Welcome to Week 4!

Punctuated Equilibrium Theory

According to Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET), the political process is generally marked by stability and incrementalism, although it sometimes experiences a sudden and dramatic change. PET is an extension of agenda-setting theories that deal with both policy stasis, or incrementalism, and policy punctuation. This theory was developed through analysis of U.S. policymaking processes where American political institutions, the dynamics between subsystem politics and the macro politics of Congress and the Presidency are designed to resist many efforts at change and thus make mobilization necessary to overcome established interests. The result over time has been institutionally reinforced stability interrupted by bursts of change. Two elements in the policy process that become the focus of analysis are: issue definition and agenda setting. Issues are defined in public discourse in various ways, and rise and fall in the public agenda in order to reinforce or question existing policies.

PET views policy process as based on a dual foundation of political institutions and boundedly rational decision making. Due to bounded rationality, which suggests that decision makers are subject to cognitive limitations in making choices, decision making must be done in a serial fashion. Political systems, like humans, cannot simultaneously consider all the issues that face them at the highest level, so policy subsystems can be viewed as mechanisms that allow the political system to engage in parallel processing. An issue moves higher in the political agenda usually because new participants have become interested in the debate. Meanwhile, a subsystem is best thought of as a policy monopoly when it is dominated by a single interest. Policy monopolies can be constructed and collapse. When the citizens excluded from a policy monopoly remain apathetic, the institutional arrangement usually remains constant or incrementally changes (the negative feedback process). If pressures are sufficient, followed by a substantial change in the policy image, they may lead to a massive intervention by previously uninvolved political actors or government institutions. Changes due to the positive feedback process then can occur as a policy monopoly is broken up and enters a new equilibrium. Such positive feedback mechanisms include the “feeding frenzy” and “bandwagon effect.”

One of the main applications of PET is in explaining government spending/budgeting. The agenda-based model of policymaking suggests a pattern of punctuations and equilibria/stability in budget processes. Subsystem politics and the bureaucratic regularity of annual budget submissions constitute endogenous forces that favor continuing with the same decision design, thus leading to static budget decisions. Yet, exogenous forces, such as earthquake or war, can cause abrupt policy changes. Studies of public budgeting show that institutional frictions foster stability but can also lead to much more dramatic changes when priorities change. Although PET was originally developed to understand the dynamics of policy change in subsystems, it has been extended to more general cases of policy punctuation and has survived rigorous quantitative and qualitative tests.

In this article, Prindle considers the implications of applying the punctuated equilibrium model to the discipline of political science. He begins this inquiry with a discussion about classical definitions of “concepts” in order to draw a distinction between the view of concepts as building blocks of causal explanations and the concept of punctuated equilibrium as it is applied in political science. This discussion is followed by an explanation of the origins of punctuated equilibrium theory and reflection on some of the dangers of abstracting this concept from the natural sciences for use in other disciplines.

The concept of punctuated equilibrium originated in the field of evolutionary biology as an alternative to the dominant theory of evolution first proposed by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in 1858. According to Darwinist theory, natural selection results in the gradual transformation of species over time. In 1972, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould challenged Darwin’s original idea in recognition of the fact that the fossil record reflected the sudden appearance of all or most species, which persisted relatively unchanged until the point at which they became extinct. In other words, the evidence suggested a history of life “characterized by rapid evolutionary events punctuating a history of stasis” (Eldredge & Gould, 1972, p. 24). This new theory of evolution came to be known as “Punctuated Equilibrium.”

Many fields quickly adopted PE as a model for stability and change in complex systems. While Eldredge was supportive of the dispersion of this framework, Gould cautioned against removing a theory from a discipline where the concepts are more easily operationalized to one where concepts are more abstract. Nonetheless, political science was among those disciplines that adopted the concept of punctuated equilibrium beginning with critical election theory in the 1990s and popularized by Baumgartner and Jones with the publication of Agendas and Instabilities in American Politics in 1993.

In political science, PE builds on Lindblom’s notion of incrementalism. However, in contrast to Lindblom’s contention that policymaking is always incremental in nature, Baumgartner and Jones (1993/2009) maintain that policymaking is characterized by “long periods of relative stability or incrementalism interrupted by short bursts of dramatic change” (p. 10). This stems from the fact that both people and agencies are limited by bounded rationality and thus typically respond to problems with attention lurches. “At the level of government policymaking, these lurches are the result of historical events as brought to the national agenda through the interpretive and advocacy actions of interest groups and the media” (Prindle, 2012, p. 31).

