Introduction: Policy-Making under Ambiguity and Time Constraints

Reimut Zohlnhöfer and Friedbert W. Rüb

Introduction

When John W. Kingdon published his seminal book Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policy in 1984, it was essentially a book on a comparatively narrow subject, namely, agenda-setting in the political system of the United States of America. And the empirical basis of that study was even narrower, as Kingdon had only investigated health and transport policy in detail, essentially during the 1970s. Nonetheless, one of the core insights of that book struck a chord in the wider literature — namely that policy-making is not an exercise in rational problem-solving. Rather, participation in many policy-making forums is fluid and most policy-makers do not know what they want (in terms of policy) most of the time and would not know how to attain particular policy goals even if they knew which goals they were after. Therefore, there is no systematic connection between a problem and a solution; decisions rather come about as solutions 'look out for' problems and get 'coupled' to these problems by policy-entrepreneurs.

It is certainly no wonder that Kingdon developed his ideas (which themselves were an adaptation of Cohen, March and Olsen's (1972) 'garbage-can' (GC) model of choice, as Harald Saetren reminds us in his contribution (2016, Chapter Two of this volume)) with the US political system in mind. The American presidential system seemed to approximate the assumptions on which the garbage-can model and Kingdon's ideas rested much more closely than the much more orderly (Zahariadis 2003: 1) parliamentary systems prevalent in Western Europe. Thus, the applicability of Kingdon's work was initially restricted mainly to agenda-setting in the United States and Kingdon himself never made an attempt to formulate a more general framework.

Nevertheless, Kingdon's book did provide the foundation of what later became known as the 'multiple-streams framework' (MSF), a framework that nowadays belongs to the most-cited theoretical approaches in the field of policy analysis (see Zahariadis 2014: 25; Herweg 2016). In a recent literature review, Jones et al. (2015) report that they found no less than 311 English-language peer-reviewed journal articles applying the MSF published since the year 2000. Thus, at least quantitatively, the MSF seems to be applied more frequently than other theories of the policy process. Baumgartner et al. (2014), for example, in a similar endeavour regarding the punctuated equilibrium theory (PET), came up with only 303 PET-related publications — and that included 63 non-journal publications and covered a longer period, starting in 1991. Similarly, Jenkins-Smith et al. (2014: 210) only found 224 publications (including eight books and thirteen book chapters) applying the advocacy coalition framework between 1987 and 2013.

Moreover, application of the multiple streams framework has been widened considerably; it is now applied to very different issue-areas, from the regulation of the sugar market (Ackrill and Kay 2011) to labour-market policy (Zohlnhöfer and Herweg 2014); and from devolution (Munter 2005; Bundgaard and Vrangbsk 2007) to privatisation (Zahariadis 1995), to give just a few examples. Moreover, many of these empirical studies also applied the MSF to political systems that differed substantially from the presidential system of the United States. Thus, scholars applied the framework in the context of parliamentary systems, among others to the United Kingdom (Zahariadis 1995; Munter 2005), Denmark (Bundgaard and Vrangbsk 2007) and Germany (Zohlnhöfer and Herweg 2014); to semi-presidential systems like France (Zahariadis 1995); and even to the European Union (Copeland and James 2014). Finally, and probably most importantly, the multiple-streams framework has been extended to explain decision-making rather than just agenda-setting (cf. Zahariadis 1995; Münter 2005; Zohlnhöfer and Herweg 2014).

The success of the multiple-streams framework

The multiple-streams framework's success (in terms of applications and citations) probably depended on at least two conditions. On the one hand, to borrow from the MSF's terminology, an academic entrepreneur was needed to prove the framework's wider applicability. As John Kingdon himself refrained from further elaborating on his book — he even declined Paul Sabatier's invitation to contribute a piece on his framework to the volume Theories of the Policy Process (Sabatier 2007b: 9)...