Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies

Political scientist John W. Kingdon sets out to answer a deceptively simple question: Why do some subjects rise to prominence on governmental agendas while others are neglected? Rather than examining how final decisions are made, Kingdon focuses on the predecision processes that determine which issues receive serious attention and which policy alternatives are considered. The second edition retains the original text and adds a final chapter with new case studies and theoretical reflections.

Kingdon draws on 247 interviews conducted over four years (1976–1979) with people in and around the federal government who deal with health and transportation policy. He supplements these interviews with 23 case studies, government documents, party platforms, press coverage, and public opinion data. Two key distinctions anchor the analysis. The first is between the governmental agenda, the list of subjects to which officials are paying serious attention, and the decision agenda, the narrower list of subjects moving toward an authoritative decision. The second is between agenda setting, the process of focusing attention on certain subjects, and alternative specification, the process of narrowing the range of conceivable policy responses to those seriously considered.

Kingdon begins with participants, dividing them into those inside and outside government. He finds that the administration, defined as the president, presidential staff, and political appointees, is discussed as important in 94 percent of interviews, the highest figure for any set of actors. The president can set agendas through institutional resources like the veto, organizational advantages over the fragmented Congress, command of public attention, and partisan leverage. Career civil servants prove far less influential in agenda setting, though they contribute to alternative specification and implementation. Congress ranks nearly as high as the administration in importance, with members possessing the unusual ability to affect both agendas and alternatives.

Among actors outside government, interest groups rank high in frequency of discussion but function more often as blockers of change than as promoters of new items. Academics, researchers, and consultants affect alternatives more than agendas and shape long-term directions more than short-term outcomes. Mass media are discussed as important in only 26 percent of interviews; they mostly report what government is already doing rather than independently driving attention. Elections and changes of administration have powerful indirect effects by replacing officials in positions of authority. Public opinion acts more as a constraint on what is considered possible than as a positive force promoting particular items. From these findings, Kingdon draws a broad distinction between a visible cluster of participants who affect the agenda (the president, prominent members of Congress, media, and elections-related actors) and a hidden cluster of specialists who affect the alternatives (academics, career bureaucrats, and congressional staffers).

Kingdon evaluates and rejects three common approaches. Tracing the origins of initiatives proves futile because ideas come from many sources and tracking origins leads to infinite regress. Comprehensive-rational decision making does not describe reality because participants rarely define goals precisely and often advocate solutions before identifying problems. Incrementalism captures the gradual evolution of proposals but fails to describe agenda change, which Kingdon's data show is often sudden and large.

Instead, Kingdon adapts the "garbage can model" of organizational choice developed by Michael Cohen, James March, and Johan Olsen, which describes decision making in organizations characterized by unclear preferences, uncertain technology, and fluid participation. In Kingdon's revised model, three largely independent streams flow through the federal government: problems, policies, and politics. Each develops according to its own dynamics, and the greatest policy changes occur when the streams converge at critical junctures.

In the problems stream, conditions come to officials' attention through indicators (routine monitoring of data such as costs or disease rates), focusing events (crises, disasters, or powerful symbols), and feedback from existing programs. Conditions become defined as problems when people believe something should be done about them, a translation shaped by values, comparisons with other nations or groups, and the categories into which conditions are placed. Budgets act both as promoters, pushing cost-related items onto the agenda, and as constraints, dampening consideration of expensive proposals.

In the policy stream, proposals are generated within communities of specialists who float ideas, test them, revise them, and float them again. Kingdon likens this environment to a "primeval soup" in which ideas compete, combine, and are winnowed through a process resembling biological natural selection. Change proceeds more by recombination of familiar elements than by the sudden appearance of wholly new ideas. Entrepreneurs engage in a long process of "softening up" the system through speeches, hearings, papers, and conversations, preparing communities for proposals that may take years to gain serious consideration. Proposals survive based on technical feasibility, compatibility with the values of the specialist community, and anticipated acceptance given budget constraints and the receptivity of elected officials.

The political stream flows on its own schedule, composed of swings in national mood, election results, changes of administration, shifts in congressional composition, and interest group pressure. Consensus in this stream is built through bargaining rather than persuasion. Turnover of key personnel is one of the most powerful agenda-changing forces. Jurisdictional competition between congressional committees can either produce stalemate or accelerate action.

The central theoretical contribution is the concept of the policy window: the brief opportunity that opens when the three streams come together. Windows open either because a compelling problem appears or because an event in the political stream, such as a new administration, creates receptivity to change. Policy entrepreneurs, people willing to invest their time, energy, reputation, and money in pursuit of future policies they favor, play a critical role in coupling the streams at these moments. They keep proposals ready, wait for favorable problems or political events, and perform both advocacy and brokerage functions. Windows close quickly as participants feel they have addressed the issue, fail to get action, or watch the precipitating events pass. Success in one area often spills over into adjacent areas as politicians seek to repeat a winning formula.

In a chapter added for the second edition, Kingdon tests his framework against three cases from the 1980s and 1990s. The Ronald Reagan budget revolution of 1981 illustrates the convergence of a sharp conservative political turn, a policy stream that had developed proposals in think tanks for years, and pressing economic problems including stagnation, inflation, and deficits. David Stockman served as a key policy entrepreneur, and the reconciliation mechanism, which allowed a single up-or-down vote on the entire expenditure package, proved a critical institutional feature. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 shows how political pressure for tax reduction was coupled with proposals for simplification and equity that entrepreneurs such as Senator Bill Bradley had developed over years, producing legislation that only partly addressed the original political anger. The Bill Clinton health care initiative of 1993 demonstrates what happens when the problems and political streams align but the policy stream has not settled on a consensus proposal: The issue achieved a prominent place on the governmental agenda but faced difficulty moving to the decision agenda.

Kingdon also addresses criticisms that his model portrays processes as essentially random. He argues there is substantial structure in the dynamics within each stream, in the processes governing couplings, and in constraints such as national mood, budgets, and procedural rules. Different evolutionary models apply to different parts of the process: Gradualistic selection describes proposal development in the policy stream, while punctuated equilibrium, a concept describing long periods of stasis interrupted by sudden change, better describes agenda shifts. Kingdon maintains that the three streams are best understood as largely independent, involving different people with different preoccupations, even as he acknowledges some links between them. The result is a model that captures both the structure and the fluidity of how public policy agendas are formed.