It emphasizes two related elements of the policy process:
- Issue identification - issues are defined in public discourse in different ways and rise and fall in the public agenda, existing policies can be either reinforced or questioned
- Agenda setting - Agenda setting stresses the difficulty that disfavored groups have in breaking through the established system of policymaking
The three policy actors:
- Organizations
- Interests groups
- Individuals within groups and organizations
Iron Triangle: The Congress, Bureaucracies, and special interest groups
- When dominated by a single interest, a subsystem is a policy monopoly
- Policy monopoly
- EX: NRA (NV Resort Association)
- Policy Image
- EX: Nuclear Power in 1980s
- Successful policy monopoly systematically dampens pressures for change
- Important elements of this process are power, prestige, and legitimacy of the previously established policy monopoly
- Incumbents seek to maintain their control and try not to lose their influence
- Agenda access does not guarantee major change
Events shift the macro-political agenda
- Focusing event
- Elections
- Crisis changes policy image
Issue identification/agenda setting
- Issue attention is expanded
- Increased participants/mobalization
- New debate and action
Q: Can you think of a current issue in Nevada that has mobilized public discourse? NSHE
- Policy change is explained well by this theory
- PET is Nonlinear meaning that clear causal chains and precise predictions will work only in some cases
- Predictions using PET are very difficult - timing and causes of punctuations very hard to define
- Herbert Simon -1957 - developed the notion of bounded rationality to explain how people & organizations operate
- Human make reasoning shortcuts = suboptimal decisions
- How to process available information
- Positive feedback occurs when modest changes are amplified
- Examples: Housing & US government crime policy
- 1968 - Press coverage, most important problem (MIP), congressional hearings caused an influx
- Government spending to reduce crime
- Between 1969 - 1972 - federal spending on crime doubled in real dollars, congress passed law
- Afterward, the MIP fell back into the background
- Maintains stability in a system somewhat like a thermostat maintains constant temperature in a room
- Operates as a stability mechanism
- Economics - invisible hand of the free markets
- Price movements should match supply with demand
- Oversupply could lead to lower prices
- Federalism, separation of powers, and jurisdictional overlaps inhibit major changes during periods of negative feedback
- However, mobilization in one venue may succeed in another (Legalization of Marijuana)
- Influences may include changing levels of public attention, new information, or turnover of decision-making body
- Endogenous party members proposing a bill
- Exogenous factor - new economic data
- When an election changes control of Congress and committee leaderships rotates
- Exogenous factors - Sept. 11, and public discourse
- PET equilibrium is based in part on a bottom-up process
- Q: Do you think the government should have passed TARP legislation to intervene in the last financial crisis?
- Incremental theories missed the manner in which attention allocation disrupts “normal” budgeting, which PET incorporates
- The distribution of major changes in budget authority is consistent with the “earthquake” budget model
- Thurmaier (1995) experiments in budget scenarios for decisionmakers shift from economic to political rationales for decisions new information about political calculations
- Such shifts in the basis of decisions that can lead to punctuations
- Fewer punctuations at the top than at the bottom levels of governmental organization
- Q: Do you agree that the President and the Congress can effect fewer punctuations than subsystems of government?
- PET predicts that changes in governmental priorities will be abrupt
- Budgets set public priorities
- Normally policies are at equilibrium - only under conditions of strong mobilization will extreme changes occur
- Baumgartner & Jones (2008): Empirical Law Study of Budgets
- Processes generates Leptokurtic frequency distributions for changes – distributions characterized by a high peak, weak shoulders, and heavy tails
- Leptokurtic vs. Normal Distribution
- Jordan (2003) finds punctuated budget change distributions for U.S. local expenditures
- Robinson (2004), for Texas school districts
- Breunig and Koski (2006), for state budgets
- Example: period of stability prior WWI, a war creates new taxes and spending capacity
- Post war - government settles into a pattern of spending perhaps twice as before the war
- How policy-making systems allocates attention to the problem is a critical component of problem recognition and policy action
- Alder and Wilkerson (2012) developed new theories showing that congressional behavior revolves around a small number of must pass pieces of legislation
- Lawmakers structure things to ensure bills will be passed
- Congressional bills project: Thousands of bills introduced (not passed since 1947) - legislative behavior, bills sponsor
- What congressional bills do you think have had a disruptive impact in recent times?
