Who or What Shapes the Policy Agenda - Essay Example

Who or what shapes the policy agenda Agenda setting is the progression through which political s and actors tackle political issues and consider making policies to deal with them. Anthony Downs's (1972) suggests that agenda setting is more than the preliminary breakthrough of an issue on the formal agenda. Agenda setting in numerous policy areas, according to Sharp, "might best be viewed in terms of the long-term rise and fall of governmental consideration to issues that already have attained several official standing on the formal agenda." Therefore, issues are not apparently either on or off the agenda at any given time, but in numerous instances, issues are enduringly on the formal agenda, but the degree of the notice they receive waxes and wanes over time. One essential component of the agenda-setting process is what E. E. Schattschneider ( 1975:69) refers to as the "mobilization of bias"--some matters are organized into politics while others are organized out. drawing from Schattschneider, as "a set of prime values, beliefs, rituals, and institutional procedures ('rules of the game') that operate methodically and consistently to the benefit of certain persons and groups at the expense of others." They raise the prospect that through the "mobilization of bias" some individuals would limit decision making to relatively non-controversial matters by influencing and controlling the political grounds in which the issues surface. Many scholars have argued that the decision making process is far from being coherent. For examples Stone, D (1989) in his reading "Causal Stories and the Formation of Policy Agendas. Agenda setting can be a compound phenomenon. Indeed, the dominant metaphor in modern agenda-setting studies has been the "garbage can model of choice," in which streams of troubles, policies, and politics flow autonomously until the right combination of them guided to a "policy window" in which decisions can be made (Kingdon 1997, Baumgartner and Jones 1993, 2002). as these concepts were developed in studies of agenda setting in the United States, one should be cautious in pertaining them to other polities, particularly since parliamentary democracies typically feature more specific party policy commitments, better executive-legislative dexterity, and greater stress on less overtly visible interest group-executive contacts, amongst other things. In short, most other liberal democratic polities perhaps lean more toward the organization end of what has been called "organized anarchy" than does the United States. This is not to refute that there exists a "policy primeval soup" (Kingdon 1997) in each. though they use overlapping terms, there is not complete agreement amongst analysts about the major concepts, extent, and processes of agenda setting. generally, the agenda-setting literature can be separated into two major theoretical approaches, which resemble the pluralist and elitist schools of thought (Petracca 1990). The pluralist loom emphasizes the role of the public, interest groups, and the media in emergent the political agenda (Downs 1972). In contrast, the elitist approach to agenda setting sees the main initiatives coming from government officials as well as policy communities; other elements mainly act as veto groups (Kingdon 1997). Perhaps as the research stems from a U.S. base, neither orientation rates political parties extremely in the agenda-setting process. Cobb, Keith-Ross, and Ross ( 1976) give a bridge across these two approaches by positing three models of agenda setting outside inventiveness, mobilization, and inside initiative. The first is mass to elite, the subsequent elite to mass, and the third elite to elite only. Major element of agenda setting is the procedure of problem identification/problem structuring of the policy issue. How a policy issue is prepared and identified in this initial stage will settle on the direction and content of the public discourse and the proposed solutions as it moves through the residual stages of the policy process. John Kingdon (1997) notes that "the treatment of a policy issue on the agenda will be exaggerated by the way in which a trouble is recognized and defined and the category in which it is placed". Thus, the policy prescriptions tackle the financial ability of utilities to pay for decommissioning, taking the figure of building future decommissioning costs into the rate structures. Issues of public safety, residual radiation levels, and long-standing storage of nuclear waste are not addressed. In another area, Mark Moore ( 1988:57) suggests that "the achievement of defining drunken driving as a problem of alcoholism rather than nonalcoholic that overuse and drive has kept the center away from probable policies aimed at this latter group". In British political studies, there are, generally, relatively few agenda-setting studies (Hogwood 1987; Sochart 1988). yet, there has long been uneven attention to the question of agenda setting on ethnic and race-related policies. The cause for this disparity is the anxious foothold