The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America

Baumgartner and Jones' first collaborative book from 1993, Agendas and Instability in American Politics, represents a milestone in policy agenda-setting research.Its theoretical and methodological ideas today inspire a large international research community on policy agenda-setting.Their next landmark book was the Politics of Attention from 2005.The ideas of that book are so radical and of such scope that they have the potential to transform the way we think about politics and the way we study it.Now Baumgartner and Jones have changed gear again and launched The Politics of Information.The book does not represent as radical a break with standard political science method and theory as the Politics of Attention book from 2005, but it does offer a very important and critical perspective on the way most scholars and practitioners today think about organization and government.In The Politics of Information Baumgartner and Jones analyse the development of the American government since World War II and identify a central tension in government that is relevant well beyond the case of the American government.It is a tension between the search for problems and solutions on the one hand and the need for order and control to implement workable solutions on the other.If we understand perfectly the problems and the best solutions to them, then clear organizational rules and procedures would be the obvious choice.However, Baumgartner and Jones argue, in many cases we do not quite understand the causes of a social problem and may disagree over whether a given condition even merits government attention.With this uncertainty (complexity), organizational clarity is a danger as it can lead to 'tunnel vision', which ignores the multiplicity of potentially relevant perspectives.Thus, a central theme in this book is the trade-off between organizational structures that facilitate effective implementation of solutions and organizational structures that promote the identification of new problems and new solutions.The tension between the desire for clear organizational rules and finding the proper fit with the organizational problem environment represents an old debate in public administration.As the authors note in chapter 2, prominent scholars such as Herbert Simon, Robert Dahl, James March and Johan Olsen in various ways make the claim that no organizational structure can optimize on specialization, problem prioritization, supervision and control.Baumgartner and Jones not only reiterate this tension; they also raise a strong critical voice against the one-sided focus on management and clear administrative control that characterizes many present-day government reorganizations.Consistent with their solid foundation in the bounded rationality perspective, they note that: 'One of the biggest mistakes in political life is to believe that we understand more than we do.This is the temptation of clarity' (p.51).