01-Jones-Baumgartner From There To Here Punctuated Equilibrium To The
01-Jones-Baumgartner From There To Here Punctuated Equilibrium To The
01-Jones-Baumgartner From There To Here Punctuated Equilibrium To The
1, 2012
In this introduction to the Policy Study Journals special issue on punctuated equilibrium, we provide
an overview of the approach, how it evolved, some of the major critiques directed at it, and some of the
major developments it has spawned. We argue that the most important aspect of a theory or framework
is not whether it is right or wrong, but the extent to which it is fruitful; that is, the extent to which it
stimulated further research. Finally, we review the articles in this issue and put them in context.
We are very pleased that the editors of the Policy Studies Journal chose to
highlight Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET) in this special issue. We hope that
the quality and the intellectual and empirical breadth of these articles validate their
decision. In this introductory essay, we provide an overview of PET, how it evolved,
some of the criticisms of the approach (which themselves stimulated more work),
and some of the major developments it has spawned. Perhaps the most important
aspect of a theory or framework (see Ostrom, PSJ special issue on Institutional
Analysis and Development [IAD] for a discussion of the distinctions) is not whether
it is right or wrong, or even whether it organizes research around a theme. We think
it centers on the extent to which the idea is fruitful, by which we mean the extent to
which it stimulates further research that itself raised more new questions. Nothing is
settled in scientific inquiry, nor should it be. Indeed, the success of the concept may
lie in its future obsolescence because new ways of thinking should be able to incor-
porate PET more or less seamlessly.
Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET) was born of our unhappiness with policy
process models that emphasized stability, rules, incremental adjustment, and grid-
lock whereas we saw policy change as oftentimes disjoint, episodic, and not always
predictable. In the first generation policy process models, developed mostly in the
1950s and 1960s, decision making was thought of as incremental, subsystems
seemed eternal, and the political order was stable. Minor adjustments from the status
quo were achieved via heuristic rules worked out among the participants (Wildavsky
version: Wildavsky, 1964) or via mutual partisan adjustment (Lindblom version:
1
0190-292X 2012 Policy Studies Organization
Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ.
2 Policy Studies Journal, 40:1
vigorously explored analytically and empirically the conditions under which collec-
tive goals could and could not be obtained, stand as major exceptions to the retreat
to the safety of single-dimensionality.
PET sketches a disjoint and abrupt process of policy change, with long periods
of stability separating the shifts. We undertook the original studies on which the
theory was based in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when decrying gridlock was
all the rage. We saw things differently: major policy changes were not only more
frequent than the static gridlock approach suggested. They also could occur not just
through elections but through a policy-by-policy adjustment process as well (Baum-
gartner & Jones, [1993] 2009). This policy-by-policy adjustment process allowed for
disjoint policy change to ripple through the system without the need for top-down
direction (although the model certainly allowed for that). Change encompassed
incremental adjustment within policy subsystems and nonincremental, punctuated
change when the subsystems assigned the policy could no longer contain the
demands for change and the macropolitical institutions (Congress, the presidency,
and the political parties) got involved. As had other scholars, we emphasized the
incrementalist adjustment patterns within subsystems, leading David Prindle (2012)
to refer to our approach as punctuated incrementalism. We saw these adjustment
patterns as incomplete because the subsystem adjustments among affected interests
omitted the disinterested, a theme that both Redford (1969) and Burnham (1970)
stress.
We saw policymaking as a continual struggle between the forces of balance and
equilibrium, dominated by negative feedback processes, and the forces of destabili-
zation and contagion, governed by positive feedback processes (Baumgartner &
Jones, 2002). In the former, a disturbance is met with countervailing actions, in a
thermostatic-type process. In the latter, change begets change, generating a far more
powerful push for change than might have been expected. Peter rdi (2008) notes
that the appreciation of positive feedback processes is central to a general scientific
movement toward the study of general complex systems in which complex feedback
mechanisms can lead to large and occasionally surprising changes. Most recently,
Mark Lawrence Schrad (2010), in his study of prohibition policies in the United
States, Sweden, and Russia, deftly shows how these processes can be filtered though
the institutional structures of nations.
