Reconceiving Decision-Making In Democratic Politics: Attention, Choice, And Public Policy (American

One of the received wisdoms in the policy processes literature is that policy agendas are invariably punctuated as a direct consequence of failure to address environmental cues in an efficient manner. In two decades of subsequent research following the introduction of the punctuated equilibrium theory (Jones and Baumgartner 2012), scholars examined the stability and change in attention shifts in a wide range of organizational settings including public budgets in democratic and non-democratic regimes (Jones 2003; Breunig 2006; Baumgartner et al. 2015; Lam and Chan 2015; Epp and Baumgartner 2017; Fagan et al. 2017; Bulut and Yildirim 2019), local governments and supranational organizations (Mortensen 2005; Breunig 2006; Alexandrova et al. 2012; Park and Sapotichne 2019), international organizations (Lundgren et al. 2018 ), legislative activities (Jones et al. 2009), the private sector and market systems (Epp 2015; Epp and Baumgartner 2017), party manifestos (Walgrave and Nuytemans 2009), and mass media (Walgrave and Vliegenthart 2010), lending strong empirical support to the contention that the distribution of changes in any policy agendas involving human decision-making is typically characterized by long periods of stasis (i.e., modest changes in attention) and short periods of dramatic spikes in attention (Jones and Baumgartner 2004).

The nature of cognitive information processing is further highlighted in one stream of the public policy literature that argues that relevant research is frequently ignored by policy makers [15, 25, 29, 38, 40, 53]. The plethora of evidence and the variety of methods by which evidence is presented (e.g., randomized clinical trials, systematic reviews, and qualitative case studies) compounds the uncertainty for policy makers in attempting to assess 'what is evidence' and how to assess the strength of the evidence [13]. For example, one critical factor that has arisen is the question of the policy makers' ability to judge the quality and applicability of research results [13, 16, 25, 38, 40]. Issues such as study results emanating from multiple scientific disciplines, use of specialized jargon, and sophisticated statistical analyses can impede policy makers' understanding [13]. As such, it is posited that numerous individuals do not have the broad ranging expertise to adequately assess scientific information across health policy domains, thus they will satisfice their decision information needs and rely on secondary sources that summarize research results and translate the findings into 'lay' language. In other words, the assumed rational, utility maximizing decision-making processes begin to break down. 2b1af7f3a8