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Posted by Anne-Katrin  on  Thu, 21/08/2008

"Unless mass views have some place in the shaping of policy, all the talk about democracy is nonsense" - V.O. Key said that in 1961 in his book Public Opinion and American Democracy.

Posted by Taeku  on  Mon, 04/08/2008

As I sat down to finish writing my second blog entry for “People, Spaces, and Deliberation” -- which was to be a discussion of two contrasting approaches to deliberation in the European Union in 2007 -- Anne-Katrin’s entry on John Kingdon’s Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policy (1984) caught my eye.  Then Sina’s ensuing entry drew my attention further away from deliberation in the EU and right smack into Kingdon’s processual world of problems, policies, and politics streaming together and apart.  I sympathized

Posted by Sina  on  Fri, 25/07/2008

In the last post on this Blog, my colleague, Anne-Katrin, discusses John Kingdon's Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, a very influential study of the policy process in the United States. In the study, Kingdon shows how the three streams of problems, policy solutions and politics converge to move an issue to 'the decision agenda'; that is, governmental action.

Posted by Anne-Katrin  on  Wed, 23/07/2008

Photo Credit: Flickr User queenkvWhen you're advocating for a better understanding of the media's role in policy making and governance reform, nothing is as disheartening as a well done study that questions the media's role on the basis of sound evidence. Even when you can make a good argument that the study doesn't tell the whole story - you just know that experts in policy making and in academia will buy into what that study argues. That is why I found reading John Kingdon's excellent book Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies rather less enjoyable than the book deserves.

Posted by Sina  on  Mon, 14/07/2008

Lubljana: location for the International Workshop On Building Citizen Centred Policies And Services (Photo Credit: Flickr User StrudelMonkey)Almost everywhere, political leaders don't work with the strange animal known as 'the Public'. They work with 'key stakeholders' when they have to.  And they prefer to decide a policy then 'consult' key stakeholders. Then they get on with the business of governing. There are at least three reasons for this. First, in representative democracies, many leaders genuinely believe that they were elected to take all the decisions, that 'the Public' only have a role when they vote during periodic elections. Second, authoritarian rule is still the rule rather than the exception in our world, even where countries have formal democracies.