Microfoundations
mechanism, the use of the death penalty in all states is declining and now prohibited
in former death-penalty states Illinois and New Mexico (Baumgartner, De Boef, &
Boydstun, 2008). Antiabortion and antismoking advocates have won skirmish after
skirmish by using a venue-by-venue approach, with only limited actions by the
macropolitical institutions. Texas, facing a huge scandal in its juvenile justice system
in 2007, has reformed the system so thoroughly that the New York Times (2010) cited
it as a potential model for the nation.
Nevertheless, many of the major laws passed by the 211th Congress were related
to the economy or to the major healthcare reform bill, most only after intensely
partisan debate. It seems likely that had Republicans held the presidency and
Congress after 2009, they would not have passed the Health Care and Education
Reconciliation Act of 2010. However, they would still have been faced with a
failing economy and would likely have addressed the problem with some set of
measuresindeed, many of the major measures directed at addressing the financial
meltdown of 2008 were initiated by the outgoing Republican Bush Administration.
It was the facts on the ground that led to the primary policymaking agenda of the
211th Congress, not the election itself.
with one being more liberal than the other. When conservatives replace liberals, the
agenda-setting process is shifted to the right. However, it is unclear that shifts in
ideology have much to do with the prioritization of problems facing government or,
at a minimum, it leaves a huge range of possible priorities from which the new
leaders may choose. Third, many major changes in policy have been forged by
conservative leaders expanding the role of government, or liberals shrinking it.
George W. Bush enacted both No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the largest expan-
sion of the federal role in education, and the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, the
largest expansion of the social safety net since the Lyndon Johnson presidency.
Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency; Clinton ended welfare as we
know it.
This does not deny the impact of elections; these can and do create important
shifts in the direction of public policy. However, we can point to many policies
where this is not the case, and when we have looked at a list of all policy changes, or
when we have tracked budgets over time, we have often found that elections were an
important element in only a small (but nonetheless distinct) percentage of the cases
(Baumgartner, Foucault, & Franois, 2009; Baumgartner, Jones et al., 2011).
In effect, the comparative statics approach has conflated the choice of policy issue
(agenda setting) with the policy solution chosen given a policy problem. At the
problem stage, political parties and elections play a limited role. At the solution stage,
ideology and partisanship clearly play a more important role. By looking over time
and by focusing on attention and agenda setting, we have often noted that actors
across the entire political system collectively shift attention; these shifts are rarely the
province of one partisan camp alone, ignored by the other side. Sometimes these
shifts are related directly to election considerations or results, sometimes they are
not. In any case, these shifts are not explainable within the confines of the standard
model based in preference shifts caused by electoral change.
The agenda-setting perspective has recognized the critical role of information in
the policy process in a way that the election-centered model has not. Problem defi-
nition does not generally occur in a vacuum; it occurs when the flows of information
indicate that a situation is worthy of governmental attention. As a consequence,
agenda changes can occur in the absence of elections or public opinion.
Given the importance of collective shifts of attention over time, shifts that can
sweep across the entire political spectrum, it is not surprising that the agenda-setting
perspective has led to research directions that cannot be pursued by relying on the
more common research project focusing on decision making or bargaining during a
single congress or a single presidency. Such studies take the items on the agenda, the
focus of attention, for granted and attempt to explain the partisan conflict associated
with the choice of solutions. An agenda-setting perspective takes one step back in the
process, attending to the choice of issues that become the grist for political conflict.
Because we look at issues over a long enough time frame, we can observe changes in
attention patterns to issues, not just the selection of solutions. Perhaps more than any
other difference, this one explains how the policy dynamics approach differs from
the preference-based approaches to the study of political institutions. Dynamics are
at the center, not cross-sectional variation.
Jones/Baumgartner: Punctuated Equilibrium Theory 7
If not the standard model, then what? In an attempt to account for large-scale
policy changes at the macropolitical level as well as within subsystems, we devel-
oped the general punctuation thesis, a generalization of the punctuated equilibrium
approach (Jones & Baumgartner, 2005). This more general approach emphasizes the
role of the processing of information in a policymaking system. Information pro-
cessing involves collecting, assembling, interpreting, and prioritizing signals from
the policymaking environment (Jones & Baumgartner, 2005). Some of this is done
explicitly, as is the case for monitoring the state of the economy, and some without
any explicit regard to systematic monitoring. In either case, information can be
uncertain (the precise value of the estimate is not set) and ambiguous (subject to more
than one interpretation). Even when attended to, information still must be inter-
preted and translated into policy action.1
While traditional approaches to information tend to focus on private information
that is not available to all, we emphasize the great availability of information in most
policymaking realms (Jones & Baumgartner, 2005).2 Policymakers are bombarded
with diverse information from many different sources, with varying reliabilities.
