The Death of Policy Process Theories? Agenda-Setting in the Age of Machines

The Multiple Streams Framework, Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, the Advocacy Coalition Framework, and the Narrative Policy Framework rest on five tacit premises about political information so self-evident when the theories were formulated that they were never explicitly stated: that political information is human-produced, filtered by identifiable gatekeepers, reflective of authentic public opinion, distinguishable from noise, and anchored in verifiable events. However, a radical transformation of the informational ecosystem completely upends these premises: machines — AI and LLMs — now produce political information indistinguishable from that produced by humans. As a consequence, this article argues that the canonical theories are, in the Kuhnian sense, dying. Through agenda-setting, where the four theories converge, it shows that their core mechanisms lose the substrate on which they were built to operate. It proposes a new Epistemic Policy Process (EPP) theory based on three dimensions to circumscribe the conditions under which the classical theories can still hold, and maybe stay alive.