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In a number of important articles and books—most notably Agendas and Instability in American Politics (1993), The Politics of Attention: How Government Prioritizes Problems (2005)—Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones have pioneered a distinctive approach to the study of agenda setting that has shaped research in both the U.S. politics and comparative politics subfields. The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America further expands on the theme of the political determinants, and implications, of "the organization and prioritization of information." And so we have invited a number of political scientists from a range of subfields to comment on the book and on the research agenda more generally.

Public policy scholars have stressed the importance and need for "comparing" since the 1970s-including comparing different policies, inputs, outputs, and outcomes across institutional settings. Broken down into three categories, this research note highlights recent work in comparative public policy. The first type of research is characterized by its use of the comparative method to answer two primary research questions: How do policies differ across countries, and why do they diverge? To do this, scholars in this category borrow from a myriad of literatures including economics, risk analysis, and cultural theory. The second and third categories of research add to this long-existing stream of scholarly work by using the comparative method to advance our understanding of the policy process. To achieve this, research focusing on the theories of the policy process includes two emerging trends: comparing theories across institutional configurations (how differing institutional arrangements affect policies), and comparing theories to one another (how different theories of the policy process help explain certain issues). By highlighting these recent publications, the goal of this essay is to encourage scholars from all three categories to collaborate and provide a further impetus to the subfield of comparative public policy. Adapted from the source document.

Increasingly, policy scholars are using the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to systematically study the narrative elements and strategies that policy actors and groups use to advance their agendas. The majority of these studies analyze reports, documents, and websites published by the actors and groups that are most active in the policy subsystem. Though useful, these "public consumption documents" can be difficult to find and relatively static. In this article, we suggest that the constant flow of messages and content that competing actors and groups publish on social media may provide a solution to this problem. To test this proposition, we use the NPF to analyze messages published on Twitter by competing advocacy groups in the U.S. nuclear energy policy subsystem from January 2014 to May 2014 (n = 703). We find that both groups use Twitter to disseminate messages that contain the basic elements of policy narratives. Moreover, the narratives they use include strategies that are consistent with their position in the subsystem. These findings demonstrate the utility of the NPF for research on social media and, more importantly, validate the use of Twitter data in future work on the NPF.

Until recently for advocacy groups, influencing public opinion meant press releases, newspaper articles and emails. Now, social media gives such groups the ability to advocate much more widely and at lower cost. In new research, Kuhika Gupta, Joseph T. Ripberger, and Wesley Wehde look at how opposing advocacy groups construct narratives via social media. They find that pro and anti-nuclear groups used individual tweets to construct policy narratives featuring heroes, villains and victims.

This paper evaluates the prospects for application of the "grid/group" cultural theory (CT), as advanced by Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, to the Advocacy Coalition Theory (ACF). CT would seem to be relevant to several key aspects of the ACF: the content of the core beliefs that provide the "glue" that binds coalitions; the resilience of core beliefs and associated implications for belief change and learning; and the structure of coalitions and the mechanisms for coordination and control within them. The paper considers the compatibility of the ACF's account of deep core beliefs and coalition structure with that of CT; surveys an array of empirical studies based on variations of CT; and extends accounts of change in cultural identities from CT to the ACF. In addition, we highlight some of the ways in which the ACF may offer important theoretical insights for scholars of CT, potentially clarifying hypotheses concerning the relationships among basic worldviews, more specific beliefs, and behaviors.

AbstractTrust is a key component of democratic decision‐making and becomes even more salient in highly technical policy areas, where the public relies heavily on experts for decision making and on the information provided by federal agencies. Research to date has not examined whether the members of the public place different levels of trust in the various agencies that operate within the same policy subsystem, especially in a highly technical subsystem such as that of nuclear energy and waste management. This paper explores public trust in multiple agencies operating within the same subsystem, trust in each agency relative to aggregate trust across agencies that operate within the nuclear waste subsystem, and trust in alternative agencies that have been suggested as possible players in the decision‐making process. We find that trust accorded to different federal agencies within the nuclear waste subsystem varies. The variation in trust is systematically associated with multiple factors, including basic trust in government, perceptions about the risks and benefits of nuclear energy/waste management, party identification, and education. These findings have significant implications for research on public trust in specific government agencies, alternative policy entities, and for policy makers who want to design robust and successful policies and programs in highly technical policy domains.