Much of this information has implications for the prioritization of policy action.
Policymakers, as boundedly rational decision makers with human cognitive con-
straints, focus on some of this information and ignore most of it. This selective
attention process has critical consequences for policymaking, and especially how the
political system prioritizes problems for policy action.
Many theories of policy change emphasize the correspondence between the
direction of preferences (left to right) among legislators or the public, on the one
hand, and the direction of policy (liberal to conservative), on the other. We, however,
emphasize the necessity of prioritizing issues they address. The key question is how
policymakers prioritize issues for action given the flow of information into the
system. Both the bounded rationality of political actors and the resistance to change
structured into the U.S. governmental system imply that the processing of informa-
tion will be disproportionatethat is, it will not match the policy implications of the
information available to policymakers. Rather, the system will tend to shift from
underreacting to overreacting to information.
This tendency toward the disproportionate processing of information means
that problem prioritization will be stable for most of the time because the resis-
tance will not be overcome by the flow of information. Hence, the policymaking
process will appear to be stable and unchanging. When policies change, they will
shift in a disjoint and episodic manner; as a consequence, policymaking will
appear to be in a period of exception to the general rule of stabilityor simply
responding to unspecified exogenous forces. But in fact the disjoint policy
responses are part and parcel of the same policymaking process that generated the
periods of stability. In a not-unfamiliar story line, a problem festers below the
radar until a scandal or crisis erupts; policymakers then often claim nobody
could have known about the surprise intervention of exogenous forces, and
then scramble to address the issue.
8 Policy Studies Journal, 40:1
The more general approach, compared with the original PET formulation, has
both costs and benefits. The benefits are the movement toward a more comprehen-
sive theory of policy change. The costs are that the detailed substantive policy
analyses that are the cornerstone of PET get submerged in the more general formu-
lation (Weimer, 2008).
Stick-Slip Dynamics3
Does this mean that elections are meaningless? More broadly, is the emphasis on
information processing rather than the preferences of citizens in policymaking fun-
damentally undemocratic? Surely it implies a loss of control by the electorate to
control the behaviors of policymakers.
We think not. We think of the traditional political forces such as public opinion,
interest groups, elections, and other forms of political participation as providing
weights for the information signals. Elections themselves may be indicators not so
much of the desire of the public to move to the right or the left and more an indicator
of the need for policymakers to solve problems viewed as pressing by the public.
This is what we mean by weights on the information signals. We have found, for
example, that the extent to which the public weights the economy as the most
important problem facing the country is more important in affecting whether Con-
gress pays attention to economic policy (has hearings on economics) than the actual
state of the economy (Jones & Baumgartner, 2005). More generally, the issues that
policymakers in the United States address are closely matched to the priorities of the
public, but the correlation weakens as we move from attention to lawmaking to
budgeting (Jones, Larsen-Price, & Wilkerson, 2009). Given the American system, this
makes sense. It is reasonably easy to address a concern through, for example, con-
gressional hearings, but it is not so easy to schedule and win a roll-call vote on the
issue, and even harder to enact a law addressing the issue.
would do well to begin thinking along the lines of scholars working in this field,
being open to the possibilities of sudden, large-scale transforming change, and
monitoring work in this field for applications to our own area of study.
Comparative Analysis
The ideas we developed in Agendas and Instability struck many readers as quint-
essentially American. We focused on venue-shopping, developed a theory in
which parties were only a minor part of the story, and gave plenty of room to the
dynamics of federalism and the conflict among branches of government. How would
these ideas fare in other political systems? In Europe, a vigorous scholarship devel-
oped using case studies to examine whether the patterns we observed in the United
States also occurred there. Perhaps surprisingly, many studies convincingly found
such patterns (see True et al., 2007, for a review and discussion). Most recently, a
special issue of Comparative Political Studies examines the current state of agenda-
setting research in comparative politics (see Baumgartner, Brouard, Green-
Pendersen, Jones, & Walgrave, 2011).
