Abstract
How and when issues are elevated onto the political agenda is a perennial question in the study of public policy. This article considers how moral panics contribute to punctuated equilibrium in public policy by drawing together broader societal anxieties or fears and thereby precipitating or accelerating changes in the dominant set of issue frames. In so doing they create opportunities for policy entrepreneurs to disrupt the existing policy consensus. In a test of this theory, we assess the factors behind the rise of crime on the policy agenda in Britain between 1960 and 2010. We adopt an integrative mixed‐methods approach, drawing upon a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. This enables us to analyze the rise of crime as a policy problem, the breakdown of the political‐institutional consensus on crime, the moral panic that followed the murder of the toddler James Bulger in 1993, the emergence of new issue frames around crime and social/moral decay more broadly, and how—in combination—these contributed to an escalation of political rhetoric and action on crime, led by policy entrepreneurs in the Labour and Conservative parties.
Highlights
How do moral panics around specific events lead to periods of rapid change in public policy? The processes by which issues are elevated onto the political agenda is a perennial concern of the study of public policy. Baumgartner and Jones’s (1993, 2009) theory of punctuated equilibrium in public policy contends that policy changes occur due to the concurrence of a breakdown in an existing policy monopoly and a change in the policy image
This article has sought to explain why crime went from being a peripheral issue on the agenda of British politics to being a major concern for the mass public, media, and policymakers in a short period of time
This seismic shift in political attention, following an extended period of stability in criminal justice policy, is consistent with the argument that moral panics contribute to punctuated equilibrium in public policy—as high-profile events become a focus of public anxieties and lead to the framing of particular conditions, episodes, persons, or groups as a threat to societal values or interests
Summary
How do moral panics around specific events lead to periods of rapid change in public policy? The processes by which issues are elevated onto the political agenda is a perennial concern of the study of public policy. Baumgartner and Jones’s (1993, 2009) theory of punctuated equilibrium in public policy contends that policy changes occur due to the concurrence of a breakdown in an existing policy monopoly and a change in the policy image (or the “issue frame” or “issue definition”). Our analysis considers evidence relating to the following factors: (1) the policy monopoly governing criminal justice (based on qualitative analysis of policy/institutions and elite interviews), (2) growing social problems and public concern (depicted using a range of quantitative data), (3) the incidence of a focusing event and moral panic (undertaking qualitative analysis of the trigger event), and (4) changes in issue frames (revealed with quantitative data on rhetoric used in parliamentary debates) We use these findings to inform specification of a time series model of the criminal justice policy agenda that tests the effect of each of these factors simultaneously. Had crime started to receive more attention from British government, the related set of issue frames had become tied to anxiety about social breakdown, or “the causes of crime” as Tony Blair had labeled it
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