The Politics of Attention: How Government Prioritizes Problems

The Politics of Attention: How Government Prioritizes Problems. By Bryan D. Jones and Frank R. Baumgartner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 304p. 70. 00 cloth, 25. 00 paper. This book is about policy change in the U. S. national government. Drawing on their exhaustive collection of policy data for the last three decades, Bryan Jones and Frank Baumgartner make a very persuasive argument for their “punctuated equilibrium” theory of public policy. The authors detail a catalog of reasons why policy changes are typically small, including (among other things) individual-level “bounded rationality” and institutional properties like “friction. ” These many factors combine to produce policy that appears to change incrementally most of the time, but there are infrequent moments in which major change is observed. The amount of nonincremental change is linked to the nature of political institutions and to the stages of the policy process. The final stage of the process—legislative change—is costly and slow, producing infrequent change, while changes in the earlier stages are less costly and therefore more frequent.