Academic literature on the topic 'John W. Kingdon'

This chapter examines John Kingdon’s bookAgendas, Alternatives, and American Public Policy, considered an alternative to the more technocratic existing theories of policy-making. It begins by summarizing what the book says about American public policy and looking at the interlocking innovations that made it so important. In particular, it analyses two political processes that differ from the better known aspects of politics: agenda-setting and alternative specification. It then turns its attention to the second conceptual innovation inAgendas: the three streams of policy, politics, and problem

H. L. Mencken, arguably the leading satirist of the 20th century, said that American puritanism is characterized by the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. If the source of that happiness is a drug, we might call it pharmacological puritanism. Followers of that faith abound, but I will mention just few. “There’s no such thing as recreational drug use” were the words of William Weld, head of the criminal division of the Attorney General’s office in 1988. A year later, in the midst of a cocaine epidemic, William Bennett, the first director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) under President George H. W. Bush, expressed dual goals. The first was to construct 95,000 more federal prison cells for drug abusers and the second to make Washington, D.C., a drug-free city. He believed that calls for legalization of any psychoactive drug to be “morally scandalous.” John Walters, director of the ONDCP during George W. Bush’s tenure as president, believed that religion is the answer to drug abuse. Lest we think that pharmacological puritanism is a dying faith, we need only recall Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ comment in 2016 that “Good people don’t smoke marijuana.” It does make me wonder where, on the good–bad spectrum, lie the tens of millions of Americans who live in states and in the District of Columbia where marijuana is legal for recreational use. Among the general population, pharmacological puritanism appears to be uncommon. A survey of American college students found that the prime motives for drug use were to help with concentration, to increase alertness, and to get high. From the United Kingdom, David Nutt, chairman of the Department of Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, put it this way: “Drugs are taken for pleasure.” Whatever their numbers today or in the past, it is believers in pharmacological puritanism, with the absolutism which accompanies that faith, who are major contributors to the failure of our most recent war on drugs, now nearly a half-century old.

The incorporation of information systems in government agencies is a process that started several decades ago, but it has sped up its pace due to the evolution of information technology and communications. This process could be characterized as being responsive to specific or by-sector requirements without policies or guiding principles. To this date, national and local government agencies obtain, record and process information in order to accomplish their duties. Their ways illustrate a fragmented scheme, noticeably based on the criteria of a self-referenced, bureaucratic state. Accordingly, the state has a myriad of information systems which are frequently disconnected. In spite of this, their remarkable evolution is a valuable asset that policy makers should consider. When the concept of electronic government emerged in the late nineties, it came to bridge the gap in the creation of public policies regarding the use of state information technologies and communications. However, electronic government it is not just limited to technology applications; it also introduces an innovative view on state modernization. The latter is presented from an external point of view that adopts the citizen’s perspective and emphasizes the need for coordination and integration in inter-agency processes. The development of electronic government has two basic approaches: electronic government initiatives and electronic government policies. The first approach resembles the traditional incorporation of information systems in government agencies, where multiple electronic government initiatives respond to specific vertical requirements. The second alternative incorporates a holistic view intended to build a global model of State through an electronic government public policy. This chapter focuses on the political process leading to the development of an electronic government policy, and it is illustrated by the analysis of the political process that led to the development of electronic government policy in Uruguay. The analysis uses John W. Kingdon’s (1995) multiple streams model, a conceptual approach that is intended to explain the mainstreaming of policies in the governmental agenda. The chapter further proposes that the multiple streams model could be extremely useful as a framework to be used on an ex ante basis for advocates of electronic government policy making.