- European Union - strong central government
- Agenda setting in the EU takes place in two ways
- From above - through high-level political institutions urging EU action
- From below - through policy experts formulating specific proposals in low-level groups
- Shrad (2010) explains the global wave of prohibition in Western countries in the early twentieth century.
- Maes- schalck (2002), in a study of a major policy failure in Belgium in the Dutroux child-abuse scandal (expansive policy follows)
- Shows that policymaking generated by scandal follows a conflict-expansion model consistent with the PET approach
- This figure inflects sharply upward after 2005
- Marked increase in the number of publications using non-U.S. data -
- U.S. studies increased over the years, total of 67% before 2006 were on U.S. data, reduced to 36 % for studies published after 2005
- 75 different journals are represented in the list
- Green-Pedersen and Walgrave (2014) have edited a book bringing together more quantitative findings from the Comparative Agendas Project
- Brings together scholars developing systematic indicators of issue attention within their nations’ political systems
- Studies the frequency of events - bills, parliamentary questions, and media stories
- Purpose: study decision making venues between nations
- Goal: Provide more empirical studies to support PET
- Gustave Speth cites PET as a theory correcting change
- Setting priorities key - punctuated dynamics may be a consequence of incomplete information processing
- Utility of PET - Predictions about policy outcomes only to avoid positive feedback
- Nonlinearity - work only in some cases
- Complete model not locally predictable because we cannot foresee the timing of punctuations
Punctuated Equilibrium Theory
Mike Biesiada & Edith Gonzalez Duarte
GOAL!
Recap
Positive Feedback
Policy Instability and Change
Negative Feedback
Government Politics
- Government decision makers process through subsystems, policy monopolies, iron triangles, and issue networks.
- Some issues move from subsystem politics to macro politics, and national attention - President and the Congress decide high profile issues
- Choice situations are multifaceted - If a policy promotes economic growth but has negative consequences in terms of human rights, competing values may be a priority of decision-makers
- EX: enter a coalition against ISIS (Middle East conflict)
Endogenous and Exogenous Forces
Earthquake Model
Public Budgets and Policymaking
Punctuated Nonincremental Budgeting
How General is Punctuated Equilibrium
Testing formulation in the study of public budgeting
- Elaboration of agenda-based budgeting model
- Generation of hypotheses showing the distribution of budget changes
- Conforms to the new theory
- Founded on the bounded rationality - key questions are whether policy subsystems develop enough autonomy in their political systems for independence from central government
- To create a punctuation
Questions
Information Processing
Serial and Parallel Processing
Can you think of recent legislative policies that would be classified as an example of PET?
What are the three components of an Iron Triangle?
PET in Public Policy Making-Baumgartner and Jones (1993)
Punctuated Dynamics in European/Western Countries
- Serial - focusing on one problem in decision making
- Ex: Policymakers engage in high-level serial processing activities
- Parallel - Political systems are capable of handling many issues simultaneously
- Governments deal with many issues at once
1. That policymaking both makes leaps and undergoes periods of near stasis as issues emerge on and recede from the public agenda
2. That American political institutions exacerbate this tendency toward punctuated equilibrium
3. That policy images play a critical role in expanding issues beyond the control of the specialists and special interests that occupy what they termed “policy monopolies.”
Costs of Doing Business
Increasing Notoriety of PET
- There are two major sources of costs in translating inputs into policy outputs.
- Cognitive costs - political actors must recognize the signal, devote attention, frame problem, draw solution
- Institutional costs - the rules for making policy generally act to maintain stability and incrementalism
- EX: U.S., super majorities needed to pass legislation
Policy Generally Changes Only Incrementally Due to Three Restraints
The Actors Making Choices
Punctuated Equilibrium Since 2006
Serial and parallel processing
Vested interests
- Policy monopoly
- Policy image
Bounded rationality of individuals
Introduction
Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET)
Conclusion
Issue Identification and Agenda Setting
- Theory suggests that most political/social systems exist in an extended period of stasis, which are later punctuated by sudden shifts in radical change
- Explains why policy is usually marked by stability & incrementalism
- Both stability and change are important elements of the PET