Where Does Policy Come From? The Policy Process

This chapter reviews on three dominant frameworks for explaining where policy comes from and what does change in the policy process look like, or what is commonly referred to as agenda setting: the advocacy coalition framework, punctuated equilibrium theory (PET), and the multiple streams approach, or policy windows. Scholars have long known that describing that accounting for set of actors, events, and institutions that affect the probability and size of policy change is incredibly complex. Criticism has been leveled at the three dominant frameworks mentioned above for their inability to rule out alternative explanations. Incrementalism is largely bounded rationality applied to policymaking, and for many years the incrementalist framework was the primary model for explaining stability in the policy process. However, it has an obvious flaw: policymaking is not always incremental. This is where PET and policy windows apply, explaining the factors that contribute to big policy change. The framework of boundedly rational actors in policy subsystems producing incremental change is unable to explain why public policy periodically undergoes radical change. Policy process is frustratingly complex and difficult to understand, but this has not stopped scholars—particularly political scientists—from trying to identify and understand systematic causal relationships. The rapid polarization of American politics has added to this complexity as hardened political attitudes may make citizens and the public less responsive to events normally predicted (by PET and policy windows) to be the precursors for major policy change. The special attraction of agenda setting for political science is not hard to fathom: the study of policy process is ultimately the study of political power.