Focusing Events, Mobilization, and Agenda Setting

The policy literature often mentions the agenda-setting influence of focusing events, but few policy studies systematically examine the dynamics of these events. This article closes this gap by examining focusing events, group mobilization and agenda-setting. Using natural disasters and industrial accidents as examples, most focusing events change the dominant issues on the agenda in a policy domain, they can lead to interest group mobilization, and groups often actively seek to expand or contain issues after a focusing event. I explain how differences in the composition of policy communities and the nature of the events themselves influence group and agenda dynamics. The organization of policy communities is an important factor in agenda setting, but agenda setting and group politics vary considerably with the type of event and the nature of the policy community. Many social scientists have cited the importance of sudden, attentiongrabbing events, known as focusing events, in advancing issues on the agenda and as potential triggers for policy change (Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Cobb and Elder 1983; Kingdon 1995; Light 1982; Walker 1977). While dramatic events are commonly understood to attract increased attention to public problems, few studies of the policy process have empirically studied the influence of these events on the agenda generally, or on group activity in particular. This article builds on existing theories of the policy process to explain the dynamics and importance of focusing events. This is accomplished 1 This research was supported by a National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act Graduate Fellowship and a University of Washington Graduate Fellowship. I thank Peter May, Mark Donovan, Regina Lawrence, and several anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this work. I also thank Steven Brooks, John Tierney, Ben Fordham and Dave Waguespack for their comments on this version of this article, and on an earlier version presented at the 1996 meeting of the American Political Science Association. 5554$$$$p3 15-04-98 14:41:54 Thomas A. Birkland 54 by applying evidence of post-event policy making in four event-prone policy domains: earthquakes, hurricanes, oil spills, and nuclear power plant accidents. While there are several ways of looking at the social and political influences of focusing events, this article concentrates on interest group mobilization after focusing events, with particular attention to four elements of post-event mobilization: change in the dominant issues on the agenda; change in the dominant issues in a policy domain; evidence of event-driven group mobilization; and evidence of group attempts to expand or contain issues in the wake of these events. It is important to test theories of the dynamics of post-event politics, both to explain the dynamics of focusing events and to narrow gaps in policy studies. Journalists often claim that focusing events concentrate attention on previously dormant issues. Such a claim seems sensible, but reveals little about the agenda and group dynamics that follow these events. The literature hints at these dynamics, but has never subjected these ideas to testing. Thus, this study is inspired by the need to avoid proliferating policy theories that are difficult or impossible to test (Greenberg et al. 1977; Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993). Narrowing this gap in our understanding of the policy process is important, for dramatic events are not politically neutral. Focusing events serve as important opportunities for politically disadvantaged groups to champion messages that had been effectively suppressed by dominant groups and advocacy coalitions. Such events can therefore be an important tool for groups seeking policy change. A focusing event is an event that is sudden; relatively uncommon; can be reasonably defined as harmful or revealing the possibility of potentially greater future harms; has harms that are concentrated in a particular geographical area or community of interest; and that is known to policy makers and the public simultaneously (Birkland 1997; Kingdon 1995, 94–100). Defining focusing events in this way guides the researcher in selecting the appropriate domains for studying focusing events, and helps us to understand more clearly why some events are more intensely ‘‘focal’’ than others. Focusing events gain attention more suddenly and rapidly than problems such as crime or disease that longer-term analysis of statistical evidence seeks to understand. The immediately obvious harms done by focusing events highlight problems to which government or other institutions might respond. These harms are usually concentrated in a particular geographical area, so that evidence of the harms done by an event is more obvious than when the harms are distributed throughout a region or nation. However, communities of interest are as important as geographically defined communities. An oil spill in Alaska, for example, will be of particular interest to people who live in coastal 5554$$$$p3 15-04-98 14:41:54 Focusing Events, Mobilization, and Agenda Setting 55 Washington State or even coastal Europe. Seemingly ‘‘local’’ events can gain national and world attention, and new groups and coalitions are formed within a policy domain to address problems that could affect other communities. While focusing events are ‘‘focal’’ because they do obvious damage, the harms done by other events are sometimes