Bryan D. Jones

Agenda Dynamics and Policy Subsystems

Rapid change in public policy outcomes often occurs, but most theories of pluralism emphasize only incrementalism. Yet from a historical view, it can easily be seen that many policies go through long periods of stability and short periods of dramatic reversals. Often the grand lines of policy may be settled for decades during such critical periods of mobilization. In this paper, we argue a single process can explain both periods of extreme stability and short bursts of rapid change. This process is the interaction of beliefs and values concerning a particular policy, which we term the policy image, with the existing set of political institutions--the venues of policy action. In a pluralist political system, subsystems can be created that are highly favorable to a given industry. But at the same time, there remain other institutional venues that can serve as avenues of appeal for the disaffected. Here we use the case of civilian nuclear policy to examine the process by which policy images find a favorable reception in some institutional venues but not others, and how the interaction between image and venue can lead to the rapid creation, destruction, or alteration of policy subsystems. We rely on data from a variety of sources to trace agenda access of the nuclear power issue in each of the policy venues available.

Analysis of the frequency and duration of freeway accidents in Seattle

Accidents occurring on congested urban freeways can have enormous impacts in terms of lost commuter time. This paper presents an appropriate statistical analysis of urban freeway accident frequency and duration and discusses how this analysis can be used to guide management strategies that seek to reduce the traffic-related impacts of accidents. The findings and demonstration of analysis procedures should be of considerable value to ongoing and future studies in this area.

Policy Punctuations in American Political Institutions

Political institutions translate inputs—in the form of changed preferences, new participants, new information, or sudden attention to previously available information—into policy outputs. In the process they impose costs on this translation, and these costs increase institutional friction. We argue that the “friction” in political institutions leads not to consistent “gridlock” but to long periods of stasis interspersed with dramatic policy punctuations. As political institutions add costs to the translation of inputs into outputs, institutional friction will increase, and outputs from the process will become increasingly punctuated overall. We use a stochastic process approach to compare the extent of punctuations among 15 data sets that assess change in U.S. government budgets, in a variety of aspects of the public policy process, in election results, and in stock market returns in the United States. We find that all of these distributions display positive kurtosis—tall central peaks (representing considerable stability) and heavy tails (reflecting the punctuations, both positive and negative). When we order institutions according to the costs they impose on collective action, those with higher decision and transaction costs generate more positive kurtosis. Direct parameter estimates indicate that all distributions except budget data were best fit by the double-exponential probability distribution; budgets are Paretian.This project was funded by the Political Science Program of the National Science Foundation, Award SES9904700. We appreciate the support of Frank Scioli, the program officer, and various political science program directors. We benefited from comments by Frank Baumgartner, John Brehm, Chris Mackie, Peter John, John Padgett, Bat Sparrow, Jim True and John Wilkerson.

Comparative studies of policy agendas

Abstract Studying agenda-setting and policy dynamics is a well-established research tradition dating back to the work of Bachrach and Baratz and Schattschneider. The research tradition provides considerable insights into how changes in agendas and political attention affect public policy. However, the research tradition has been strongly dominated by studies of the US and has suffered from a lack of comparative studies. This paper discusses the different ways in which such comparative studies can be conducted as well as the potential insights which may be gained from them.

Policy punctuations: U.S. budget authority, 1947-1995

Baumgartner and Jones (1993) described a process of punctuated equilibrium in their study of policymaking in the United States since World War II Evidence was drawn from a series of particular issue-areas, but the model has implications for all areas of policymaking In this paper, we explore the validity of this approach with a new dataset that tabulates congressional budget authority at the Office of Management and Budget subfunction level across all areas of the federal budget for the entire postwar period We find that government spending is characterized by much greater change than is typically portrayed in the literature, even if there is great stability for most categories most of the time In addition, overall patterns of spending have been affected by two large-scale punctuations These punctuations divide national spending into three epochs one of postwar adjustment, lasting until FY 1956; one of robust growth, lasting from 1956 through 1974, and one of restrained growth, beginning in FY 1976 We test the epoch hypothesis against three plausible rival hypotheses: changes in the robustness of the postwar economy; partisan divisions; and public opinion The epoch hypothesis survives all of these rivals whether modeled individually or together This paper provides empirical evidence that punctuations occur, not just in some programs or subsystems, but also throughout government.

