THE POLITICS OF INFORMATION: PROBLEM DEFINITION AND THE COURSE OF PUBLIC POLICY IN AMERICA
| Date | 01 December 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12246 |
| Published date | 01 December 2016 |
| Author | Peter B. Mortensen |
doi: 10.1111/padm.12246
REVIEWS
THE POLITICS OF INFORMATION: PROBLEM DEFINITION AND THE COURSE
OF PUBLIC POLICY IN AMERICA
Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones
The University of Chicago Press, 2015, 264 pp, £19.50 (pb), ISBN: 9780226198125
Baumgartner and Jones’ rst collaborative book from 1993, Agendas and Instability in
American Politics, represents a milestone in policy agenda-setting research. Its theoretical
and methodological ideas today inspire a large international research community on
policy agenda-setting. Their next landmark book was the Politics of Attention from 2005.
The ideas of that book are so radical and of such scope that they have the potential to
transform the way we think about politics and the way we study it. Now Baumgartner
and Jones have changed gear again and launched The Politics of Information. The book
does not represent as radical a break with standard political science method and theory
as the Politics of Attention book from 2005, but it does offer a very important and critical
perspective on the way most scholars and practitioners today think about organization
and government.
In The Politics of Information Baumgartner and Jones analyse the development of the
American government since World War II and identify a central tension in government
that is relevant well beyond the case of the American government. It is a tension between
the search for problems and solutions on the one hand and the need for order and control
to implement workable solutions on the other. If we understand perfectly the problems
and the best solutions to them, then clear organizational rules and procedures would be
the obvious choice. However, Baumgartner and Jones argue, in many cases we do not
quite understand the causes of a social problem and may disagree over whether a given
condition even merits government attention. With this uncertainty (complexity), organi-
zational clarity is a danger as it can lead to ‘tunnel vision’, which ignores the multiplicity
of potentially relevant perspectives. Thus, a central theme in this book is the trade-off
between organizational structures that facilitate effective implementation of solutions
and organizational structures that promote the identication of new problems and new
solutions.
The tension between the desire for clear organizational rules and nding the proper t
with the organizational problem environment represents an old debate in public admin-
istration. As the authors note in chapter 2, prominent scholars such as Herbert Simon,
Robert Dahl, James March and Johan Olsen in various ways make the claim that no orga-
nizational structure can optimize on specialization, problem prioritization, supervision
and control. Baumgartner and Jones not only reiterate this tension; they also raise a strong
critical voice against the one-sided focus on management and clear administrative control
that characterizes many present-day government reorganizations. Consistent with their
solid foundation in the bounded rationality perspective, they note that: ‘One of the biggest
mistakes in political life is to believe that we understand more than we do. This is the
temptation of clarity’ (p. 51).
Public Administration Vol.94, No. 4, 2016 (1155–1163)
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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