race-related policies seem to have on the political consciousness and actions of political influential. Indeed, some of the studies argued that there was a conscious or unconscious (cultural) conspiracy to keep race off the political agenda, one of the few intense examples of a mobilization of bias toward non-decision making in a political system, particularly on the central level (Schattschneider 1960; Crenson 1971). Race relations legislation of the sixties is one of the areas in which the United Kingdom has borrowed from the United States. numerous other studies of subsequent anti-discrimination legislation as well as urban aid have revealed, at least in passing, that U.S. experience has had a few influences on British developments. In view of the resurrection of interest in the politics of agenda setting in U.S.-based public policy research (Downs 1972; Kingdon 1997; Peters and Hogwood 1985) and the development of proportional policy-borrowing research, it is suitable to attempt to apply some of this theoretical literature to the well-documented agenda-setting and policy formulation predicaments of British race politics, with particular focus on the role of minority group "black" access to the agenda and contribution in policy formulation. There is wide-ranging recognition among agenda theorists that a distinction needs to be made linking a formal (government, institutional, official) agenda and a systemic (popular, public) agenda. additionally, John Kingdon (1997) refer to "specialized" or "professional" agendas amongst members of policy communities and the considerate public, issues which might not have reached either the formal or public agendas. If politicians offer an issue metaphoric attention only, Cobb and Elder ( 1972) call it part of the pseudo-agenda. Randall Ripley ( 1985) has attempted to relate Cobb, Keith-Ross. Anthony Downs's (1972) formulation of the issue-attention cycle has been tailored and tested numerous times subsequently (Peters and Hogwood 1985). A valuable distinction between agenda analysis and alternatives analysis is made, even if not always retained, by Cobb, Keith-Ross, and Ross ( 1976), Kingdon ( 1997). The latter have attempted to amalgamate and theoretically reformulate the agenda-setting literature, with a particular focus on emergent a set of categories useful for both foreign and domestic policy, incremental and non-incremental change. They engender a topology of agenda procedures based on biological analogies. However their discussion of the applicability of this topology underlines the generation of alternatives for decision, particularly in the foreign policy arena, somewhat than problem recognition and definition, our major concerns. Today, as in the past, nonwhite resources for distressing the British political agenda are few and partial in scope. Though nonwhites remain a weak group politically, they do have several capacities to affect the political agenda. The major predicament is that most of their resources for getting issues on the political agenda are double-edged and are expected to rebound against them in alternative assortment. Donley Studlar and Zig Layton-Henry (1990) present a scrupulous appraisal of these inconsistent resources, together with growing numbers (currently approximately 5 percent of the total population), citizenship rather than guest worker status, concentration in urban areas, and connections to political parties, particularly Labor. On the other side, the exclusive nature of British political culture, the need of cohesion of nonwhite groups, the relative decline of race as an issue on the central government agenda, the unitary nature of British government, and the normally adverse treatment of nonwhites in the popular media lessen against agenda access and policies in line with particular nonwhite needs. Nonwhites do have what has come to be called the "race industry" lobbying on their behalf. This refers to a policy network of private research organizations and lobbying groups who have widespread contacts within the political parties, with the Race Relations and Immigration Subcommittee of the Home Affairs Select Committee, and in such quasi-governmental agencies as (in the past) the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants, the Community Relations Commission, and the Race Relations Board and (in the present) the Commission for Racial Equality and Community Relations Councils. On occasion in the past, nonwhite groups such as the Campaign against Racial Discrimination or Equal Rights have been thriving in pressure group activity to urge the government to put forward anti-discrimination legislation in a form which they favored. Over the longer term the multiethnic Runnymede Trust, supported by research from such organizations as Political and Economic Planning and the Policy Studies Institute, has been significant on behalf of racial and ethnic minorities. intermittent urban violence has also been significant in agenda setting for the inner cities, although there is substantial dispute over whether such violence can realistically be termed racial in nature. Yet, the