Agenda Setting in Comparative Perspective

I t has been more than 50 years since the discipline was split by the difficulty of studying “power” and “influence.” Writers such as E. E. Schattschneider (1960) and Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz (1962) brought our attention to the scope of conflict and those issues kept off the agenda as fundamental strategies of political control. Schattschneider wrote that the struggle over what to fight about was the most fundamental political conflict of all. Bachrach and Baratz noted that if political debate could be restricted only to those issues that were comparatively innocuous to those in power, we could have the appearance of democratic debate and pluralism inside an elitist structure. Overall, our profession responded to these challenges by bifurcating. One group took the critique as an argument not to do large-scale empirical work on decision-making processes at all, essentially eschewing behavioralism and empiricism as a valid methodology. Another responded with narrower but more careful work designed to clearly answer some questions while leaving these bigger issues unexplored. Perhaps they were interesting questions, but they just could not be addressed in a scientifically valid manner, so better to focus more narrowly on what we could indeed accomplish. Mancur Olson (1965) was the most influential within one group, bringing interest-group studies away from the study of influence, policymaking, and lobbying and toward the more tractable question of who joins a group. Anthony Downs (1957) provided the model for an even larger group, reducing the political struggle to one played out on a strategic platform based on a single dimension of conflict relating to larger or smaller government. One thing that disappeared in all of this was the study of what governments actually do. Agenda Setting, Policies, and Political Systems proposes a more complete political science, one that accepts the challenge of the critics of pluralism rather than flees from it as an insurmountable obstacle. In fact, its contributors argue that we cannot have a theory of politics without a theory of public policy. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (2014) have recently commented on the decline of the Downsian perspective and the rise of a new, policy-focused perspective within political science. Whereas the Downsian approach emphasizes elections and the role of parties in seeking election to office by positioning themselves strategically on an ideological left—right scale, “in the policy-focused approach, pride of place is given not to elections but to policies—to the exercise of government authority for particular purposes” (Hacker and Pierson 2014, 644). They argue that “the waning of the Downsian era has the potential to open up new opportunities for constructive engagement between electorally-oriented studies and those that place public policy and organized groups at the heart of analysis” (p. 656), and conclude their essay by stating: “We need to bring policy back in, not just to better understand what government does, but also to better understand why” (p. 657). In the edited volume under review, Christoffer GreenPedersen and Stefaan Walgrave, working with 27 collaborators and presenting chapters on 11 different countries, illustrate the potential of a policy-focused approach. The project is as much intellectual as it is methodological. Intellectually it is focused on integrating the study of public policy with the study of political conflict. Methodologically it is focused on a large empirical sweep that takes advantage of collaboration, openness, and shared data infrastructure, encouraging large scientific teams to work together and in a way that fosters replication and collaboration rather than in isolated research projects where each scholar must develop a novel theoretical approach as well as a distinctive (but necessarily smaller scale) set of evidence to test it. Further, the Frank R. Baumgartner ([email protected]) is the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.