subtle, contested, and difficult to visualize, and are less likely to be focal. For example, many observers considered the 1979 Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear accident to be very serious. However, its influence on the agenda may not be as great as might be expected, because its harms – if any – were unclear and relatively hard to detect and understand. Almost twenty years after TMI, debate persists over the extent of any harms done to people from possible radiation leaks. By contrast, the harms done by natural disasters and oil spills appear more obvious, illustrated in compelling images of destroyed buildings, or dead wildlife, which have considerable power to expand the agenda. This is a central reason for the differences between politics of oil spills and nuclear power plant accidents discussed in this article. Group Mobilization and Issue Expansion Focusing events can lead interest groups, government leaders, policy entrepreneurs, the news media, or members of the public to identify new problems, or to pay greater attention to existing but dormant problems, potentially leading to a search for solutions in the wake of apparent policy failure. At the heart of this activity is the constant search by interest groups for opportunities to advocate policy change based as much on advocacy opportunities as on technically superior analysis (Kingdon 1995; Majone 1989). Claims of policy failure are therefore made by pro-change groups in an attempt to expand an issue to a broader audience. These event-triggered issue expansion efforts should be clearly evident in post-event policy making, as groups seek to move their preferred ideas from the systemic agenda (the collection of all possible policy ideas) to the institutional agenda (the list of possible policies up for active consideration) (Cobb and Elder 1983). Group efforts to expand issues are important because they increase the likelihood of more influential and powerful actors entering the conflict on the side of policy change (Schattschneider 1960/1975). This increased attention can further tilt the balance of debate in favor of pro-change groups. Baumgartner and Jones (1993) find that greater attention to a problem usually leads to more negative assessments of current policy, thereby creating pressure on the dominant policy community or policy monopoly to open up policy making and accept change, 5554$$$$p3 15-04-98 14:41:54 Thomas A. Birkland 56 regardless of efforts by dominant members of the policy community to contain conflict and to deflect attention from the problem. This increased, more negative attention thereby expands attention to issues and can lead to more claims of policy failure and a more active search for solutions, leading to a greater likelihood of policy change (Baumgartner and Jones 1993). At the same time, status quo-oriented groups (such as business interests) seek to prevent the promotion of issues that they find detrimental to their interests. Groups and advocacy coalitions that have traditionally struggled to gain a hearing or see their preferences translated into policy must overcome the sometimes aggressive blocking action of their political opponents (Bachrach and Baratz 1962; Gaventa 1980). Because they are sudden, dramatic and often harmful, focusing events give pro-change groups significant advantages in overcoming these barriers. Apart from group efforts to expand issues, major events often reach the agenda without group promotion through media propagation of news and symbols of the event. This coverage occupies enough of a finite agenda (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988) that it cannot be ignored by the attentive public, nor is it easily contained by the policy monopoly. This media propagation of symbols gives less powerful groups another advantage in policy debates. Pro-changed groups are relieved of the obligation to create and interpret powerful images and symbols of the problem. Rather, groups only need repeat the already existing symbols that the media have seized upon as the most important in the current crisis. These obvious symbols are likely to carry more emotional weight than industry or governmental assurances that policy usually works well. Media-generated symbols of environmental catastrophes are therefore often used by groups as an important recruiting tool – thereby expanding the issue – and as a form of evidence of the need for policy change. The suddenness of focusing events also gives less powerful groups significant advantages in their debates. The public and policy makers learn of focusing events virtually simultaneously, which diminishes advantages that policy elites have in framing the nature and substance of public problems before broader public participation is possible. All participants in the debates that follow an event must start their comprehension and depiction of the nature of the event nearly simultaneously. This does not presume that the lay public will know just as much about a problem as experts in a particular policy domain, or that the lay public receives unmediated information about events. Rather, the suddenness of an event means that politically disadvantaged groups gain a strategic advantage from the event itself, which illustrates the 5554$$$$p3 15-04-98 14:41:54 Focusing Events, Mobilization, and Agenda Setting 57 very problem they seek to address, while the members of the policy monopoly are placed in the position of managing negative publicity and defending the status quo in a highly charged, politically embarrassing environment.