Book Review: Frank R Baumgartner and Bryan D Jones, The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America
| Author | Tevfik Murat Yildirim |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929916676934 |
| Published date | 01 February 2017 |
| Date | 01 February 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Book ReviewsThe Americas |
Book Reviews 157
Wetzel and Jan Orbie’s edited volume attempts
to offer such an explanation.
In a remarkably clear introduction, Wetzel
provides a conceptual framework drawing on
work by Wolfgang Merkel. A distinction is
made between external ‘context conditions’,
such as socio-economic conditions, and five
‘partial regimes’: the electoral regime, political
liberties, civil rights, the division of power, and
the effective power to govern. To her credit,
Wetzel notes that ‘a sole focus on the context
conditions can … be to the detriment of democ-
ratization’ (p. 7), an insight which, although
repeated in the conclusion, remains mostly
absent in the country chapters.
A total of 11 chapters, each covering two
countries, form the backbone of the book. In
these, 15 collaborators examine the substance
of EU democracy promotion. They look at
what the EU does, that is, what projects are
supported and how much money is allocated.
Importantly, though, they also look at demo-
cratic indicators drawn from the Bertelsmann
Transformation Index (BTI), potential power
asymmetries and the institutional and interor-
ganisational context.
Wetzel and Orbie conclude that EU democ-
racy promotion tends towards promoting exter-
nal context conditions rather than partial
regimes. This they label an ‘outward-oriented’
bias – following the now infamous distinction
of input- and output-based legitimacy popular-
ised by Fritz Scharpf. They argue that it is in
the ‘nature of the [EU] beast’ to be oriented
towards regulatory, technocratic outputs, but
they also give credit to feasibility concerns,
particularly the presence of resistance in target
countries to partial regime promotion.
With the exception of four theoretical chap-
ters, which are less well integrated into the
book, the project is tied together remarkably
well. The country chapters generally report
indicators that allow general empirical conclu-
sions to be drawn, and they invariably incorpo-
rate the sophisticated analytic scheme that
opens the volume. Unavoidably, not all the
country chapters are equally good. Several, for
example, do not refer to the BTI, complicating
a comparative analysis. Furthermore, some
chapters, like that on Croatia and Turkey by
Balkır and Aknur, show little critical distance
from EU rhetoric, barely going beyond an
analysis of the documents to look at the actual
substance. On the whole, however, Wetzel and
Orbie have pulled off a remarkable editorial
and scholarly feat.
Tom Theuns
(Sciences Po, Paris; University of Amsterdam)
© The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1478929916677893
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The Americas
The Politics of Information: Problem
Definition and the Course of Public Policy in
America by Frank R Baumgartner and Bryan
D Jones. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
2015. 231pp., £19.50 (p/b), ISBN 9780226198125
How do governments prioritise problems and
search for their solutions? What are the best
organisational forms for political institutions to
detect problems and prioritise them for action?
Politics of Information is the latest collabora-
tive book that Frank Baumgartner and Bryan
Jones have launched to answer these important
questions in a thought-provoking manner. The
scholars base their arguments on what they call
the paradox of search: the number of problems
that government detects increases as the scope
of search mechanism broadens, which in turn
creates more policy action on the problems
detected by the system. Especially germane to
this paradox is the tension between hierarchies
and diversity in governmental organisations.
‘One can have order and control, or one can
have diversity and open search processes and
“participatory democracy”. In theory these
could occur in continual balance. This does not,
however, work out so well in practice’ (p. 5).
Governments are ‘complex adaptive sys-
tems’ that process and respond to the available
information within the system. These complex
adaptive systems face increasing tensions ‘if
the problem space is evolving more quickly
than the organizational structure can possibly
adapt to’ (p. 20). Here, Baumgartner and Jones
go further and suggest two types of informa-
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