Agendas and Instability in American Politics.

Good scholarship on U.S. agenda-setting should produce not only interesting descriptive research in specific policy areas, but provacative commentary on how the political system operates in general. Baumgartner and Jones in Agendas and Instability in American Politics have produced good scholarship on agenda-setting. The authors examine a variety of policy areas using a longitudinal approach that reveals that "...our government can best be understood as a series of institutionally enforced stabilities, periodically punctuated by dramatic change." (p.251) Change in the U.S. political system, then, is best understood by drawing on the "punctuated equilibrium" model that paleontologists developed to explain the dynamics of evolution.

Baumgartner and Jones examine a variety of policy areas, including nuclear power, pesticides, smoking, auto safety, urban affairs, drug abuse, alcohol abuse and child abuse, to illustrate the value of the punctuated equilibrium model. The presentation of case material is clear, and the longitudinal data on media and congressional interest in policy topics is handled deftly. The authors are particularly successful in their stated goal of illustrating how issue re-definition can destroy old institutional settings that remain powerful after "agenda enthusiasm" wanes. In many of the policy areas examined by the authors "policy monopolies," which had limited conflict and stifled participation, were challenged in the 1950s and 1960s by new interests with new understandings of the goals of public policy. The authors present an agenda approach to explaining the disappearance of iron triangles and the emergence of more nebulous issue networks.

In the final section of the book, the authors connect their agenda insights with institutional changes that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. The focus here is on interest group development and the decentralization in Congress. Too little attention is devoted to the courts, and the congressional role in providing interest groups with standing before the courts is unexplored. These omissions are far from serious, though, and the inclusion of some institutional analyses provides the reader with some interesting research directions to pursue after finishing this section.

The idea that the U.S. political system is characterized by periods of institutional stability that are upset rapidly and dramatically by new definitions, issues and institutions is not quite as novel as BAumgartner and Jones suggest. Walter Dean Burnham has argued that ther are "critical elections" which abruptly change the dominant political party and alter the central political issues facing the electorate. A critical election sets the agenda for approximately thirty-six years before the next critical election reshapes the political landscape. (Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics, 1970) Given the decline of U.S. parties it is not surprising that Burnham's model is not mentioned. However, for both models 1968 is an important date. In Burnham's model it should have been the first criticall election since 1932 (but 1968 did not meet some of the important standards of the model). In the punctuated equilibrium model, 1968 is an important year for the re-definition of many policy issues. Some examination by Baumgartner and Jones of this coincidence seems warranted.

Agendas and Instability in American Politics is a stimulating inquiry into agendas and the nature of the political system. The empirical work on agendas should provoke more, and much needed, historical analyses of language, causal stories and institutions. The puncutated equilibrium model will certainly draw attention from those less sanguine about the possibilities for substantial change in institutional arrangements and policy outcomes. Even the readers who remain unpursuaded will be challenged to rethink their conceptual frameworks. This is what good policy scholarship should achieve.

Dwight C. Kiel
University of Central Florida