Andres Bernal
Makhene looks at the most recent Democratic primary to illustrate contemporary agenda setting stage dynamics in the area of policy making for the United States. Examining Bernie Sanders' challenge to the favorite and eventual victor Hillary Clinton, Makhene suggests the use of the funnel causality model of agenda setting to understand the impact of the Sanders campaign on the current Democratic or "left of center" policy agenda.
While I am in agreement with the usefulness of the funnel of causality model's conceptual framework for understanding policy agenda setting, I believe my disagreements with some components of Makhene's analysis actually helps illustrate the interplay between FOC, elements of the Multiple Streams Approach, and the role of discourse.
The nested nature of social, institutional, ideational, political, and economic conditions is presented as embedding Senator Sanders' ideological influence on the DNC with a party that was already becoming more progressive and increasingly concerned with inequality. She goes on to argue that the distributed and accessible nature of the internet and social media brought attention to the Sanders campaign and while many democrats did not agree with his proposals, his presence seemed to have moved the party in a progressive direction. Lastly, Makhene implies that while distributed media and an increasingly progressive DNC brought attention to the Sanders perspective, the public's realization that there was ultimately no easy fix caused a fading in the demand and attention for certain Sanders led political agendas as understood by the Downs cycle model.
My points of disagreement with these assertions draw attention to Makhene's analysis as itself an example discourse. The notions that the Democratic party was moving in a progressive direction, that most Democrats did not in the end agree with Sanders' proposals, and that the media, particularly social media, helped garner attention to his campaign presents a discursive framework through which to understand a very ambiguous and confusing agenda setting battle at the national level. Zahariadis (2014) describes the Multiple Streams Approach as explaining policy creation under conditions of ambiguity. Ambiguity here refers to "a state of having many ways of thinking about the same circumstances or phenomenon" (pg. 25-26). In this case, it is about understanding what Sanders represented and offered in the election, why the voters in the Democratic party behaved in the way it did and elected Hillary Clinton, and what role the media played in this experience.
While Makhene offers one explanation. My points of disagreement are grounded on a different discourse that sees the Democratic Party as an institution inherently compromised by financial and corporate interests, and its voting membership split depending on how one made sense of the two campaigns. For example, under one interpretive paradigm, Sanders offered lofty rhetoric with no real ability to get things done while Clinton's incremental pragmatism was effective and was the only option able to defeat Donald Trump. A distinct paradigm saw the Sanders campaign as a political insurgency capable of breaking through political homogeneity through mass mobilization and the creation of a new progressive vocabulary (the threat of the billionaire class). Lastly, I believe Makhene's understanding of social media and the internet grants it too much power and influence in its ability to act as a singular force for participation and the dissemination of information. A distinct interpretive frame sees social media as a generational split amongst voters in the Democratic primary whereby the active silencing of the Sanders campaign by the traditional media outlets made sure to maintain uniformity in the belief of Clinton as the only viable option. Furthermore, as the Sanders campaign was heavily promoted in younger social media and internet outlets, a situation of over saturation with possible interpretations and causal explanations emerged as Clinton began to pull ahead in the polls ranging from conspiracy theories, to corruption, to simply the reality that the democratic voter membership was ultimately too conservative.
In Multiple Streams Analysis, collective choice is understood as the combined result of of structural forces and cognitive and affective processes that are highly context dependent (26). This too me is the most insightful idea about MSA and multivariate models of agenda setting. While Makhene's analysis focuses on the role of information dissemination and higher levels of public opinion, it does not sufficiently explore what exactly could this interplay between structure and discourse look like. As the funnel of causality model points out, all levels of institutional decision making exist through the cognitive, interpretive, ideological, affective, emotional, and rational experiences of policy makers within a context of social relations of power. In this sense, interpretive frameworks manifest themselves as systemic guides to behavior and standard operating procedures continuously in contact with the push and pull of structural forces. It is important for this reason to also invest time in thinking about policy agenda setting as grounded in a political economy of moving variables, interests, and systemic technological, and material forces described somewhat inadequately by the resource dependency model.
As an example, the structural implications of market failures and externalities, the Marxist ideas like primitive accumulation, overproduction, alienation, exploitation, and commodity fetishism, and or a Polanyian notion of commodity fictions and the double movement all provide politics in motions to which collective interpretive affective agents are in constant negotiation with. At the policy level, it may be prove insightful for the exploration of multivariate approaches to political change at the policy level, to challenge the assumptions that say problem, policy, and political streams are independent and on acting in parallel to one another. It would make more sense to see them as interdependent acting both in parallel but also continuously intersectional. This may offer a new manner of understanding the emergence of policy windows within a both structural and discursive social reality.
Sources
Makhene looks at the most recent Democratic primary to illustrate contemporary agenda setting stage dynamics in the area of policy making for the United States. Examining Bernie Sanders' challenge to the favorite and eventual victor Hillary Clinton, Makhene suggests the use of the funnel causality model of agenda setting to understand the impact of the Sanders campaign on the current Democratic or "left of center" policy agenda.
