The focusing event theory has been substantially formed by contributions of John Kingdon by offering a somewhat broader definition of focusing events through the prism of his multiple streams theory, and Thomas Birkland, who introduced better precision by listing a number of basic characteristics of focusing events (e.g. using the example of 9/11 terrorist attacks as a focusing event, as in Birkland 2004). These major contributions notwithstanding, there still seems to be a strikingly persistent absence of clarity in defining the notion of "focusing events" within the agenda-setting stage of the policy process, and a lack of a general typology of related significant, or key events. Even somewhat more disturbing is that, inspired by Birkland's notion of focusing events, a number of subsequent scholars attempted to develop this theory, unintentionally further conflating the meaning of focusing events.Thus, it is important not only to more clearly define focusing events but also to develop an operationalizable typology of a broader set of related anchor events as applied to agenda-setting. It is precisely these two issues that form the analytical essence and contributions this paper aims to achieve. The focusing event theory has become increasingly vital to explain a wide range of social and policy-related events, e.g. 9/11, large-scale earthquakes, major healthcare reforms in a given jurisdiction etc.
The paper reviews existing literature on the role of the internet in addressing corruption by breaking it down into instrumental, important, and critical roles, across two types of political regimes – (semi-)authoritarian and democracies. It analyzes the key resources and strategies utilized by governments and activists across these regimes, and looks into the common themes that emerge as a result of analyzing literature sources, i.e. the notion of crisis, lack of a single accepted definition of corruption across nations, factors found to positively correlate with reduced corruption, and the evolving nature of the internet. The paper finds that neither regime can be perfectly immune against mass-scale protests caused by dissatisfaction with worsening corruption. However, the regimes differ in the nature of protests, with semi-authoritarian regimes witnessing more violent and aggressive uprisings fueled by long-accumulated social disappointment with previous repressive regimes than across much of democracies.
While similarly taking an actor-centric approach to studying agenda-setting interactions, this paper seeks to fill a gap in existing policy research by explicitly assuming the government’s capacity and motivation to withstand the external pressure that is often exerted by other key actors, and thus by introducing a concept of government resilience as applied to agenda-setting. It furthermore attempts to quantify the notion of government resilience, thus addressing the issue of operationalizing a change in public policy. Reflective of growing calls among scholars to look into policy change in the developing world, this paper develops a framework that could be useful not only in assessing the degree of resilience of a certain actor, e.g. the government, as applied to agenda-setting but used as a diagnostic tool to assess the government’s capacity to pursue its agenda and implement policy measures. Seeking to explore the potential applicability of the new framework in the context of economic diversification across two post-Soviet nations – Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan – this study looks into the time span of 2008-2017.
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