Despite strong empirical evidence for PE theory, it is worth recounting the concerns Gould expressed regarding the use of this concept in fields such as political science. In biology the theory of punctuated equilibrium is based on measurable trends in the fossil record backed by an explicit model of historical process. It is more difficult to operationalize this model in political science where we lack clear, measurable guidelines as to what constitutes as an increment of policy or process. Thus, in order to apply punctuated equilibrium to political science, the foundational concepts of “equilibrium” and “punctuation” are transformed into operational definitions that differ in type, empirical content and function from the way the concepts were devised in the original theory. In short, by adopting the notion of punctuated equilibrium, Baumgartner and Jones cut the concept away from its operationalized definition, in effect turning an empirical scientific concept into a metaphor.

Schrad (2009) suggests that American alcohol prohibition policy and its repeal in the early twentieth century are best understood through the lens of punctuated equilibrium theory. With this approach, alcohol prohibition and repeal are considered as individual policy choices among various potential policy options. According to this theory, whether policy outcomes become stable for a long period of time, i.e. in the equilibrium condition, or change dramatically, relies heavily on whether the policy making system is supported by a negative or a positive feedback information processes related to external forces of policy change. Policy punctuation can take place as new information on policy choices enters the debate and leads to a shifting perspectives on policy dimensions due to positive-feedback trends.

Based on the coding of 2593 articles related to alcohol control policy in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature and all Congressional hearings on alcohol policy between 1890 to 1950, Schrad (2009) argues that the prohibition policy emerged as a result of a positive-feedback mechanism. Before the adoption of the prohibition policy, the U.S. experienced a long period of alcohol policy stability, where control measures included federal liquor taxation combined with individual states’ local prohibitions or restrictions. This stability can be attributed to negative-feedback mechanisms inherent in the U.S. institutional arrangement, such as the federal division of power and the super majoritarian requirement in enacting a constitutional amendment (p. 448).

Started in 1906, prohibition policy became the dominant policy alternative among other alcohol control measures, as indicated by the majority of articles reflecting positively on the prohibition policy. The punctuation, i.e. the rapid adoption of prohibition legislation at the national level, took place following the shift from negative to positive feedback toward prohibition due to several factors: an increased attention to the prohibition issue, a shift in policy image during the World War I that recasts prohibition from a moral issue to an issue of patriotism, security and security issues, and increased coverage of prohibitory legislation in the states and internationally. Meanwhile, the repeal of the policy in 1932 can be understood as the result of a shift from negative to positive-feedback with respect to repeal stemming from the U.S. economic crisis in 1929 and the beginnings of the Great Depression. Opposition toward prohibition policy, mainly related to economic arguments that such prohibition cut government tax revenue and created unemployment, escalated during 1920s shown by the fact that the proportion of articles coded positively toward prohibition fell below 33 percent. Both the crisis of World War I and the Great Depression opened a window for dramatic policy change, i.e. the prohibition of alcohol and the repeal in the U.S.

Worsham and Stores (2012), employing the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET), show how the U.S. agricultural subsystem used negative feedback to resist change in the macro level of the polity, i.e. the civil right regime established during the 1950s and the 1960s. They argue that a policy punctuation that takes place at the macro level of the polity might have difficulty penetrating subsystem politics. The resistance to add the civil rights dimension to agricultural policy finally ended in 1999 as the U.S.

Department of Agriculture (USDA) agreed to pay restitution to African American farmers as they experienced a long pattern of racial discrimination in loan programs since the 1930s. The ability of the agricultural subsystem to resist changes is explained by the staying power or the monopoly of the agricultural committee in legislative activities, both in the House and in the Senate, and the dominance of the agricultural coalition, which served as a source of negative feedback preventing the spread of the civil rights regime within this subsystem.

Analysis was made based on a subsystem model of PET which suggests that subsystems are allowed to operate in a semi-autonomous fashion in a particular policy area. Therefore, although policy equilibria are subject to radical changes at an opportune time, such changes might depend on the ability of the subsystems to contain challenges to existing policy arrangements (p. 170). This explains why a policy change takes place at the margin rather than in a radical configuration (p. 171). The model suggests that the sources of change are a variety of macro-level forces outside the subsystem as well as the internal dynamics of the subsystem, which altogether induce challenges to the policy equilibria (p. 171). Dramatic changes would take place due to positive feedback produced by the actions of policy entrepreneurs who assemble a coalition in order to impose a new policy regime, i.e. “the political institutional arrangements that define the relationship between social interests, the state, and economic actors” (p. 171).

