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February 11 - February 23, 2021
Thus, the changes that occur as a policy monopoly is broken up may be locked in for the future as institutional reforms are put in place. These new institutions remain in place after public and political involvements recede, often establishing a new equilibrium in the policy area that lasts well after the issue backs off the agenda and into the parallel processing of a (newly altered) policy community.
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Punctuated Equilibrium Theory includes periods of equilibrium or near stasis, when an issue is captured by a subsystem, and periods of disequilibrium, when an issue is forced onto the macropolitical agenda.
When an issue area is on the macropolitical agenda, small changes in objective circumstances can cause large changes in policy, and we say that the system is undergoing a positive feedback process (Baumgartner and Jones 2002). Positive feedback occurs when a change, sometimes a fairly modest one, causes future changes to be amplified.
Negative feedback, on the other hand, maintains stability in a system,
A landslide may not be caused by a large-scale event; it may be caused by the slow and steady buildup of tiny changes. Like earthquakes and landslides, policy punctuations can be precipitated by a mighty blow, an event that simply cannot be ignored, or by relatively minor events that accumulate over longer periods.
What determines whether an issue catches fire with positive feedback? The interaction of changing images and venues of public policies.
Policy images are a mixture of empirical information and emotive appeals.
When a single image is widely accepted and generally supportive of the policy, it is usually associated with a successful policy monopoly.
A new image may attract new participants, and the multiple venues in the American political system constitute multiple opportunities for policy entrepreneurs to advance their cases.
Macropolitics is the politics of punctuation—the politics of large-scale change, competing policy images, political manipulation, and positive feedback.
Embedded in the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory of policy change is an implicit theory of individual and collective decision making. From a decision making perspective, large-scale punctuations in policy spring from a change in either preferences or attentiveness.
Jones (1994) has argued that individual and collective decision changes, including choice reversals, do not spring from rapid flip-flops of preferences or from basic irrationality (choosing to go against our own preferences); they spring from shifts in attention. He has called such rapid changes “serial shifts.”
More generally, bounded rationality undergirds all policy change because the mechanisms associated with human cognitive architecture are also characteristic of organizations, including governments (Jones 2001).
Punctuated Equilibrium Theory is at base a theory of organizational information processing. Governments are complex organizations that act on the flow of information in producing public policies (Jones, Workman, and Jochim 2009). The manner in which public policy adjusts to these information flows determines the extent of bursts of activity in the system.
It has become clear in recent years that this view is incomplete. Political systems may be designed with such a high level of friction that they so strongly resist change, and when major changes come (and they will) they can be highly destructive.
Baumgartner and Jones’s Politics of Information develops the thesis that problem discovery and definition requires a different organizational system than does solution search.
the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory has been extended to produce an agenda-based model of governmental budgeting
The distribution of annual changes in budget authority is consistent with the earthquake budget model (as called for by the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory), but not with incremental theories. Both rely on bounded rationality, and our approach may be viewed as adding agenda setting and attention allocation to the incrementalist models.
the results are so strong and invariant that punctuated equilibrium has been classified as “a general empirical law of public budgets” (see Jones et al. 2009).
This suggests that we need a broader theory of how policy punctuations occur, one that is not so tightly tied to pluralistic forms of government. It is likely that different systems lead to different intensities in punctuations, yet don’t escape the process—because it is rooted in the capacities of government to process information and allocate attention.
The punctuated equilibrium model was originally developed to understand the dynamics of policy change in subsystems, but it has been extended to a more general formulation of punctuated change in policymaking.
The ubiquity of serial attentiveness and organizational routines of operation leads us to expect that stability and punctuations are a feature of policymaking in many governments. At the same time, the institutional aspect of multiple venues interacts with boundedly rational decision making to make Punctuated Equilibrium Theory particularly apt for relatively open democracies.
Two subthemes can be identified within this research agenda. One track offers a new approach to the classic question about the importance of elections and changes in the partisan composition of governments as drivers of policy and agenda changes. This perspective challenges the “politics matter” perspective, which has generally been restricted to looking for election and partisan effects along the left-right dimension. Approaching the question at the issue level, as is characteristic of PET studies, not only offers a fresh and more detailed look at the election-based explanations of change but
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there is no evidence that elections, changes in government colors, or changes of prime minister systematically affect the level of change and stability in government agendas.
Agendas do change over time, but the timing of such changes is not closely related to elections or shifts of governments. To understand these changes requires more elaborate theoretical models about how governments respond to and process new information about changes in their environment (Jones and Baumgartner 2005; Baumgartner, Jones, and Wilkerson 2011; Mortensen et al. 2011).
