The Politics of Information

Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America

Frank R. Baumgartner, Bryan D. Jones

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780226198125, 9780226198095
• eBook ISBN: 9780226198262
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Governo americano

How does the government decide what's a problem and what isn't? And what are the consequences of that process? Like individuals, Congress is subject to the "paradox of search." If policy makers don't look for problems, they won't find those that need to be addressed. But if they carry out a thorough search, they will almost certainly find new problems—and with the definition of each new problem comes the possibility of creating a government program to address it.
           
With The Politics of Attention, leading policy scholars Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones demonstrated the central role attention plays in how governments prioritize problems. Now, with The Politics of Information, they turn the focus to the problem-detection process itself, showing how the growth or contraction of government is closely related to how it searches for information and how, as an organization, it analyzes its findings. Better search processes that incorporate more diverse viewpoints lead to more intensive policymaking activity. Similarly, limiting search processes leads to declines in policy making. At the same time, the authors find little evidence that the factors usually thought to be responsible for government expansion—partisan control, changes in presidential leadership, and shifts in public opinion—can be systematically related to the patterns they observe.
           
Drawing on data tracing the course of American public policy since World War II, Baumgartner and Jones once again deepen our understanding of the dynamics of American policy making.

Part I

“Seek and Ye Shall Find”

Picture yourself an analyst with decades of experience in a federal agency charged with fighting poverty. You probably know a lot about the issue. You have seen programs come and go; you have tracked the ups and downs of the poverty rate; you have seen the political parties wax and wane on the issue; you know what innovations and experiments have been tried out in the various states; you understand the various contributing elements to poverty; you know which programs have been more and less successful in fighting aspects of it; you understand that some of them have unintended consequences; you can see gaps in the safety net; you know that political realities preclude certain policies that work in other countries; and you can see gaps in the commitment of elected officials to push for a renewal of a national war on poverty. In sum, you have a strong understanding of the complexity of the problem—as you should, since you have spent your entire career working in the trenches of a bureaucracy focused on nothing but this problem.

Now imagine yourself an opponent of increased government spending. You have nothing personally to object with the values of our federal poverty official described above, but you think taxes are too high, that there are too many programs, and that if we have not solved poverty with all the effort that has been put into it by government over the past fifty years, perhaps it is simply something that government cannot solve, period.

How do these two individuals approach the question of information? For the first, the causes of poverty are endlessly complex, and the myriad solutions to the issue vary in their effectiveness, cost, and approaches. The more we learn about the connections between poverty, education, transportation, job training, and other contributors, the better we may be able to address the problem. The more we gather information on the effectiveness of various public and private solutions to the problem, the more accurately we can calibrate our public policy response. The more information we have, the better we can justify and choose among competing solutions and programs.

The second individual may view any additional study of the causes of poverty with suspicion. Most likely, he or she may argue, it will come from a source with a vested interest in spending more money to combat the problem. If a study documents that the problem is more severe the previously recognized, will this not simply be used to demand greater spending? If it shows that a given program is more effective than the other, will not the old program remain while the new program grows dramatically? Is it not likely that wishful thinking, or social norms, will press to enact well-meaning programs to solve a national problem even if evidence suggests we do not really know what works, or if the solutions do more harm than good? No one wants to rain on the parade, but who is going to suggest we should not throw money at a problem that simply cannot be solved, or that we should not duplicate efforts already going on in the states, for example?

These dilemmas are at the heart of our book. We argue here that information is at the core of politics. We focus on complex problems with no simple solutions: war, peace, economic growth, educational attainment, and, yes, poverty assistance. We argue that the search for information is tightly connected with the implementation of solutions; therefore, our attitudes and curiosity about the nature of a social problem are closely tied with our beliefs about the value of government responses to the public policy challenges we face. With the collection of a diverse array of information about a complex problem, we discover its manifold dimensions. Understanding the multiple aspects of a given public policy problem, we justify solutions and government programs designed to attack this, then that, aspect of the problem. As we do so, government grows. But it does not grow in a neat, orderly manner. It grows organically, as different elements of a problem emerge and as our understanding of the causes and possible solutions to it arise out of professional communities of experts, social movements, the business community, other governmental agencies, and academic disciplines. Agencies and programs proliferate with slightly different missions designed to address different parts of the larger whole. Problems then emerge with regard to the coordination of these disparate institutions. Calls for “leadership” and “clarity” proliferate. And leaders attempt to impose control. A key element of what we point out is that central to any effort to impose control is one to limit, or censor, information. Declaring some aspects of a problem out of bounds for discussion, or beyond the purview of what we can do today, is central to most efforts to impose clarity, hierarchy, and efficiency in government.

