A Comprehensive Study of Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies

This essay explores John Kingdon's framework on pre-decision processes in American domestic policy and extends it to foreign policy. It emphasizes the need to incorporate both incremental and non-incremental policy styles and suggests a more explicit use of Cohen, Olsen, and March's 'garbage can' model. The paper discusses the influence of participants and processes on agenda setting, highlighting the challenge stream, policy stream, and political stream. It also examines the role of policy entrepreneurs, policy windows, and various factors influencing agenda setting, such as new problem definitions, changes in Congress or administration, and national mood. Desklib provides access to similar solved assignments and past papers for students.

Running header: AGENDAS, ALTERNATIVES, AND PUBLIC POLICIES 1
Agendas, alternatives, and public policies
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AGENDAS, ALTERNATIVES, AND PUBLIC POLICIES 2
Introduction
This paper spreads John Kingdon's writing on pre-decision strategy procedures in
American domestic rule to the external policy field. While Kingdon's understandings have
meaningfully enhanced our knowhow of pre-decision procedures, further expansion is important
for extending across both foreign and domestic policy territories. Kingdon's incremental
evolutional image for alternative description must be restored to comprise both non-incremental
and gradualist policy styles. Scholars should as well make more thorough, explicit, and elaborate
usage of Cohen, Olsen's 'garbage cans and March model of making a decision (Kingdon &
Thurber, 1984). To these culminations, we provide the typology of plan alternatives that
integrates alternative images premised on latest expansions in evolutionary concept. The essay
finishes by proposing an investigation agenda open to search within both cross-national and
national contexts.
The concerns that occur on the agendas or does not get in public strategy making
procedure is influenced by two issues: 1) Participants outside and inside governments as well as
2) Procedure that comprises the challenge stream, the civil stream and the strategy stream
(Lovell et al., 2009). Every stream has a different life, however when they assemble together, a
particular problem becomes significant on the plan, guidelines that coincide with the challenge
get considerations, and then strategy change becomes conceivable. When the streams are
together, they are sometimes foreseeable and other times they are unpredictable. Therefore
policy businesspersons who support their own suggestions must be ready to get the chances.
Agenda

AGENDAS, ALTERNATIVES, AND PUBLIC POLICIES 3
The term “agenda” can be used in different meanings in a day to day conversations. In
reference to the book the name “agenda” means: “The record of problems or subjects that
governmental officers, and people who are outside the government and closely associated with
the officers, are paying serious consideration at all times, including the administrative agenda.” It
includes receiving consideration by government and decision agenda: list of matters (Katikireddi
et al., 2014). Two factors that are the process, as well as participants, determine the subjects on
agenda.
Participants
We can examine important participants by deliberating (1) the significance of all
participants, (2) how each participant is significant (3) the resources accessible to every
participant (Birkland, 2015). The President might set the programs of individuals in the Congress
and executive branch singlehandedly, however, is incapable of dominating the alternatives.
Resources: official (the prerogative and the veto to fire and hire), organizational (unitary
decision-making branch), an understanding of civic attention (might be transformed into weight
on other administrative officials).
Policy Window: It is a chance for promoters of suggestions to drive their pet answers, or
to drive concentration to their distinct challenges. Policy entrepreneurs should be ready, the pet
proposals kept ready, and their distinct challenges well-documented to understand their
objectives when the procedure window unwraps (Kingdon & Thurber, 1984). Then, the distinct
three streams join together. A challenge is understood, an answer is developed as well as
accessible in the strategy community, political changes bring about the ideal time for changing
policy, and potential restrictions are simple. Policy windows open when there is a new definition

AGENDAS, ALTERNATIVES, AND PUBLIC POLICIES 4
of the problem or the problem itself, a change in Congress or administration and when there is a
national mood.
References
Birkland, T. A. (2015). An introduction to the policy process: Theories, concepts, and models of
public policy making. Routledge.
Katikireddi, S. V., Hilton, S., Bonell, C., & Bond, L. (2014). Understanding the development of
minimum unit pricing of alcohol in Scotland: a qualitative study of the policy process. PLoS
One, 9(3), e91185.
Kingdon, J. W., & Thurber, J. A. (1984). Agendas, alternatives, and public policies (Vol. 45, pp.
165-169). Boston: Little, Brown.
Lovell, H., Bulkeley, H., & Owens, S. (2009). Converging agendas? Energy and climate change
policies in the UK. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 27(1), 90-109.