Customer Reviews

The Politics of Attention: How Government Prioritizes Problems

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Though not a casual read, this is a great work for those interested in Congressional behavior, organizational information processing and quantitative Political Science. Aspects of the book are rather technical and expand on earlier work by Jones & Baumgartner. Before you pick this up, check out Policy Dynamics or Agendas and Instability in American Politics (also by Jones & Baumgartner). These prior works use more case studies than The Politics of Attention and provide a good introduction to Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, a concept expanded upon in The Politics of Attention.

The work begins by noting two key issues regarding information processing in (page viii): ". . .under what conditions it will be supplied, on the one hand, and how it will be interpreted and prioritized, on the other." This is nested within their broader "punctuated equilibrium" theory of policy change. This perspective suggests that there is stability in a policy system, with occasional bursts of rapid change (punctuated change) followed by stasis for a period (equilibrium). This is based on the biological theory of punctuated equilibrium, developed by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould.

They use their massive "Policy Agendas Project" data sets to explore the use of information and how it fits into change processes. One key point: there is a plenitude of information available to decision-makers; they are not "information poor." This means that decision makers, then, must figure out which information to attend to, which information to assign a priority to. The end result (Page 11): "And prioritizing somehow means winnowing--dropping from consideration for the time being problems that can wait."

Another issue arises: which information to attend to and how to use it. Often, decision makers selectively attend to information (not paying attention to information at variance with their views and cherry picking information that supports their perspectives). As the authors note (page 17) ". . .information is not neutral; it creates winners and losers. People prefer to be seen as winners and do not like to admit when they are wrong."

How does information link to their punctuated equilibrium theory of policy change? They claim (Page 19): "If we put together the limits of human information processing and the characteristics of democracies that encourage error correction, we get a model of politics that is very static but reluctantly changes when signals are strong enough. The system resists change, so that when change comes it punctuates the system. . . ."

The bulk of the book explores how information is actually processed and how it is associated with change. The reading here will be slow going for those not conversant with statistical analysis. Nonetheless, persevering will be rewarding.

This is an important volume that looks at key political processes and change processes in a unique and compelling manner.

If you are wanting to understand more about how things get priortized in DC this is a great book. Through research, easy to read, more detail than necessary, but that is the type of book it is. Written by Professor not a politician.