The three chapters that make up Part One develop these arguments in greater detail. But the idea is very simple: The more you look for problems, the more you find. The more you seek to understand the complexity of a given problem, the more complex you find that it is. With each discovery of the nature of a social problem comes at least the possibility (not the certainty) of creating a government program to help alleviate it. With greater understanding of the multiple dimensions of complex problems, we see the proliferation of targeted programs. These trends cannot continue forever because important political actors object to the accumulation of too many overlapping agencies and they seek to impose order. Our approach to the growth of government, and the limits to this process, are new enough that we spend three chapters explaining our ideas first in the abstract and then with reference to more examples and historical cases. In Part Two, we shift to a more quantitative and empirical approach driven by the resources of the Policy Agendas Project to document the pattern of growth in the U.S. federal government with a focus on the post-1947 period. Part Three concludes with the theoretical implications of what we think is a new way of approaching the question of government growth and its causes.

1

Search, Information, and Policy Agendas

Good government requires sound mechanisms for detecting problems and prioritizing them for action. But the better the performance of the search mechanisms, the more likely is public policy action on the problems detected. And the more government action, the larger and more intrusive the government. We call this tension the paradox of search.

This is not just a theoretical proposition. We show in this book that in the United States, this tension has contributed to an arc of policy development in which the policy agenda, the arena of serious dialogue for possible government intervention, expanded to a peak, which we can locate definitively as occurring in 1978. Then the policy agenda contracted throughout our period of study, which ended in 2008. We do not claim that search alone caused the arc, but we show correspondences in data we have assembled and coded through the Policy Agendas Project that strongly indicate how central search was in this historical development and how these mechanisms became part of the ideological dialogue in the period.

In this introductory chapter, we explore the paradox, showing that it involves at its heart a tension between allowing full and free participation in the detection and discovery of public problems and orderly government in which policies are carefully implemented through hierarchies. One can have order and control, or one can have diversity and open search processes and “participatory democracy.” In theory these could occur in continual balance. This does not, however, work out so well in practice.

Handling Complexity in Problem Definition

In dealing with complex social problems with many underlying dimensions, governments must attempt to understand the issues. To understand a complex issue, governments must gather information about the issue. It is straightforward to seek out expertise on a problem that is well understood and for which known solutions exist. But how does one gather information about a problem one does not completely understand? One way to do this is to break down a large problem into its component parts and attempt to make progress one part at a time. When governments focus their attention on one element of a problem, they often can make progress in alleviating it. Food stamps do indeed allow millions of poor Americans to eat at least somewhat more nutritiously than they would if the program did not exist. But when we create a program to focus on one element (say, nutrition) of a complex and interconnected issue (say, poverty), it is not long before advocates point out that other elements or dimensions of the problem also deserve attention: housing, transportation, job training, tax structures, health care, education, personal responsibility, work ethic, equal opportunity, and family structure are also important parts of the poverty puzzle, to be sure. In an issue as complex as poverty, the more one focuses attention on the myriad dimensions of the issue, the more information one gathers, the more one understands the multidimensional character of the issue, and the more one might be tempted to create a range of public policy programs designed to address different elements of it. Poverty is not unusual with regard to its complexity. Health care or fostering economic growth or protecting national security are equally complex, for example. The more one thinks about how to address a complex social problem, the longer the list of potential ideas that might justify a new government program.

Governments face not only complex individual problems but also multiple problems, and these problems are not prioritized. That means that when they make progress, say, on poverty, some actors might say they are paying insufficient attention to, for example, the environment, health care, national defense, or the space race. There is no simple way to prioritize the diverse problems governments face. So the issue of complexity does not stop with matching solutions with multiple consequences to multifaceted and ill-understood problems. Politics is often about getting government to focus on one topic rather than another. Even if the topics are not directly in conflict with one another, all topics compete for space on the agenda.

Gathering information about complex problems, prioritizing those problems, and understanding the myriad repercussions that current policies may have on different elements of society, the economy, or other sectors require that we organize diversity into the process of gathering information. A greater diversity of information is better in helping to understand extremely complex issues and for balancing diverse priorities: information should come from as many different angles as possible. But implementing solutions and doing so efficiently requires clarity of organizational design and a clear mission. Thus, the goals of understanding the complex world around us are in fundamental conflict with the need to act. The conflict between complexity and control is at the heart of this book, and it explains fundamental tensions at the core of government since its inception.

Judging Government’s Performance

Should government be so consumed with defining problems? Not according to many analysts. We can judge government performance through two fundamental lenses. The first concentrates on democratic accountability, and in particular on the correspondence between what government does and what its citizens want. Here the question is the connection between citizen preferences and public policies. A second perspective focuses on the extent to which government solves the problems it faces. These are obviously not the only standards, but they are the most prevalent, both in the political science literature and in general discourse about government.

