Information Processing

The Politics of Attention How Government Prioritizes Problems

Bryan D. Jones
Frank R. Baumgartner

Government seldom has to seek out information; policymakers are generally bombarded with demands for action. How political leaders prioritize these many potential problems is at least as important as the preferences and ideologies that these political leaders harbor in determining public policy. Problem-prioritization is related to the objective conditions that policymakers face, how they interpret these conditions, and how governing institutions act to focus attention on some problems rather than others. This is information-processing, and The Politics of Attention is the first study of American politics based in an information-processing perspective.

Problems are prioritized by government when policymakers attend to them-when they are 'on the agenda'. Using the Policy Agendas datasets, The Politics of Attention studies the allocation of attention and the operation of governing institutions since the Second World War. The operation of attention allocation within the American system of separated powers invariably leads to disjoint and episodic policy outputs, even in the absence of 'triggering' events.

The Politics of Attention proposes an entirely new way of looking at American politics. It asks how the system solves, or fails to solve, problems rather than address how preferences are realized through political action, the prevailing analytical approach in the discipline of political science. It asks that we put aside the blinders of a preference-centered political science in favor of a problem-solving perspective. This leads to a dynamic view of politics in the response of policymakers to the flow of information.