There are good reasons for the pattern to exist elsewhere. There is nothing
uniquely American about limited attention and policy subsytems. As we developed
in greater detail in The Politics of Attention, the ideas at the base of the punctuated
equilibrium model relate to human cognition and institutional resistance, and thus
should be common to all political systems. Of course, they do not work in the same
manner; institutional design and political culture matter, and these aspects should
show up in definable differences among systems.
Beginning in 2004, scholars in a number of countries began to replicate the
databases that are at the core of the Policy Agendas Project (see http://
www.comparativeagendas.org/). When they have looked at various elements of
political change, stick-slip dynamics, not smooth adjustment nor election-governed
changes, have appeared in every country where investigations have taken place. We
entitled our paper on the distribution of changes in public budgets A General
Empirical Law of Public Budgets because the similarities were so strong across all
budgets and because we have yet to discover a public budget that does not have the
tell-tale fat-tailed distribution that provides evidence for punctuated equilibrium
(Jones, Baumgartner, et al., 2009). Moreover, we observed systematic differences
among countries in the parameters of the distributions, differences that were asso-
ciated with measures of friction within the countries.
In a second set of studies, scholars have found evidence of stick-slip dynamics
through the stages of the policy cycle. If the general punctuation thesis were correct,
one would expect to find the lowest level of resistance or friction in the earlier stages
of the policymaking process, particularly agenda setting, with higher resistance as a
proposal moves through the process. This has been confirmed first in the United
States (Jones & Baumgartner, 2005; Jones et al., 2003) and later in European countries
(Baumgartner et al., 2009). A second implication of stick-slip dynamics is that public
opinion should be more important earlier in the cycle and less important later, a
12 Policy Studies Journal, 40:1
thesis that has received strong support in the United States (Jones, Larsen-Price,
et al., 2009) and in Spain (Bonafont & Palau, 2011).
As scholars have investigated policy dynamics in a wide range of political
settings, they have found some patterns that seem to be universal such as the
inability of any government to respond smoothly to changes in the environment.
These findings have raised new questions. For example, are some institutional pro-
cesses more efficient than others? Does the number of veto players affect the ability
of governments to respond to incoming information? Do the disciplined parties and
greater institutional control of a Westminster-style democracy allow for stronger
election effects than we have seen in the United States, with its separation of powers,
decentralized parties, and federal structure? Using the new datasets, scholars have
discovered some surprising things, such as the important role of the parliamentary
opposition in affecting the policymaking agenda and the associated constraints on
the ability of governing parties to set the agenda (see Green-Pedersen & Mortensen,
2010). It is not that opposition parties can set the policymaking agenda; they cant.
However, they can take advantage of circumstances to force governing parties to
address issues they would rather avoid.
the Policy Agendas Project (many are noted on our web site, and we invite research-
ers to let us know of projects that they have pursued using the data).
It is one thing to develop a model of politics, but quite another to provide the
resources to test it in a variety of ways. It is in the confrontation with empirical
observation that the analyst is forced to refine, improve, and perfect the theory. We
have constantly been impressed at the fruitfulness of puzzling over data. Our initial
forays into the comprehensive database that we developed on U.S. federal spending
led us to look at each series one by one; we found no common pattern and no sensible
overarching theory that could make sense of the wide range of trends we observed.
From this failure came the theory of stick-slip dynamics, which helps explain not the
individual cases but the overall pattern of spending changes. Many political scien-
tists are wary of induction, but all scientific disciplines advance by a mixture of
induction and deduction. Theories are confronted with data, and data are confronted
with different theories. The two are so intertwined that we see the development of an
infrastructure of measurement and observation to be absolutely central to the
process of developing theory because one cannot advance without the other. Thus,
punctuated equilibrium may not be the Agendas Project, and many users of the
Agendas Project have no interest in testing any theory at all. However, we could not
have developed the ideas that are central to our understanding of punctuated equi-
librium without spending years and building the large international collaboration
focused on measurement as we have done. It has been time well spent.
