Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-21T22:59:51.041Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Predictable and Unpredictable Policy Windows: Institutional and Exogenous Correlates of Canadian Federal Agenda-Setting*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Michael Howlett
Michael Howlett
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article addresses the question of the applicability of John Kingdon's theory of agenda-setting to Canadian political life. It examines the extent to which agenda-setting in Canadian governments is routine or discretionary, predictable or unpredictable, and the extent to which it is influenced by events and activities external to itself. The study uses time series data collected on issue mentions related to Native affairs, the constitution, drug abuse, acid rain, the nuclear industry and capital punishment in parliamentary debates and committees between 1977 and 1992. It compares these series to other time series developed from media mentions, violent crime rates, unemployment rates, budget speeches and speeches from the throne, elections and first ministers' conferences over the same period in order to assess the impact of such events on public policy agenda-setting.

Résumé

Cet article aborde la question de l'applicabilité de la théorie de John Kingdon portant sur l'établissement des priorités dans la vie politique canadienne. Il examine dans quelle mesure l'établissement des priorités dans les gouvernements canadien est routinié ou discrétionnaire, prévisible ou imprévisible et dans quelle mesure ce processus est influencé par les événements ou les activités qui lui sont extéieurs. Cette étude utilise des données sérielles sur des enjeux reliés aux questions autochtones, à la constitution, à l'usage abusif des drogues, aux pluies acides, à l'industrie nucléaire et aux débats parlementaires et dans les comités portant sur la peine de mort entre 1977 et 1992. Cet article compare ces séries à d'utres développées à partir de mentions dans les média, les niveaux de crimes violents, les niveaux de chômage, les discours sur les budgets et les discours du trône, les élections et les conférences des premiers ministres au cours de la même période dans le but d'évaluer l'impact de ces événements sur l'établissement des priorités dans les politiques publiques.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , September 1998 , pp. 495 - 524
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See Cobb, Roger W. and Elder, Charles D., Participation in American Politics: The Dynamics of Agenda-Building (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1972)Google Scholar.

2 See Allison, Graham T. and Halperin, Morton H., “Bureaucratic Politics: A Paradigm and Some Policy Implications,” World Politics 24 Supplement (1972), 40–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 On the policy cycle see Howlett, M. and Ramesh, M., Studying Public Policy: Policy Cycles and Policy Subsystems (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

4 See Cobb, R., Ross, J. K. and Ross, M. H., “Agenda Building as a Comparative Political Process,” American Political Science Review 70 (1976), 127–136CrossRefGoogle Scholar. More recently see Rochefort, David A. and Cobb, Roger W. eds., The Politics of Problem Definition: Shaping the Policy Agenda (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

5 See, for example, the critical article by Downs, Anthony, “Up and Down with Ecology —The ‘Issue-Attention Cycle,’ “ The Public Interest 28 (1972), 38–50Google Scholar. On the application of this model to Canada see Howlett, Michael, “Issue-Attention Cycles and Punctuated Equilibrium Models Re-Considered: An Empirical Examination of Agenda-Setting in Canada,” this Journal 30 (1997), 5–29Google Scholar; and Howlett, Michael, “Agenda-Setting in Canada: Evidence from Six Case Studies,”paper presented at the annual meeting of the British Columbia Political Studies Association, 1996Google Scholar. See also Hogwood, Brian W., Ups and Downs: Is There an Issue-Attention Cycle in Britain? No. 89 (Glasgow: Strathclyde Papers in Government and Politics, 1992)Google Scholar.

6 Kingdon, John W., Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984)Google Scholar.

7 Woods, B. Dan and Peake, Jeffrey S., “The Dynamics of Foreign Policy Agenda-Setting,” American Political Science Review 92 (1998), 173–184CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 See Zahariadis, Nikoloas, Markets, States, and Public Policy: Privatization in Britain and France (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Zahariadis, Nikoloas and Allen, Christopher S., “Ideas, Networks, and Policy Streams: Privatization in Britain and Germany,” Policy Studies Review 14 (1995), 71–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 See Sharp, Elaine B., “Paradoxes of National Anti-Drug Policymaking,” in Rochefort, David A. and Cobb, Roger W., eds., The Politics of Problem Definition: Shaping the Policy Agenda (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), 98–116Google Scholar.