Deep core beliefs represent an important yet theoretically underspecified concept within the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). This underspecification can (in part) be attributed to the ad hoc way in which ACF scholars have defined and measured the concept over time. To overcome this, we advocate the development and future use of a standardized metric for measuring deep core beliefs in ACF studies. Such a measure, we contend, should be multidimensional, generalizable, measurable using multiple techniques, and broad enough in scope to operate across virtually all policy domains. Using these criteria as our benchmark, we evaluate the viability of cultural theory (CT) as one such metric. In short, we find that CT meets all of these criteria, and therefore provides ACF scholars with a way to measure deep core beliefs across enduring public policy disputes that are demarcated by conflicting belief systems. Accordingly, we advocate its use in future studies.

As the US faced its lowest levels of reported trust in government, the COVID-19 crisis revealed the essential service that various federal agencies provide as sources of information. This Element explores variations in trust across various levels of government and government agencies based on a nationally-representative survey conducted in March of 2020. First, it examines trust in agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services, state health departments, and local health care providers. This includes variation across key characteristics including party identification, age, and race. Second, the Element explores the evolution of trust in health-related organizations throughout 2020 as the pandemic continued. The Element concludes with a discussion of the implications for agency-specific assessments of trust and their importance as we address historically low levels of trust in government. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. ; This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. RAPID-2026763. The authors would also like to thank the offices of the Senior Vice President and Provost and the Vice President for Research and Partnerships for their financial support. This support allowed us to make this volume available as Open Access permanently so that as many people as possible have access to the volume. ; Yes

Methods for identifying relevant policy impacts for valuation in benefit-cost analyses (BCAs) have received relatively little attention in academic research, applied policy analyses, and guidance documents. In this paper, we develop a systematic, transparent, and replicable process that draws upon information contained in records of Congressional hearings to identify relevant policy impacts for valuation in a BCA. Our approach involves classifying – and subsequently analyzing – statements from witnesses testifying in Congressional hearings on the topic of the BCA. By using Congressional hearings as the basis for our approach, we are identifying potential policy impacts from information provided during the very process the BCA is intended to inform. However, because this approach is quite resource-intensive and would be somewhat burdensome for agencies to implement, it may be best applied in the academic realm, with identified impacts resulting from such applications then made available to agency personnel for potential inclusion in BCAs. Using the case of the Glen Canyon Dam, we demonstrate the approach and its resulting improvements in the quality and transparency of the BCA it was intended to inform.

AbstractAs the United States is at historic lows of trust in government, various agencies are seeking to convince members of the public to take key protective actions and to support novel policy actions intended to reduce the spread of COVID‐19. This article assesses the status of trust in key organizations relevant to pandemic information based on a national survey of residents of the United States. First, the article illustrates the variations in trust placed in various agencies—local to global agencies and governmental and private sector organizations. Second, the analysis reveals considerable variances in trust in specific organizations based on party identification. Finally, the results indicate that trust is important as it is related to the intention to adopt personal protective actions and support for key public policies.

Survey-based contingent valuation (CV) techniques are commonly used to value the potential effects of a policy change when market-based valuation of those effects is not possible. The results of these analyses are often intended to inform policy decisions, which are made within the context of formal policymaking institutions. These institutions are typically designed to reduce the large number of potential options for addressing any given policy problem to a binary choice between the continuation of current policy and a single, specified alternative. In this research we develop an approach for conducting CV exercises in a manner consistent with the decision structure typically faced by policymakers. The data generated from this approach allow for an estimate of willingness to pay (WTP) for a defined policy alternative, relative to leaving policy unchanged, which we argue is of direct interest to policymakers. We illustrate our approach within the context of policy governing the storage of used nuclear fuel in the United States. We value the policy option of constructing an interim storage facility relative to continuation of current policy, wherein used nuclear fuel is stored on-site at or near commercial nuclear generating plants. We close the paper with a discussion of the implications for future research and the role of CV in the policymaking process.