An Idea Whose Time has Come? Explaining the Rise of Well-Being in British Politics
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| Author | Ian Bache,Louise Reardon |
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.12001 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
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P O L I T I C A L S T U D I E S : 2 0 1 3 VO L 6 1 , 8 9 8 – 9 1 4
doi: 10.1111/1467-9248.12001
An Idea Whose Time has Come? Explaining
the Rise of Well-Being in British Politics
Ian Bache and Louise Reardon
University of Sheffield
Well-being has recently risen rapidly up the political agenda in Britain and beyond, signalled most clearly by Prime
Minister Cameron’s announcement in 2010 that well-being measures developed by the Office for National Sta-
tistics would be used to guide public policies. Here we seek to explain why well-being has risen up the British
political agenda, drawing on Kingdon’s multiple streams approach. While this approach has considerable merit, it
does not acknowledge the complexity of multi-level governance in which policy, politics and problem streams can
operate at different territorial levels. As such, we argue that the match between policy, politics and problem streams
has to be not only temporal, but also spatial. The consequence is that, while in relation to measurement a paradigm
shift may be taking place, in terms of decisive action there is some way to go before well-being can be described
as ‘an idea whose time has come’.
Keywords: agenda setting; well-being; multiple streams; British politics; quality of life
Well-being has recently risen rapidly up the political agenda in Britain and beyond. This
article is concerned specifically with the idea and current proposal that a set of measures
wider than economic performance be used to measure societal progress. A shift in this
direction was signalled most clearly by Prime Minister David Cameron’s announcement in
November 2010 that well-being measures developed by the Office for National Statistics
(ONS) would be used for public policy purposes.1 The ONS subsequently conducted a
series of hearings and presented its findings in July 2011, with the first set of data to be made
available to government within twelve months.2 These developments signal that, in some
respects at least, well-being is an idea whose time has come in British politics. Moreover,
that Britain has gone furthest in this respect makes this case an important one to examine
for understanding the significance of this idea.
In this article we seek to explain why well-being has risen up the British political agenda,
drawing on research conducted in the UK, Brussels and Luxembourg in 2011.3 In doing so,
we apply John Kingdon’s (2011)4 multiple streams approach to agenda setting. While
developed in the context of US politics, it has become a landmark contribution that has
been applied more widely and we also draw on some of these applications.This approach
provides a very helpful way of understanding developments in the UK, explicitly theorising
both structural and agential factors without privileging one over the other. However, we
suggest that an important dimension of our findings that is not really signalled by Kingdon’s
approach is the importance of international networks through which ideas are developed.
This is an indication of how national politics are often nested within broader processes of
multi-level governance and of the potential territorial disjunctures between the policy and
politics streams.
© 2013 The Authors. Political Studies © 2013 Political Studies Association
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The Multiple Streams Approach5
The central purpose of Kingdon’s approach is to try to explain why some ideas capture the
imagination of politicians and policy makers at some moments, while others do not. It
relates to the process of pre-decision making, which remains relatively under-researched in
the public policy literature, although the literature on agenda setting has expanded beyond
its US roots to studies of other political systems (e.g., Uger and Yankaya, 2008;Vliegenthart
et al., 2011).The resilience, development and widespread application of the multiple streams
approach to the study of agenda setting make it an appropriate point of departure for this
study. However, such studies remain rare in the UK (Jennings et al., 2011).Yet this is an area
of research that reveals important power dynamics in policy making, drawing attention both
to issues that are placed high on the agenda and to those that are excluded from it –
‘non-decisions’ in Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz’s (1963) terms. It is research that
generally requires a long time frame to understand the rise and fall of issues on agendas and
the nature of change, whether incremental or characterised by punctuated equilibrium
(Pralle, 2006, p. 987).
In discussing the ‘political agenda’, we understand this term to refer to issues that receive
serious attention from decision makers (Baumgartner et al., 2006; Kingdon, 2011; Princen,
2007).This is analytically distinct from public and media agendas (Princen, 2011) although
there are inevitable overlaps in practice. We also find helpful Kingdon’s (2011) distinction
between the governmental agenda, which comprises the topics receiving attention, and the
decision agenda, which contains those topics lined up for a decision. Our case is one in which
there is a definite governmental agenda, but arguably the key decisions relating to this
agenda are yet to be made.
Participants and Processes
The multiple streams approach is one that pertains under conditions of ambiguity, ‘a state
of having many ways of thinking about the same circumstances or phenomena’ (Feldman,
1989, p. 5, cited in Zahariadis, 2003, pp. 2–3). It identifies three process streams – problems,
policies and politics – and the importance of key actors, policy entrepreneurs6 who in the
context of ambiguity can manipulate the policy process to advance their aims. Problems can
press the political agenda through the occurrence of a crisis or high-profile events or less
dramatically through a shift in respected indicators. Policies develop through the accumu-
lation of knowledge by experts and their subsequent proposals, although Kingdon (2011,
p. 17) also notes that ideas may become faddish and sweep through policy communities
without any obvious movement in the science of knowledge. Political processes affect the
agenda through shifts in public opinion, changes in government and other similar dynamics.
Thus, politicians respond to shifts in public opinion and public moods as well as trying to
lead and shape public opinion.
These three processes – problem recognition, generation of policy proposals and political
developments – can either constrain or facilitate the elevation of an idea up the political
agenda. They are conceptualised as streams of activity that develop largely separately from
each other, ‘governed by different forces, different considerations, and different styles’
(Kingdon, 2011, p. 88).The political agenda is set by either problem recognition or political
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developments (e.g. a change of government), whereas the alternatives (the policy options to
choose from) are decided in the policy stream, populated primarily by experts and
bureaucrats. Sometimes there is a recognised problem, but no obvious policy solution.
Alternatively, there may be a recognised problem and an appropriate policy response, but the
political circumstances are not conducive to action, and so on.
Policy Windows
The greatest opportunity for change occurs when a policy window is opened by either
political events or compelling problems. Thus, there can be either political windows or
problem windows. They can close for a variety of reasons, such as the problem being
addressed, the failure of participants to get desired action, the events that mattered passing
from the scene, through a subsequent change in key personnel, or because there is no
available alternative (Kingdon, 2011, pp. 169–70).
It is during policy windows that policy entrepreneurs are crucial to moving change
forward by ‘selling’ their combination of problem definition and policy alternative to
political actors.The importance of this role is heightened in conditions of ambiguity, which
is characterised by participants with unclear goals, fluid participation and opaque organi-
sational technology in which jurisdictional boundaries are blurred (Zahariadis, 2008, p.
517). Policy entrepreneurs play a key role in coupling streams through framing issues
persuasively. The problem stream tends to be connected last and it is this that ‘provides
legitimacy for dealing with societal problems, after politics and policy streams have been
coupled’ (Ackrill and Kay, 2011, p. 77). In this case, the politics and policy streams are to
some extent coupled but agreement on the ‘problem’ that well-being measures can solve is
less advanced and this stream requires more effective framing of the problem by policy
entrepreneurs if this stream is to be effectively coupled.
The Nature of Change
According to Kingdon, change in the policy stream tends to be incremental, but the politics
and problem streams are prone to more sudden changes, resembling punctuated equilib-
rium. As Frank Baumgartner et al. (2006, p. 961) suggest:
A primary finding from agenda-setting studies is the reactive nature of policymaking, resulting
in a disjointed and episodic trace of policy activities across time.As new participants with fresh
ideas break into the inner circle of policy-making, the system is jolted;...
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