ABSTRACT
One of the key questions about policy change is why? Political scientists want to know about the origins of significant and large changes in public priorities, what Jones et al. (1998, 2003) call ‘policy punctuations’. Do they come from democratic processes, such as parties and interest groups, or from inside political systems, such as bureaucracies, or arise in the media and from other propagators of ideas? Findings on this question would increase knowledge about some of the key behavioural relationships between institutions and groups in a democracy. It also matters whether major policy changes, such as budget shifts, are random or rare occurrences, such as Kingdon’s (1984) ‘policy windows’, which may lead to a series of ‘wild lurches’ before policy-making settles down again, or whether they arise from long-term movements in social and economic processes. Concerning the former, observing policy-making becomes just like the science of studying earthquakes, with little relation to the impact of democratic debate or deliberation; the latter could reflect the periodic reawakening of opinion-formers and publics from a long slumber.