actual initiative for most British government agenda setting on race-related issues has lain with the government itself somewhat than with outside groups. Based on experience since the sixties, government policy initiatives on race are more likely to appear throughout a Labor government, and may even be heavily reliant on the particular views of the home secretary. Even then, they lean to have a long development period, are often amended in the legislative process, and might have severe problems in enforcement. In as a minimum one instance, the Race Relations Act of 1976, the nature of the legislation seems to owe much to affording to reconcile anti-discrimination provisions in race with those of a Sex Discrimination Act passed the previous year. British governments, both Conservative and Labor, have as well shown considerable capability to resist policy plans by consultative groups both inside and outside government. The need of a persistent, broadly surrounding nonwhite lobby group since the demise of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination in the late 1960s has hampered nonwhites' attempts to place their particular issues on the governmental agenda. Although several attempts at a more coordinated policy of ethnic monitoring have been made by Conservative governments seeing as 1979, the financial stringencies of the 1980s and the unwillingness of these governments to take interventionist action on behalf of racial and ethnic minorities have led to such issues being detached from the central government agenda, barring urban violence. Even more than previously, central government has peripheralized race-related issues by assigning them to local governments, but constant battles over central government restrictions on the finance and powers of local authorities have not made the era a propitious time for successful coordinated local government agenda setting on race. Nevertheless, in some areas the local politics of race has allowed concentrated nonwhite groups to have some impact on agenda setting on such issues as multicultural education, racial discrimination in public housing, official respect for differing religious practices, and police-nonwhite relations. Studies of policy making at this level, however, suggest that even here nonwhite access to the agenda is uneven and may be countered by other groups As the general election of 1992 approached, the Labor party once again brought forward some modest proposals for changing British race relations policy, but whether this attempt at central agenda setting will be pursued with vigor is debatable (Russell 1990). In summary, then, nonwhites have an extremely limited capacity to influence the political agenda in Britain. Even then, they need the aid of sympathetic white allies, both inside and outside government. In fact, the liberal white allies are probably the key element in setting the political agenda on race-related issues in a direction favorable to nonwhite interests. Utilizing Cobb, Keith-Ross, and Ross's ( 1976) models of agenda access, domestic race relations acts in Britain closely resemble the mobilization model; governmental actors are the key initiators, in consultation with affected interests. Minority groups may have some impact on setting the agenda, but it is a subordinate one. Once an issue reaches the governmental agenda, however, the next question (analytically if not always practically) is: what alternatives exist for policy formulation In the case of British race-related policies, the alternatives rarely come from the minority groups themselves. Their contribution is to call attention to the problem, and perhaps to lobby for particular alternative "solutions." Until the last quarter century, however, British government officials were rarely confronted with race-related problems on their home territory. Even today, race relations expertise is not cultivated by many bureaucrats or politicians; the race relations industry is kept at arm's length by most governments. Evidence on the adoption and implementation of particular race-related policies by British governments suggests that officials have relied heavily on the example of the United States in formulation of such policies. Policy borrowing or lesson drawing has been most prevalent from the United States for obvious reasons. The common language, the greater U.S experience in dealing with race-related problems, and the frequent visits by bureaucrats, politicians, industrialists, trade unionists, academics, and policy researchers from one country to the other ease the inevitable problems of communication. In this instance, even though we are dealing formally with a domestic problem, it is fair to say that there is a transnational policy network which is of some importance in agenda setting in Britain and of even greater significance in generating alternatives for policy formulation. British lesson drawing from the United States is preeminent in this international policy network. Even British nonwhite interest groups and their white allies have taken their cues from the United States. The most obvious