Based on the story counts in the New York Times between 1945-2002 and the Congressional Record index, Worsham and Stores show that civil rights regime was well in place by 1960 or as early as the mid- 1950s. However, the discussion of the civil rights and African American farmers does not appear until 1997 in the House and 2000 in the Senate. They offer two explanations to this resistance. First is the policy monopoly of the agricultural committee with respect to legislative referrals. Focusing on the legislative activity in the agricultural subsystem, which covers the introduction and referral of legislation activities, they show that both in the House and in the Senate the agricultural committees are the dominant venue for referral and thus the dominant congressional player in the agricultural policy domain. Although there are periods where an increasing number of non-agricultural committee members are involved in the policy domain, i.e. the period of referral competition, the review of the content of legislation shows that there was little room for new issues on the agenda, and no one in either chamber was interested in including civil rights concerns within the agricultural policy subsystem (p. 1774-177). Second is the dominance of the agricultural coalition in the hearing activity. Using the Herfindahl index score, which calculates whether a single committee or a large number of committees hold the hearing, they show that the agricultural committees have been quite successful in controlling agricultural policy over a long period of time.

Meanwhile, by coding the Congressional Information Services (CIS) abstracts, they show that the appearance of non-agricultural interests, i.e. the civil rights coalition and the business coalition, as witnesses at hearings is quite consistent, and that the agriculture committees adjust their hearing activity to accommodate previously excluded non-agriculture interests, including civil rights issues. Therefore, the recent legislation awarding 1.2 billion dollars to African American farmers is evidence that Congress intends to accommodate the interests of the new subsystem players, in this case the civil rights coalition. Yet, they argue, subsystem arrangements are durable and policy change is incremental and subsystem has the ability to resist policy punctuation.

Givel: This article examines whether tobacco policymaking trends between 1990 and 2003 in the 50 states conform to the punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) framework put forth by Baumgartner and Jones. This theory maintains that policy monopolies are stable over long periods of time and usually change in response to sharp, short-term exogenous shocks to the policy system. Worsham added to this framework in determining that competitive coalitions can challenge dominant policy coalitions or monopolies with varying effects on the degree of dominance by the policy monopoly. For the purposes of situating this study, Givel provides a literature review, which includes discussion of PET, its origins in evolutionary biology and the role of monopolies in the public policy process. He then uses this framework to analyze state tobacco policy outputs in response to increased efforts by anti-tobacco efforts in the aforementioned period.

According to Baumgartner and Jones, the federal tobacco policy monopoly was destroyed or weakened during the 1970s as national attention shifted from a focus on the economic significance of tobacco to concerns about public health resulting in mixed policy outcomes for the tobacco industry. During the 1990s this industry faced renewed political opposition at the state level from anti-tobacco advocates who favored increased tobacco taxes and strong tobacco-use regulations. Givel uses data from the STATE (State Tobacco Activities Tracking and Evaluation System): Tobacco Map Reports and other relevant sources to identify state legislative policy outputs associated with tobacco taxation, regulation and education generated between 1999 and 2003 to determine if this increase in activity on the part of anti- tobacco interests resulted in a shift in policy as occurred on the national scale during the 1970s. Despite the rise in anti-tobacco activism during this period, he finds that key policy outputs primarily favored the tobacco industry. In addition, the Master Settlement Agreement negotiated in 1998 included no restrictions about how the funds were to be spent and had no significant impact on tobacco sales and profits. Thus, Givel concludes that despite the appearance of punctuation in the policy system, anti- tobacco efforts to punctuate or replace the tobacco policy monopoly fell short of this objective. The most significant factor in explaining these policy outcomes is the power and influence of the tobacco lobby, although other factors of note include the conditions of the state’s budget, gubernatorial involvement, the state’s tobacco economy, and the position of political parties.

Ultimately, Givel’s findings reinforce the conclusion drawn by Baumgartner, Jones and Worsham that not all mobilizations or sharp shocks to the system will be successful. In fact, he goes so far as to suggest the continued dominance of the tobacco industry is perhaps reflective of neopluralist theory which maintains that business organizations have a privileged position in the political process.