THE DESTRUCTION OF ISSUE MONOPOLIES IN CONGRESS

Scholars studying congressional committees have noted the potential for members to seek membership on particular committees, leading to bias. Underpinning this line of scholarship is what might be termed a theory of comparative committee statics, characterized by a cross-sectional empirical approach. We present a new approach that focuses on the dynamics of jurisdictional control. By following a series of issues through the committee hearing process, we show that there is indeed significant issue bias in particular committee venues. However, we also find that new committees often claim jurisdiction over issues as they are redefined in the political process. The degree of jurisdictional monopoly enjoyed by different committees has been overlooked in the literature on this topic in spite of its importance in determining the nature of representation of interests in Congress.

Bureaucratic Response to Citizen-Initiated Contacts: Environmental Enforcement in Detroit

When citizens contact local government agencies, they generally attempt to influence service delivery decisions made by these bureaucracies. This paper examines the nature of citizen contacts, and the results of such contacts, with respect to the enforcement of environmental ordinances in Detroit, Michigan. We first examine the mechanisms responsible for the generation of citizen contacts. Assuming relations among citizen awareness, service need, and social well-being, we derive a downward-opening parabola as appropriate for describing the relationship between social well-being and propensity to contact a service agency. Using data on citizen contacts from City of Detroit agencies merged with census data, we find the expected relationship in evidence. We find that the Environmental Enforcement Division generally responds to citizen contacts, but the quality of the response varies with social characteristics of neighborhoods.

Does Incrementalism Stem from Political Consensus or from Institutional Gridlock

Theory: Wildavsky (1992) indicated that consensual politics lead to incremental budget results and that dissensual politics result in large and rapid budget changes. Yet it is also possible that dissensual politics could result in policy gridlock with budgets changing very little. Hypotheses: By associating increased dissensus with divided governments and by measuring the long-term trend in budget volatility, we can test (1) whether the trend is toward more or less incremental budgeting, (2) whether divided government increases or decreases budget volatility, and thus infer (3) whether incremental budget results stem from political consensus or institutional gridlock. Methods: We use OLS regression to study the intersextile ranges of annual percentage changes in budget authority for the domestic subfunctions of the Budget of the United States Government from Fiscal Year 1947 through 1995. A model including the exponential decay of this robust measure of budget variability and a dummy variable for years of divided government is estimated. We then add two additional measures of dissensus: percentage of bills vetoed by the president, and the polarization of the congressional parties (based on the divergence in their respective ADA scores). A variety of alternative hypotheses are also tested. Results: Variability in relative changes in national government spending is trending downward, and divided government increases budget volatility. Neither additional measure is independently related to volatility. We infer that volatility thus indicates dissensus and that budgeting was more volatile and probably less consensual in the past than in the supposedly rancorous present.

The Evolution of Legislative Jurisdictions

We consider the clarity of the jurisdictions of the committees of the U.S. Congress over the entire post-war period. We offer a theory to explain changes in clarity over time, emphasizing how the rise of new issues and the redefinition of existing ones undermine the clarity and stability of committee jurisdictions. We present results from a new dataset on all congressional hearings between 1947 and 1994-67,291 cases in all. Using new summary indices of jurisdictional clarity, we trace the evolution of the jurisdictional system for both the House and Senate. We demonstrate low levels of clarity for most issues and a decline in clarity for the system as a whole over time. Further, we show that these developments are the result of changes in issue-density (the rise of new issues and the redefinition of old ones) and increases in institutional resources, in particular professional committee staff. We note the implications of these findings for models of legislative behavior and government decision-making more generally.

Representation and American Governing Institutions

We isolate two limitations of the existing literature on representation and then move toward some important remedies. The first limitation is that typical representation studies assess the extent to which policymakers’ issue positions correspond to those of the public, but do not investigate whether the issue priorities of policymakers correspond to those of the public. The second limitation is that existing studies do not consider the full policymaking process, from agenda setting to enactment. Using data provided by the Policy Agendas and Congressional Bills Projects, we investigate how well the publics policy priorities have been represented in national policymaking over a 47-year time period. We first assess public concern about 18 major issues using Most Important Problem data (1956–2002) and then correlate these concerns with changing issue attention across 10 policymaking channels that are ordered by differences in institutional friction. We find much closer correspondence where friction is low.