influence of the United States on British agenda setting is the sudden announcement and development of the Urban Programme in 1968. In contrast to the incremental nature of movement toward the governmental agenda of most race-related initiatives, the Urban Programme was quickly announced by Prime Minister Harold Wilson in a speech in Birmingham in the spring, and government officials scrambled to prepare and implement the strikingly brief legislation. Early 1968 was a difficult time for the government, with its restrictions on Kenyan Asians immigrating to Britain and Conservative front bencher Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" speech. Although counterbalancing these fears of racial strife was undoubtedly an impetus behind the Urban Programme, Wilson's own words suggest that he was mindful of what had occurred in other countries, particularly the contemporary urban racial disturbances in the United States, and that he was anxious to prevent similar developments in the United Kingdom. The experience of the United States, as interpreted by British researchers and policy makers, was influential in the formulation of policy, even if not in agenda setting per se. Both the Race Relations Acts of 1965 and 1968 owed much to lesson drawing from the United States. The 1965 act redeemed a Labor election manifesto pledge to legislate against racial discrimination. Never having acted in this area previously, however, both the Labor party and permanent government officials sought guidance from the United States, where the civil rights movement of the time had recently brought about the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawing racial discrimination in a wide variety of activities. Even earlier some U.S. states had acted against racial discrimination. These acts, and especially their coverage and enforcement mechanisms, were the subject of much study and debate, especially by those favoring the legislation, in the course of formulation not only of the 1965 act, but also of its successor in 1968. The major issues of coverage were whether to legislate against private acts of discrimination in housing and employment as well as those in "public places," narrowly defined. The major issue of enforcement was the relative role of conciliation mechanisms through a government agency versus individually brought cases of criminal law. The widespread perception of the Race Relations Acts as ineffective, however, and the opening of a policy window in the form of another Labor government with the same civil libertarian home secretary, Roy Jenkins, who had shepherded the 1968 bill through Parliament led to a further initiative in 1976, the third Race Relations Act. As noted previously, the form of this legislation was modeled on the Sex Discrimination Act of the previous year, an act which was brought forward after Jenkins had visited the United States and learned how the concept of indirect discrimination worked there. This policy instrument then became incorporated into British race relations law in 1976. Thus, Policy Agenda borrowing is more likely to occur in technical areas rather than in softer areas more subject to cultural differences. The fact that anti-discrimination legislation and urban policy are social rather than technical in nature would seem to make them less likely candidates for transfer. But the core values and policy goals were not at issue; the search abroad was to acquire suitable instruments (administrative techniques) to realize the goals. We can find little evidence that anti-discrimination legislation and area-based urban policy initiatives were placed on the political agenda because of lesson drawing. The extant policy studies emphasize the relevance of British experience and commitments in putting anti-discrimination legislation on the agenda. Although the urban initiatives of the Great Society in the United States may have had some influence in the more modest British proposals reaching the agenda, the weight of the evidence indicates that area-based approaches to dealing with deprivation were current in British political thinking as well, and the problem of poverty and what social policies could relieve it were a major thrust in both countries in the 1960s. lesson drawing is more important at the agenda-setting than at the alternative selection stage may be due to the particular policy area he was studying, plant closing notification legislation, and/or the fact that the separation of powers makes policy borrowing more contentious in the United States. The unitary nature of the British polity may make lesson drawing a less contentious process there. Furthermore, policy makers in the United Kingdom have been quite willing to acknowledge publicly that they are engaged in lesson drawing from the United States, in contrast to the usual tendency for policy borrowers to be less forthright about the process than policy lenders. The emphasis of lesson drawing on race-related policy by Britain from the United States has been on learning what policy instruments were more likely to work once the decision to face a problem