Subsystems and ill‐fitting problems: Clarifying a concept

Abstract

AbstractPolicy process scholars are increasingly attentive to issues that engage multiple subsystems, though they disagree on what the unit of analysis should be. Researchers have used the term “boundary spanning,” which already refers to a different class of institutions and actors, as well as variants of the terms wicked and messy problems without incorporating their full definitions. In this article, I argue that trans‐subsystem issues are better understood as “ill‐fitting problems” because they do not neatly fit into existing institutional jurisdictions. Jurisdictions are arbitrary rather than fixed, so our understanding of which problems stretch across subsystems depends on the political system or institution under study. I illustrate the match or mismatch between issues and institutional organization using data on attention to cybersecurity issues in U.S. congressional hearings from 1966 to 2014. Cybersecurity's widely varied attributes mean that multiple committees and the subsystems they represent compete for policymaking authority, while cybersecurity also competes for attention within each component subsystem. While the opposite phenomenon, “well‐fitting problems” are possible, endogenous and exogenous problem definition dynamics will worsen the fit between most issues and their governing arrangements. The clarified concept of ill‐fitting problems can support research into policy regimes, wicked problems, and complex systems.