Your browser does not support the NLM PubReader view.

Go to this page to see a list of supporting browsers.
Korean Journal of Policy Studies
Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University

Korean J. Policy Stud. 2015; 30(3):1-22

pISSN: 1225-5017, eISSN: 2765-2807

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52372/kjps30301

Article

The Issue-Attention Cycle and Public Policy in the United States

Kimuck Park1, Edward T. Jennings Jr2
1Kimuck Park is a professor in the Department of Urban Public Administration at Daegu University in Korea. E-mail: kpark@daegu.ac.kr.
2Edward T. Jennings Jr. is a professor in the Martin School of Public Policy and Administration at University of Kentucky, U.S.A. E-mail: ed.jennings@uky.edu.

© Copyright 2015 Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Received: Jul 03, 2015; Revised: Aug 05, 2015; Revised: Sep 02, 2015; Accepted: Oct 04, 2015

Published Online: Dec 31, 2015

Abstract

Four decades ago, Anthony Downs offered a compelling picture of the public policy issue-attention cycle. This paper offers a systematic test of how well 50 social issues in the United States fit the model over an extended period of time. A total of 29 issues that fit Downs’s model are analyzed in order to test Downs’s theory that an increase in public interest in an issue increases the government’s efforts to address the issue. The results were quite mixed. For 11 issues, there was a positive relationship between the level of media attention and the number of bills passed. This provides partial support for Downs’s theory. Downs postulated that state intervention occurs when there is a high level of public concern. On the other hand, the results also reveal that a large number of policies were implemented when the level of media attention was not at its peak, resulting in either no relationship between attention and legislation or a negative relationship.

Keywords: issue-attention cycle; policy issues; Anthony Downs; public policy decisions