not only about cumulative research results, but also about several other key aspects of this research field. This article tries to amend these deficiencies by presenting the results of a comprehensive literature survey. Its main purpose is to challenge, revise, and supplement some conventional wisdom about implementation research. A second motivation is to lay the foundation for and initiate a much needed synthesis of empirical research results. The main results are: The overall volume of publications on policy implementation has not stagnated or declined dramatically since the mid 1980s as is commonly asserted. On the contrary, it has continued to grow exponentially through the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. Even more surprising is that a large number of publications are located outside the core fields. Hence, the literature is substantially larger and more multidisciplinary than most commentators realize. Doctoral dissertations are the most ignored, but probably the richest, largest, and best source of empirical research results. Tracing the origin as well as the location of the disciplinary and geographical cradle of implementation studies must also be readjusted significantly. The ethnocentric bias of this research field toward the Western hemisphere has been, and still is, strong and some policy sectors are given much more attention than others. Although positive in many ways, the predominant multidisciplinary character of implementation research still poses some serious problems with respect to theory development. Thus, I discuss whether a resurgence of interest in policy implementation among policy scholars may already be occurring. Finally, I suggest that the time is long overdue for efforts to synthesize research results in a more rigorous scientific manner than has hitherto been done.     

Framing the Poor: Media Coverage and U.S. Poverty Policy, 1960–2008

Public policy toward the poor has shifted from an initial optimism during the War on Poverty to an ever‐increasing pessimism. Media discussion of poverty has shifted from arguments that focus on the structural causes of poverty or the social costs of having large numbers of poor to portrayals of the poor as cheaters and chiselers and of welfare programs doing more harm than good. As the frames have shifted, policies have followed. We demonstrate these trends with new indicators of the depth of poverty, the generosity of the government response, and media framing of the poor for the period of 1960–2008. We present a simple statistical model that explains poverty spending by the severity of the problem, gross domestic product, and media coverage. We then create a new measure of the relative generosity of U.S. government policy toward the poor and show that it is highly related to the content of newspaper stories. The portrayal of the poor as either deserving or lazy drives public policy.     

The Public Policy Process among Southeastern States: Elaborating Theories of Regional Adoption and Hold‐Out Behavior

Having been adopted by legislatures in over a dozen states, postsecondary merit aid programs are largely concentrated in the southeastern United States. The observed clustering pattern seems to support previous evidence that policies spread between proximate states, a phenomenon referred to by political scientists as policy diffusion. Often, however, policy diffusion is not complete, and one or more states in a region fail to adopt. By interviewing policymakers throughout the southeastern United States—including actors in the three states in the region without merit aid—the study addresses the following question: Why do diffusion pressures lead to adoption in some states but not in others? Studying state “hold‐outs” promises not only to uncover the reasons for failed legislation in specific state contexts but also to better our understanding of the limits of diffusion theory.     

Antagonism,Neo‐liberalism and Movements: Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Abstract: The “movement of movements” has reached an impasse, from which innovation and expansion appear out of reach. Given these circumstances a re‐examination of concepts such as antagonism and class hatred might be timely. Antagonism has never disappeared. It is present in climate‐change politics as much as in those of the Black Bloc—both examples we discuss here. Indeed antagonism permeates capitalism and drives capitalist development. But a politics founded purely on antagonism quickly comes up against its own limits. The transformative power of love—whilst simultaneously coupled in productive tension with antagonism—offers the possibility of exodus.