10 Lober, Douglas J., “Explaining the Formation of Business-Environmentalist Collaborations: Collaborative Windows and the Paper Task Force,” Policy Sciences 30 (1997), 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Keeler, John T. S., “Opening the Window for Reform: Mandates, Crises and Extraordinary Policy-Making,” Comparative Political Studies 25 (1993), 433–486CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies, esp. chaps. 7 and 8.

13 Ibid., 213.

14 Ibid., 176.

15 Other authors, of course, argue that agenda-setting is a much more random process. See Baumgartner, Frank R. and Jones, Bryan D., Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

16 Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies, 216.

17 Ibid., 193.

18 Much of Kingdon's analysis is based on earlier work undertaken by Jack Walker into the agenda-setting process followed in the US Senate. Examining Walker's work, it becomes apparent that Kingdon's principle hypothesis related to the frequency of predictable and unpredictable windows was derived from the application of Walker's observation that US Senate agenda items varied widely in their level of institutionalization or “routinization.” Kingdon also made use of Walker's distinction between “discretionary” and “nondiscretionary” issues. See Walker, Jack L., “Setting the Agenda in the U.S. Senate: A Theory of Problem Selection,” British Journal of Political Science 7 (1977), 423–445CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 See Wilkinson, Leland, Hill, MaryAnn and Vang, Erin. SYSTAT: Statistics, Version 5.2. Edition (Evanston: SYSTAT, 1992)Google Scholar; and SPSS, SPSS Trends 6.1. (Chicago: SPSS, 1994)Google Scholar.

20 On these techniques see Chatfield, C., The Analysis of Time Series: An Introduction (London: Chapman Hall, 1989)Google Scholar; and Gottman, John M., Time Series Analysis: A Comprehensive Introduction for Social Scientists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar. See also Priestley, M. B., Spectral Analysis and Time Series, Vol. 2: Multivariate Series, Prediction and Control (New York: Academic Press, 1981)Google Scholar; and Thrall, Tony and Engelman, Laszlo, “Univariate and Bivariate Spectral Analysis,” in Dixon, W. J., ed., BMDP Statistical Software Manual, Vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 971–1012Google Scholar.

21 For similar analyses see Beecher, Janice A., Lineberry, Robert L. and Rich, Michael J., “Community Power, the Urban Agenda, and Crime Policy,” Social Science Quarterly 62 (1981), 630–643Google Scholar; and King, Gary and Laver, Michael, “Party Platforms, Mandates and Government Spending,” American Political Science Review 87 (1993), 744–750CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 See McCleary, Richard and Hay, Richard A., Applied Time Series Analysis for the Social Sciences (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980)Google Scholar; Ostrom, Charles W., Time Series Analysis: Regression Techniques (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1990), 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vandaele, Walter, Applied Time Series and Box-Jenkins Models (New York: Academic Press, 1983)Google Scholar; and Chatfield, C., The Analysis of Time Series: An Introduction (London: Chapman Hall, 1989)Google Scholar.

23 Because the first order correlations are high for all series, ARIMA methods should be utilized rather than an ordinary least squares method (since the significant auto-correlation in the series violate crucial assumptions in OLS analysis). See McCleary and Hay, Applied Time Series Analysis.

24 On this technique see Ibid., 240–43; Liu, Lon-mu, “Box-Jenkins Time Series Analysis,” in Dixon, W. J., ed., BMDP Statistical Software Manual, Vol. I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 429–482Google Scholar; and Vandaele, Applied Time Series and Box-Jenkins Models, 286–91.

25 Coherency “measures the linear correlation between two series at each frequency and is analogous to the square of the ordinary product-moment correlation coefficient.” See Chatfield, The Analysis of Time Series, 147.

26 Beecher et al. have argued that the key effect to watch for is “agenda-density,” or how many issues are on the agenda at one time. See Beecher et al., “Community Power, the Urban Agenda, and Crime Policy,” 630–43.