Qualitative Studies
Much of the work that has come from the Agendas Project, especially that
focusing on the distribution of budgetary changes (work that we believe has not only
reinvigorated the study of budgeting, but also provided the most wide-ranging and
convincing evidence for punctuated equilibrium outcomes across a variety of politi-
cal institutions), has been almost exclusively quantitative. Our original contribution,
Agendas and Instability, relied on quantitative assessments mixed with qualitative
treatments, but in comparison to earlier agenda-setting studies, Agendas and Insta-
bility was more quantitative. In the years since then, there has been a flowering of
many types of work, but perhaps the most influential has been more sophisticated in
terms of analytic techniques. We applaud this, we have participated in this directly,
and the resources made available through our Policy Agendas Project have made this
possible indirectly.
However, we think it is incomplete. A full test of the implications of the theory
of punctuated equilibrium will require more in-depth fieldwork-based studies of
actual policy processes as these are worked out on the ground. Gary Goertz, among
others, has stressed that a world full of complex interacting systems requires quali-
tative studies as well as quantitative ones. We should particularly be interested in
cases that fall at the far ends of our empirical distributions. Did decision makers
reached outside of the box in terms of the cognitive models that justify the policy
change? Are they characterized by positive feedback processes? Do the cases in the
central peak correspond to those where few alternatives were considered?
14 Policy Studies Journal, 40:1
bill introduction to passage. Media coverage may aid in accessing the agenda but
retard actually getting things done.
One implication of this research is for policy scholars to begin to think in terms
of conditional probabilities: P(A) is the probability that an issue accesses the policy-
making agendathat is, a bill is introduced; P(L|A) is the probability that a bill
becomes a law given that it is on the agenda (which is necessary but not sufficient).
We might hypothesize that P(A) is directly related to media coverage, but that
P(L|A) is inversely related to coverage.
Graeme Boushey, in his contribution to this volume entitled Punctuated Equi-
librium Theory and the Diffusion of Innovations (2012) is also interested in what
circumstances move different policies through the policy process at different
speeds. Boushey first develops the connection between the diffusion dynamics and
the positive and negative feedback effects so critical in punctuated equilibrium. He
then studies the diffusion of 81 policies in the American states, using a Bass Dif-
fusion Model, an approach that allows him to differentiate diffusion processes
caused by common external events from those that are caused by internal mim-
icking dynamics. Boushey is able to tie the speed of policy diffusion to the nature
of the policy through the particular pattern of parameter estimates from the Bass
Model. He finds that the federal government encourages rapid diffusion, but its
involvement produces a different pattern from other rapid diffusion such as policy
outbreaks generated by positive feedback processes. The Bass Model allows him to
differentiate between rapid diffusion prompted by federal coercion from that gen-
erated state policy mimicking. It also identifies incremental diffusion patterns. As a
consequence, Bousheys approach moves us toward a more complete theory of
policy diffusion.
Heather Larsen-Prices The Right Tool for the Job: The Canalization of Presiden-
tial Policy Attention by Policy Instrument (2012) uses the tools of modern policy
process theory to reconceive the role of the president in the policy process. Do
presidents coordinate their use of policy instrumentsthat is, proposing laws, issuing
executive orders, making speeches, and presenting the governments position in
court cases? To examine this, Larsen-Price codes new datasets on presidential mes-
sages, Solicitor General Briefs, according to the Policy Agendas Protocol (having
already been responsible for the Executive Orders and dataset), allowing her to do the
comparisons across policy issues that are necessary to discern policy coordination. She
finds some evidence of coordination but only when attention to the issue is high.
Jeff Worsham and Chaun Stores, in Pet Sounds: Subsystems, Regimes, Policy
Punctuations, and the Neglect of African American Farmers, 19352006 (2012) is the
only article in this special issue to return to the policy subsystems basis of Agendas
and Instability. Worsham and Stores show exactly how resistant some policy arrange-
ments can be to national political trends. They study the resistance of the agricultural
policy subsystem to the civil rights policy regime at the macropolitical level. For
nearly seven decades, agricultural policymakers refused the demands of black
farmers for compensation for the wrongs done by past government policy. Domi-
nance of the agricultural subsystem by Southern congressmen and agenda crowding
after their influence faded, account for the power of the resistance.