While I am in agreement with the usefulness of the funnel of causality model's conceptual framework for understanding policy agenda setting, I believe my disagreements with some components of Makhene's analysis actually helps illustrate the interplay between FOC, elements of the Multiple Streams Approach, and the role of discourse.
The nested nature of social, institutional, ideational, political, and economic conditions is presented as embedding Senator Sanders' ideological influence on the DNC with a party that was already becoming more progressive and increasingly concerned with inequality. She goes on to argue that the distributed and accessible nature of the internet and social media brought attention to the Sanders campaign and while many democrats did not agree with his proposals, his presence seemed to have moved the party in a progressive direction. Lastly, Makhene implies that while distributed media and an increasingly progressive DNC brought attention to the Sanders perspective, the public's realization that there was ultimately no easy fix caused a fading in the demand and attention for certain Sanders led political agendas as understood by the Downs cycle model.
My points of disagreement with these assertions draw attention to Makhene's analysis as itself an example discourse. The notions that the Democratic party was moving in a progressive direction, that most Democrats did not in the end agree with Sanders' proposals, and that the media, particularly social media, helped garner attention to his campaign presents a discursive framework through which to understand a very ambiguous and confusing agenda setting battle at the national level. Zahariadis (2014) describes the Multiple Streams Approach as explaining policy creation under conditions of ambiguity. Ambiguity here refers to "a state of having many ways of thinking about the same circumstances or phenomenon" (pg. 25-26). In this case, it is about understanding what Sanders represented and offered in the election, why the voters in the Democratic party behaved in the way it did and elected Hillary Clinton, and what role the media played in this experience.
While Makhene offers one explanation. My points of disagreement are grounded on a different discourse that sees the Democratic Party as an institution inherently compromised by financial and corporate interests, and its voting membership split depending on how one made sense of the two campaigns. For example, under one interpretive paradigm, Sanders offered lofty rhetoric with no real ability to get things done while Clinton's incremental pragmatism was effective and was the only option able to defeat Donald Trump. A distinct paradigm saw the Sanders campaign as a political insurgency capable of breaking through political homogeneity through mass mobilization and the creation of a new progressive vocabulary (the threat of the billionaire class). Lastly, I believe Makhene's understanding of social media and the internet grants it too much power and influence in its ability to act as a singular force for participation and the dissemination of information. A distinct interpretive frame sees social media as a generational split amongst voters in the Democratic primary whereby the active silencing of the Sanders campaign by the traditional media outlets made sure to maintain uniformity in the belief of Clinton as the only viable option. Furthermore, as the Sanders campaign was heavily promoted in younger social media and internet outlets, a situation of over saturation with possible interpretations and causal explanations emerged as Clinton began to pull ahead in the polls ranging from conspiracy theories, to corruption, to simply the reality that the democratic voter membership was ultimately too conservative.
In Multiple Streams Analysis, collective choice is understood as the combined result of of structural forces and cognitive and affective processes that are highly context dependent (26). This too me is the most insightful idea about MSA and multivariate models of agenda setting. While Makhene's analysis focuses on the role of information dissemination and higher levels of public opinion, it does not sufficiently explore what exactly could this interplay between structure and discourse look like. As the funnel of causality model points out, all levels of institutional decision making exist through the cognitive, interpretive, ideological, affective, emotional, and rational experiences of policy makers within a context of social relations of power. In this sense, interpretive frameworks manifest themselves as systemic guides to behavior and standard operating procedures continuously in contact with the push and pull of structural forces. It is important for this reason to also invest time in thinking about policy agenda setting as grounded in a political economy of moving variables, interests, and systemic technological, and material forces described somewhat inadequately by the resource dependency model.
As an example, the structural implications of market failures and externalities, the Marxist ideas like primitive accumulation, overproduction, alienation, exploitation, and commodity fetishism, and or a Polanyian notion of commodity fictions and the double movement all provide politics in motions to which collective interpretive affective agents are in constant negotiation with. At the policy level, it may be prove insightful for the exploration of multivariate approaches to political change at the policy level, to challenge the assumptions that say problem, policy, and political streams are independent and on acting in parallel to one another. It would make more sense to see them as interdependent acting both in parallel but also continuously intersectional. This may offer a new manner of understanding the emergence of policy windows within a both structural and discursive social reality.
Sources
- Howlett, Michael, M. Ramesh and Anthony Perl. Studying Public Policy: Policy Cycles and Policy Subsystems, Oxford University Press, 2009 (3rd Edition).
- Zahariadis, N. (2014) Ambiguity and Multiple Steams. In Sabatier, P. and Weible, D (Eds.) Theories of the Policy Process, Third Edition, Westview Pess.