27 On this “traditional” behaviour of policy entrepreneurs, see Mintron, Michael, “Policy Entrepreneurs and the Diffusion of Innovation,” American Journal of Political Science 41 (1997), 738–770CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Durrant, Robert F. and Diehl, Paul F., “Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policy: Lessons from the U.S. Foreign Policy Agenda,” Journal of Public Policy 9 (1989), 179–205CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 See Klijn, Erik-Hans, “Analyzing and Managing Policy Processes in Complex Networks: A Theoretical Examination of the Concept Policy Network and Its Problems,” Administration and Society 28 (1996), 90–119CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Leik, Robert K.. “New Directions for Network Exchange Theory: Strategic Manipulation of Network Linkages,” Social Networks 14 (1992), 309–323CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and de Bruijn, Johan A. and ten Heuvelhof, Ernst F., “Policy Networks and Governance,” in Weimer, David L. ed., Institutional Design (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), 161–179CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 See Tufte, Edward R., Political Control of the Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Nordhaus, W., “The Political Business Cycle,” Review of Economic Studies 42 (1975), 169–190CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hibbs, Douglas A. Jr., “Political Parties and Macroeconomic Policy, “American Political Science Review 71 (1977), 1467–1487CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hibbs, Douglas A. Jr., The Political Economy of Industrial Democracies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 See especially Schneider, F. and Frey, Bruno S., “Politico-Economic Models of Macroeconomic Policy: A Review of the Empirical Evidence,” in Willett, Thomas D., ed., Political Business Cycles: The Political Economy of Money, Inflation and Unemployment (Durham: Duke University Press, 1988), 239–275Google Scholar, for a review of the many empirical studies which have failed to reveal evidence of the existence of such cycles. For Canada see Johnston, Richard, Public Opinion and Public Policy in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), esp. 119–44Google Scholar; and Foot, David K., “Political Cycles, Economic Cycles and the Trend in Public Employment in Canada,” in Bucovetsky, Meyer W., ed., Studies in Public Employment and Compensation in Canada (Toronto: Institute for Research on Public Policy, 1979), 65–80Google Scholar.

31 Johnston found that “On balance, the now classic formulation of the politicalbusiness cycle finds little support in Canadian attitudinal data. Canadians are not systematically more averse to unemployment than to inflation; if anything the opposite is true. Over time, aversion shifts back and forth sharply, according to whichever of inflation or unemployment yields the worst reading.” See Johnston, Public Opinion and Public Policy in Canada, 144. Foot argued that “generally, the cyclical economic and political factors at the national level examined in this chapter do not appear to have had a significant impact on the variation in the ratio of ‘public’ employment to total employment.” See Foot, “Political Cycles, Economic Cycles and the Trend in Public Employment in Canada,” 79.

32 See Zelditch, Morris Jr., Harris, William, Thomas, George M. and Walker, Henry A., “Decisions, Nondecisions and Metadecisions,” Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change 5 (1983), 1–32Google Scholar; Jones, Bryan D., Reconceiving Decision-Making in Democratic Politics: Attention, Choice and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Howlett, Michael and Rayner, Jeremy “Do Ideas Matter? Policy Subsystem Configurations and Policy Change in the Canadian Forest Sector,” Canadian Public Administration 38 (1995), 382–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 See MacFarland, Andrew S., “Interest Groups and Political Time: Cycles in America,” British Journal of Political Science 21 (1991), 257–285, 264CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Durr, Robert H., “What Moves Policy Sentiment?” American Political Science Review 87 (1993), 158–72; James A. Stimson, Public Opinion in America: Moods Cycles and Swings (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991); James A. Stimson, Michael B. Mackuen and Robert S. Erikson, “Dynamic Representation,” American Political Science Review 89 (1995), 543–565Google Scholar; and Lewis-Beck, Michael S., Economics and Elections: The Major Western Democracies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 137–152Google Scholar. See also Suzuki, Motoshi, “Political Business Cycles in the Public Mind,” American Political Science Review 86 (1992), 989–996CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Adams, Greg D., “Abortion: Evidence of an Issue Evolution,” American Journal of Political Science 41 (1997), 718–737CrossRefGoogle Scholar.