had largely been made. This makes the long debate over what combination of enforcement models to use in anti-discrimination policy more understandable. Similarly, although the evidence is less clear, the penchant of the British government for clear lines of responsibility and ultimate central control may have led to the deliberate rejection of the U.S. form of community development. Finally, even though British urban policy is less ethnic or race-specific than in the United States, even Conservative governments have never completely abandoned financial aid to nonwhite areas. This evidence indicates that, in terms of policy types, domestic race-related policy in Britain lies closer to regulatory policy (Race Relations Acts) and distributive policy (urban aid) than to redistributive policy. Small-scale solutions and small commitments of resources--laws, personnel, finance--are emphasized. Changing the orientation of British legal thinking to allow better enforcement of race relations law, for instance, has not been attempted; that would mean a major challenge to deeply held institutional values. In contrast, similar civil rights and urban development policies in their country of origin, the United States, tended to be more redistributive or social regulatory in character, at least initially on the federal level, but the judiciary there was more prepared for a politically controversial role. Policy typologies, however, need much more extensive comparative research before firm conclusions are drawn about these matters. Even considering their handicaps in resources for agenda setting in Britain, ethnic minorities are more likely to be able to influence the political agenda than they are the latter stages of the policy process. When it comes to alternative selection, minorities lack the expertise and cohesion to be able to exert other than a very diffuse impact. Indeed, evidence suggests that lesson drawing from the United States has been a major influence on the shape that race-related legislation has taken in the United Kingdom. Even if they have allies who have a role in policy formulation at this point, ethnic minorities themselves are unlikely to be part of the transnational policy networks which enable policy borrowing to take place. Whether lesson drawing in race-related policy has led to successful transfers of policy and effective implementation remains a question for future exploration. As argued, often the wrong lessons are learned, and the barriers to effective policy transfer are considerable. Race-related policy in Britain is not immune to these difficulties. Work Cited: Petracca Mark P. 1990. "Building the Institutional Agenda: From Political Issue to Public Policy". Presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco. Sharp Elaine B. 1990. "Agenda Setting and Policy Results: Lessons from Three Drug Policy Episodes". Presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, CA. Cobb Roger W., Jennie Keith-Ross, and Marc Howard Ross. 1976. "Agenda Building as a Comparative Political Process". American Political Science Review 70:126138. Downs, A (1972) "Up and Down with Ecology: The 'Issue-Attention' Cycle", the Public Interest, 28, 38-50 Kingdon, J Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policy. 2d edition. (Boston: LittleBrown), esp. House of Commons Library Research Paper 04/08 The Higher Education Bill. Bill 35 of 2004 (downloadable at http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp2004/rp04-008.pdf) Crenson, MA The un-politics of air pollution: a study of non-decisionmaking in the cities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). Guy Peters and Brian Hogwood. 1985. "In Search of the Issue-Attention Cycle" Journal of Politics 47: 238-253. Baumgartner, FR. And Jones, BD (1993) Agendas and instability in American politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) Baumgartner, FR and Jones, BD (2002) Policy Dynamics, (University of Chicago Press). Hogwood Brian W. 1987. From Crisis to Complacency Shaping Public Policy in Britain. New York: Oxford University Press. Russell Dave. 1990. "Equal Opportunities and the Politics of Race". Talking Politics 3:8-13. Schattschneider, EE (1960) The Semisovereign People (New York: Holt, Reinhardt and Winston). Stone, D (1989). "Causal Stories and the Formation of Policy Agendas." Political Science Quarterly 104:281-300. Moore Mark H. 1988. "What Sort of Ideas Become Public Ideas" In The Power of Public Ideas, ed. Robert B. Reich. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sochart Elsie A. 1988. "Agenda Setting, the Role of Groups, and the Legislative Process: The Prohibition of Female Circumcision in Britain". Parliamentary Affairs 41:508-526. Cobb Roger W., and Charles D. Elder. 1972. Participation in American Politics: The Dynamics of Agenda-Building. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Ripley Randall B. 1985. Policy Analysis in Political Science. Chicago: Nelson-Hall. Studlar Donley T., and Zig Layton-Henry. 1990. "Nonwhite Minority Access to the Political Agenda in Britain". Policy Studies Review 9:273-292. Read More