42 4.4 – GETTING IDEAS ON THE AGENDA – PREVAILING THEORIES
- GETTING IDEAS ON THE AGENDA – PREVAILING THEORIES
How and why do some issues move successfully through the stages of the agenda setting process while others are never considered? A few short years ago, some members of Congress made a significant push to eliminate the penny (C.O.I.N.S Act, 2017). What happened to that idea? In the 1970s, manufacturers and politicians floated the idea of converting measurements to the metric system. Only three countries in the world do not use the metric system: Myanmar, Liberia, and the U.S. (Marciano, 2014). Sounds interesting, so why were measurements never changed? The world is full of policy ideas that never happened and of those that captured attention but eventually lost their appeal. Ideas and policy issues are constantly gaining and losing importance on the public agenda.
The process of getting an issue recognized and placed on the agenda is called agenda setting. During the agenda setting process, groups compete to control the agenda and promote their issue as the most important among all other issues being considered. Groups also compete to keep issues off the agenda (Cobb and Ross, 1997). It is important to note that the number of issues that governments can address is finite. Think of the agenda setting process as a “bottleneck” with all ideas attempting to rush out at once, but only a select few are considered seriously. No government can address every problem when it arises. For this reason, internal and external forces continuously compete to define problems and to ensure that their problem gains traction and influence before making it to the final level of the agenda.
Here, we examine three prevailing policy process theories—elite theory and pluralism, multiple streams framework, and advocacy coalition framework—and their relationship to agenda setting. These theories were largely developed to add depth to the traditional stages approach to policymaking, but also serve as guides to understanding how problems progress onto the public agenda. In fact, these theories compliment the study of agenda setting by illustrating the role that institutions, interests, and knowledge play in agenda setting.
