The Emergence and Transformation of Policy Ideas in the U.S. Congress, 1946-2015

• In Event: 3246 - The Politics of Public Policy

Abstract

Much of the literature on the policy process in political sociology and political science focuses on agenda setting, policy passage, and implementation. However, policymaking is not just about which policies pass, but about competition over ideas. Yet, to date, our understanding of the policy process is missing a systematic analysis of how problem definitions and policy proposals change in institutional politics. In this paper, we examine how policy ideas change within Congress. To investigate the ways in which policy ideas emerge and change over time, we build a new dataset of transcripts of every public Congressional hearing from 1946 to 2015. Using computational text analysis and event history analysis, we trace change in the composition of policy debate, and identify points in time when the policy ideas that dominate this debate change. We focus our analysis on four policy areas: Immigration, Education, Social Welfare, and Defense. We find evidence that change in which policy ideas dominate a particular policy area occurs in a two-stage process. In the first stage, increased media attention to, and public concern regarding, a policy issue leads to an increase in attention diversity (the number of policy ideas that are prevalent in Congressional debate) within a policy area. In stage two, increased attention diversity has a positive lagged effect on the likelihood that the policy idea that dominates in a particular policy are will change. However, this process is constrained by the structure of the institutional venue within which political debate occurs. The more that Congressional attention in a policy area is dispersed, the less likely that a new policy idea will come to dominate debate in that area.

Authors

• David Lee Rigby, UNC Chapel Hill

• Akram Al-Turk, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill