Policy Punctuations in American Political Institutions

Abstract

P olitical institutions translate inputs-in the form of changed preferences, new participants, newinformation, or sudden attention to previously available information-into policy outputs. In the process they impose costs on this translation, and these costs increase institutional friction. We argue that the "friction" in political institutions leads not to consistent "gridlock" but to long periods of stasis interspersed with dramatic policy punctuations. As political institutions add costs to the translation of inputs into outputs, institutional friction will increase, and outputs from the process will become increasingly punctuated overall. We use a stochastic process approach to compare the extent of punctuations among 15 data sets that assess change in U.S. government budgets, in a variety of aspects of the public policy process, in election results, and in stock market returns in the United States. We find that all of these distributions display positive kurtosis-tall central peaks (representing considerable stability) and heavy tails (reflecting the punctuations, both positive and negative). When we order institutions according to the costs they impose on collective action, those with higher decision and transaction costs generate more positive kurtosis. Direct parameter estimates indicate that all distributions except budget data were best fit by the double-exponential probability distribution; budgets are Paretian.

Party Reputations and Policy Priorities: How Issue Ownership Shapes Executive and Legislative Agendas

“…This relationship is illustrated in Figure 2b, which exhibits the marginal effects. 82 Jones and Baumgartner 2005;Jones, Sulkin, and Larsen 2003. There are very strong parallels in these effects, comparing Figure 2b for legislation, above, and Figure 1b for executive speeches. These findings jointly reveal that electorally popular parties in the US are less influenced by the public's relative issue competence evaluations than electorally unpopular parties, which supports Hypothesis 3a but not 3b.…”

“…57 Cohen 1997. 58 Jones, Sulkin, and Larsen 2003. time are generally insulated from electoral pressures that might otherwise create incentives to emphasize party issue strengths. It also reduces lawmakers' propensity to be responsive in the short term to changes in issue salience or popularity.…”

Stability and change in international policy-making: A punctuated equilibrium approach

“…In abstract terms, institutional friction can be understood as the costs involved in the translation of policy inputs into policy outputs (Jones et al 2003). In concrete terms, institutional friction consists of the hurdles built into policy-making through divisions of power and procedural thresholds for policy adoption.…”

Understanding and influencing the policy process

“…Indeed, to find the ''scientific'' approach in policy process research, people need look no further than to Dr. Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize for her work within the institutional analysis and development framework (Ostrom 1990(Ostrom , 2005 or to Drs. Bryan Jones and Frank Baumgartner's arguments on institutional friction affecting incremental and punctuated policy change (Baumgartner et al 2009;Jones et al 2003). Of course, many unanswered questions remain.…”