What will cause the next big shift in attention, change in dimension, or new frame of reference? Immersion in a policy or issue area may lead to inferences about pressures for change, but when will the next attention shift occur in a particular policy area?
Punctuated Equilibrium Theory predicts a form of systems-level stability, but it will not help us make point-specific predictions for particular policy issues, unless we look only during periods of stability.
Linear predictions about the details of future policies will fail each time they meet an unforeseen punctuation; they will succeed as long as the parameters of the test coincide with periods of equilibrium.
clearer, more complete, and more empirically accurate theoretical lens is that of punctuated equilibrium, especially in its more general form, which integrates large policy changes with periods of stability.
Most theories of the policy process analyze, in one way or another, how policies come into being, and to explain that, they focus on factors that are seemingly exogenous to public policy itself.
however, policy creation typically occurs in a context that is deeply influenced by existing policies.
How do policies, once created, reshape politics, and how might such transformations in turn affect subsequent policymaking?
Today we dwell in what might be called a “policyscape,” a political landscape densely laden with existing policies that were created at earlier points in time and that structure multiple dimensions of contemporary politics (Mettler 2016).
The policy feedback approach not only adds a new dimension to the study of the policy process but also positions scholars to engage in a novel form of policy analysis that has been neglected by the dominant approaches to that task. The field of policy analysis, which aims to predict the most valuable approaches to solving social problems or to evaluate the ability of existing policies to do so, typically focuses exclusively on matters of economic efficiency or social well-being.
Meanwhile, scholars of the policy process have helped to illuminate, among other things, whether the adoption of such alternatives is politically feasible and, if not, the circumstances under which it might be.
Policy Feedback Theory sits at the intersection of these two approaches: it brings political considerations to bear on policy analysis, assessing how policies affect crucial aspects of governance, such as whether they promote civic engagement or deter it, whether they foster the development of powerful interest groups, and how they affect institutional governing capacity.
This approach is still early in its development but possesses a high level of potential value for scholars, policymakers, and the public.
The articulation of policy feedback emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the writings of several historical institutionalist scholars (Hall 1986; Steinmo, Thelen, and Longstreth 1992; Skocpol 1992; Pierson 1993).
Skocpol explained that polices created at “Time 1” could reshape both state capacities and social groups and their political goals and capabilities, in turn affecting policies created at “Time 2.”
For Pierson, public policies, like other institutional innovations, have the potential to instigate a path-dependent process, whereby each step along a policy pathway makes it increasingly difficult to reverse course.
four major streams of inquiry, each composed of several tributaries (see Figure 3.1
The first two streams of inquiry stem directly from the historical institutionalist tradition, frequently employing the logic of path dependence to demonstrate how past policies constrain future policymaking. First, policies affect political agendas and the definition of policy problems, with consequences for how issues are understood and which ones receive attention from policymakers. Second, policies affect governance through their impact on the capacity of government and political learning by public officials.
The third stream applies the logic of policy feedback to the study of organized interests, arguing that policie...
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the fourth stream extends the logic of policy feedback to the study of individual political behavior by examining how policies shape the meaning of citizenship, which we define broadly as the reciprocal relationship between government and ordinary people under its domain.
Policy Agendas and Problem Definition Policies created at earlier points affect, going forward, how social problems are understood, whether they are defined as matters worthy of public attention and government action, and whether they find a place on the political agenda.
How issues are framed through policies influences their likelihood of engendering broader, enduring effects and the type of influence they bear on subsequent policy debates.
In addition, public policies can shape the future conflicts that emerge over them, including which groups are mobilized and whether coalitions or cleavages form within groups. Policies forged by a particular political party often become viewed as “owned” by that party, and subsequent action over such laws or related issues is likely to mobilize that party’s members as supporters and the other’s as opponents (Petrocik 1996).
Finally, the construction of target populations, groups at which policies are aimed, often affects the alternatives policymakers consider legitimate in future evaluations of policy programs (Schneider and Ingram 1993). New policies can also create new constituencies and organized interest coalitions that become major players in the policymaking process (Patashnik 2008).
Governance Some of the foundational literature on policy feedback suggested that policies, once established, may affect future governance: they may shape the policy alternatives that lawmakers select, the type of administrative arrangements assigned to new policies, and even the parameters—and limits—of government action.
Existing policies may also shape what both public officials and the general public perceive to be the legitimate domain of government and, conversely, what belongs to the private sector.
