ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews on three dominant frameworks for explaining where policy comes from, or what is commonly referred to as agenda setting: the advocacy coalition framework, punctuated equilibrium theory, and the multiple streams approach, or policy windows. Criticism has been leveled at all three for their inability to rule out alternative explanations. Incrementalism is largely bounded rationality applied to policymaking, and for many years the incrementalist framework was the primary model for explaining stability in the policy process. However, it has an obvious flaw: policymaking is not always incremental. The framework of boundedly rational actors in policy subsystems producing incremental change is unable to explain why public policy periodically undergoes radical change. Policy process is frustratingly complex and difficult to understand, but this has not stopped scholars—particularly political scientists—from trying to identify and understand systematic causal relationships. The special attraction for political science is not hard to fathom: the study of policy process is ultimately the study of political power.