Both of these standards are quite obviously incomplete. What if citizen preferences are based on faulty or even misguided information? What if such policies have terrible economic, environmental, or social consequences? These and other aspects of the preference satisfaction approach have been thoroughly aired in the political science literature.

Less explored is the standard of problem solving. The key focus is on how governments detect, prioritize, and address a dynamic flow of changing challenges for the system (Jones and Baumgartner 2005b; Adler and Wilkerson 2012). Here the incomplete nature of the standard is also clear. Problems are in part subjective and in part objective, and any policy solution to a problem will have clear distributional effects. Nevertheless, the problem-solving approach has much to commend it. Ranking of problems by citizens, such as in Gallup’s long-running query about “the most important problem facing the nation,” indicate a great deal of consensus on problems. The approach focuses on questions of how a political system processes information, because information is a requirement of sound problem solving (Jones and Baumgartner 2005b). Most importantly, much of politics is not about matching policies to preferences but rather centers on the definition of problems and the design of policy solutions. And the approach makes clear that citizens can have preferences for what problems should be addressed as well as what policies should be enacted (Jones, Larsen-Price, and Wilkerson 2009).

This study, and our work more generally, is located solidly within the problem-solving perspective. In following this thread, we have increasingly come to see governments as complex adaptive systems (Jones and Baumgartner 2005b). A complex adaptive system is one that interacts dynamically with its environment by processing and responding to information and adjusting to external changes in its environment in ways that are often not proportional to the changes in the environment (in technical terms, nonlinear) and involve whole series of variables changing together such that it is hard to isolate the effect of a single one of them. The problem-solving perspective, which has a long tradition in political science, meshes well with the burgeoning literature on complex systems in other fields of inquiry.

Underlying the problem-solving perspective is an approach to understanding individual behaviors in complex organizations in which participants are seen as boundedly rational actors who are generally goal oriented but are constrained by their biological and psychological inheritances (Jones 2001). They struggle with allocating attention to the most pressing issues, become attached to solutions independently of how much they contribute to goal attainment, and become confused when faced with longer chains of causation. When the boundedly rational individual meets the complexity of modern government, the result is heightened uncertainty about the course of the future. Within this frame, the organizations that they inhabit can facilitate or inhibit the solving of problems.

A major issue in such a perspective is the complexity of modern problems facing government, and the complexity of problems (by which we mean multi-attribute situations with unappealing trade-offs) has been a (maybe the) major key to our studies. The problems facing modern governments are hard, in two senses. They involve unpalatable trade-offs, or they conflict with the values and preferences of participants such that governments must deny the problems or rethink their preferences. This can be difficult for democratically elected politicians if their constituents do not similarly update their preferences in light of emergent problems.

Information is critical for problem solving, and hence how governments recognize, organize, and respond to information is essential to understand public policy, the outputs of government activities. In particular, we have explored the role of information in causing the policy responses of governments to alternate between calm and incremental adjustments to changes in their environments and disjoint and episodic disruptions to the ongoing adjustment process.

In previous research, we examined the effects of the processing of information on government policy actions (Jones and Baumgartner 2005b). There we explored the impact of the ongoing, dynamic flow of information on a system that was conservative, in the sense that it reacted slowly to changing information signals indicating problems in the environment. That is, mostly political systems underreact to information. They do so because of the bounded rationality of political actors and because of the institutional friction built into the decision-making system. But occasionally the flow of information signals cumulated to reach crisis stage (a process we termed “error accumulation”) and major policy punctuations occurred. Sometimes the policy punctuation was preceded by major electoral shifts; sometimes not.

In this book, we turn to the frontend of the information processing in those complex adaptive systems we call governments. We want to understand what organizational mechanisms are involved in the detection of signals and the definition of problems that lead to policy action. We focus on the search mechanisms that governments employ, either consciously or unconsciously, to detect problems, prioritize them among competing issues, and design solutions for those problems.

The term “search” implies active recognition that problems may exist and that governments have established mechanisms for doing this. But in some cases search can be a side consequence of arrangements established to further other goals, in particular the ambitions of office-seeking politicians. We show in detail how the search mechanisms within congressional committees developed both as a conscious information-processing system within congress and as a consequence of changes in the electoral coalitions pushing for reform during the early 1970s.

Three Questions

We organize our exploration of search and information gathering in government by positing three key questions. Taken together, these three questions constitute what we call the paradox of search.

Is search necessary for good government?

This seems obvious. If government ignores problems that emerge from its environment, it cannot act adaptively to address those problems. But if we return to the two standards for judging government above, it is not. In the preference satisfaction approach, there is no role for search, except for the search that politicians engage in to discover the preferences of their citizens for policies (Gilligan a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I “Seek and Ye Shall Find”
• Part II Information and the Growth of Government
• Part III The Implications of Information in Government
• Appendices
• References
• Index
• Footnotes