Jones/Baumgartner: Punctuated Equilibrium Theory 17
Each of the topics of the special issues of PSJ has concentrated on a different
aspect of the policy process. IAD centers on the rules of governance, how they are
established, and the consequences they have. ACF focuses on the belief systems of
actors, how they generate coalitions, and the consequences for governance. PET
centers on the collective allocation of attention to disparate aspects of the policy
process, and how shifts in attention can spawn large changes in policymaking. One
of the major challenges as we move forward is to think about how these different
perspectives interact with one another, with an aim not necessarily to integrate them
but to generate new hypotheses and research directions (see Worsham, 2006).
Bryan D. Jones is the J.J. Jake Regents Chair in Congressional Studies at the
University of Texas at Austin.
Frank R. Baumgartner is the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of
Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Notes
References
Alexandrova, Petya, Marcello Carammia, and Arco Timmermans. 2012. Policy Punctuations and Issue
Diversity on the European Council Agenda. Policy Studies Journal 40 (1): 69488.
Arrow, Kenneth. 1951. Social Choice and Individual Values. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Baumgartner, Frank R., and Bryan D. Jones. 2002. Positive and Negative Feedback in Politics. In Policy
Dynamics, ed. Frank R. Baumgartner, and Bryan D. Jones. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 328.
. [1993] 2009. Agendas and Instability in American Politics, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Baumgartner, Frank R., Suzanna L. De Boef, and Amber E. Boydstun. 2008. The Decline of the Death Penalty
and the Discovery of Innocence. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Baumgartner, Frank R., Martial Foucault, and Abel Franois. 2009. Public Budgeting in the French Fifth
Republic: The End of La Rpublique Des Partis? West European Politics 32 (2): 40422.
Baumgartner, Frank R., Sylvain Brouard, Christoffer Green-Pedersen, Bryan D. Jones, and Stefaan Wal-
grave, ed. 2011. The Dynamics of Policy Change in Comparative Perspective. Comparative Political
Studies 44.
Baumgartner, Frank R., Bryan D. Jones, and John Wilkerson. 2002. Studying Policy Dynamics. In Policy
Dynamics, ed. Frank R. Baumgartner, and Bryan D. Jones. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2946.
18 Policy Studies Journal, 40:1
. 2011. Comparative Studies of Policy Dynamics. Comparative Political Studies 44 (8): 94772.
Black, Duncan. 1958. The Theory of Committees and Elections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bonafont, Laura Chaqus, and Anna M. Palau. 2011. Assessing the Responsiveness of Spanish Policy-
makers to the Priorities. West European Politics 34: 70630.
Boushey, Graeme. 2010. Policy Diffusion Dynamics in America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 2012. Punctuated Equilibrium Theory and the Diffusion of Innovations. Policy Studies Journal 40
(1): 12746.
Breunig, Christian, and Chris Koski. 2012. The Tortoise or the Hare? Incrementalism, Punctuations, and
Their Consequences. Policy Studies Journal 40 (1): 4567.
Burnham, Walter. D. 1970. Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics. New York: WW
Norton.
Cobb, Roger, and Charles D. Elder. 1972 (1983). Participation in American Politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Cohen, Michael, James March, and Johan Olsen. 1972. A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice.
Administrative Science Quarterly 17: 125.
rdi, Peter. 2008. Complexity Explained. Berlin: Springer.
Fenno, Richard. 1966. The Power of the Purse. Boston: Little, Brown.
Green-Pedersen, Christoffer, and Peter B. Mortensen. 2010. Who Sets the Agenda and Who Responds to
It in the Danish Parliament? European Journal of Political Research 40 (2): 25781.
Howlett, Michael, and Andrea Migone. 2011. Charles Lindblom Is Alive and Well and Living in Punc-
tuated Equilibrium Land. Politics and Society 30: 5362.
John, Peter, and Shaun Bevan. 2012. What Are Policy Punctuations? Large Changes in the Legislative
Agenda of the UK Government, 19112008. Policy Studies Journal 40 (1): 89107.
Jones, Bryan D. 1994. Reconceiving Decision-Making in Democratic Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
. 2001. Politics and the Architecture of Choice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
. 2003. Bounded Rationality in Political Science: Lessons from Public Administration. Journal of
Public Administration Theory 13: 395412.
Jones, Bryan D., and Frank R. Baumgartner. 2005. The Politics of Attention. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Jones, Bryan D., Frank R. Baumgartner, and James L. True. 1996. The Shape of Change: Punctuations and
Stability in US Budgeting, 194796. Paper presented at the Midwest Political Science Association,
Chicago, IL.
Jones, Bryan D., Frank R. Baumgartner, Christian Breunig, Christopher Wlezien, Stuart Soroka, Martial
Foucault, Abel Francois, Christoffer Green-Pederson, Chris Koski, Peter John, Peter Mortensen,
Frederic Varone, and Steffan Walgrave. 2009. A General Empirical Law of Public Budgets: A
Comparative Analysis. American Journal of Political Science 53: 85573.
Jones, Bryan D., Heather Larsen-Price, and John Wilkerson. 2009. Representation and American Govern-
ing Institutions. 2009. Journal of Politics 71: 27790.
Jones, Bryan D., Tracy Sulkin, and Heather Larsen. 2003. Policy Punctuations in American Political
Institutions. American Political Science Review 97: 15170.
Kingdon, John. 1984. Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies. New York: Longman Classics.
Krehbiel, Keith. 1998. Pivotal Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Larsen-Price, Heather A. 2012. The Right Tool for the Job: The Canalization of Presidential Policy
Attention by Policy Instrument. Policy Studies Journal 40 (1): 14768.
Lindblom, Charles. 1959. The Science of Muddling Through. Public Administration Review 19: 7988.
Lowi, Theodore. 1969. The End of Liberalism. New York: W.W. Norton.
Mandelbrot, Benoit. 1963. The Variation of Certain Speculative Prices. Journal of Business 36: 294419.
. 1997. Fractals and Scaling in Finance. New York: Springer.
Jones/Baumgartner: Punctuated Equilibrium Theory 19
Mandelbrot, Benoit, and Richard L. Hudson. 2004. The (Mis)Behavior of Markets. New York: Basic Books.
McKelvey, Richard D. 1976. Intransitivities in Multidimensional Models: Implications for Agenda
Control. Journal of Economic Theory 12: 47282.
New York Times. 2011. Texass Progress on Juvenile Justice. New York Times (July 9): SR11.
Padgett, John F. 1980. Bounded Rationality in Budgetary Research. American Political Science Review 74:
35472.
Prindle, David F. 2012. Importing Concepts from Biology into Political Science: The Case of Punctuated
Equilibrium. Policy Studies Journal 40 (1): 2143.
Redford, Emmette. 1969. Democracy in the Administrative State. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schattschneider, Elmer E. 1960. The Semisovereign People. New York: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston.
Schrad, Mark Lawrence. 2010. The Political Power of Bad Ideas. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Sewell, Martin. 2011. A History of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. London: Research Note, University
College of London Department of Computer Science.
Simon, Herbert A. 1983. Reason in Human Affairs. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Simon, Herbert A., and Associates. 1986. Decision-Making and Problem-Solving. Research Briefings:
Report of the Research Briefing Panel on Decision-Making and Problem-Solving. Washington DC: National
Science Academy Press.
True, James., Bryan D. Jones, and Frank R. Baumgartner. 2007. Punctuated Equilibrium Theory: Explain-
ing Stability and Change in Policymaking. In Theories of the Policy Process, ed. Paul A. Sabbatier.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 15587.
Vergano, Dan. 2011. Paleontology Points to Political Punctuations. USA Today 7: 24.
Weimer, David. 2008. Theories of and in the Policy Process. Policy Studies Journal 36: 48996.
Wildavsky, Aaron. 1964. The Politics of the Budgetary Process. Boston: Little, Brown.
Wolfe, Michelle. 2012. Putting on the Brakes or Pressing on the Gas? Media Attention and Policymak-
ing. Policy Studies Journal 40 (1): 10926.
Workman, Samuel G., Bryan D. Jones, and Ashely Jochim. 2009. Information Processing and Policy
Dynamics. 2009. Policy Studies Journal 37: 7592.
Worsham, Jeff, and Chaun Stores. 2012. Pet Sounds: Subsystems, Regimes, Policy Punctuations, and the
Neglect of African American Farmers, 19352006. Policy Studies Journal 40 (1): 16989.
Worsham, Jeffrey. 2006. Up in Smoke: Mapping Subsystem Dynamics in Tobacco Policy. Policy Studies
Journal 34: 43752.