Decision Agenda Research Articles

Placing Emergency Department Crowding on the Decision Agenda

The causes of emergency department crowding (EDC), and the outcomes and strategies for resolution are reviewed. This is a call to the nursing profession to elevate EDC on hospital, community, and national agendas to garner resources to restore timely emergency care.

Speed and Search: Designing Organizations for Turbulence and Complexity

We use an innovative technique to examine an enduring but recently neglected question: How do environmental turbulence and complexity affect the appropriate formal design of organizations? We construct an agent-based simulation in which multidepartment firms with different designs face environments whose turbulence and complexity we control. The model’s results produce two sets of testable hypotheses. One set pinpoints formal designs that cope well with three different environments: turbulent settings, in which firms must improve their performance speedily; complex environments, in which firms must search broadly; and settings with both turbulence and complexity, in which firms must balance speed and search. The results shed new light on longstanding notions such as equifinality. The other set of hypotheses argues that the impact of individual design elements on speed and search often depends delicately on specific powers granted to department heads, creating effects that run contrary to conventional wisdom and intuition. Ample processing power at the bottom of a firm, for instance, can slow down the improvement and narrow the search of the firm as a whole. Differences arise between our results and conventional wisdom when conventional thinking fails to account for the powers of department heads—powers to withhold information about departmental options, to control decision-making agendas, to veto firmwide alternatives, and to take unilateral action. Our results suggest how future empirical studies of organizational design might be fruitfully coupled with rigorous agent-based modeling efforts.

How well does a partnership in pensions really work? The Israeli public/private pension mix

This paper takes the old-age pension system in Israel as a test case to examine the implications of proposals for pension reform now being debated or implemented in many welfare states. For over a decade, high on the agenda of decision-makers on both national and international levels, there has been the notion of moving towards a changing ‘partnership in pensions’ or, to put it more bluntly, towards greater privatisation of social security. Virtually since its emergence in the 1950s, the Israeli old-age pension has been based primarily upon a mix of low universal state pensions and income-related private occupational pensions. This paper compares the British and Israeli social security systems for older people in the wake of the reforms recently introduced in Britain and analyses the implications of the Israeli structure on the distribution of social security spending and on the wellbeing of different categories of older individuals.

Healthy Cities projects in Europe

The WHO Healthy Cities Project has been developed in Europe to place health high on the agenda of city decision-makers. It has promoted comprehensive local strategies for health and sustainable development. Cities endorse principles and strategies, establish project infrastructures, work on specific goals, products, changes, and outcomes, and invest in formal and informal networking and cooperation. Consistent research and development efforts are contributing towards a more evidence-based policy making and to the emergence of a framework to meet the demands of the new public health movement.

Night and Day: Mitigation Policymaking in Oakland, California before and after the Loma Prieta Disaster

The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake was a watershed event for all of the communities it affected but perhaps more so for Oakland, California, where it had a fundamental and enduring impact on the decision agenda of city government. This paper explains (1) local government inaction on earthquake safety in Oakland before the disaster and then (2) how and why a political coalition was formed to develop a series of city ordinances to abate the hazard posed by earthquake-damaged buildings as well as by a class of structures (unreinforced masonry) known to be particularly earthquake-vulnerable.

Cultural strategies of agenda denial: avoidance, attack, and redefinition

Agenda-setting is a key component in the democratic process if political outsiders are to have their concerns taken seriously. However, their efforts sometimes fail for reasons other than insufficient resources or incompetent leaders: opponents often succeed in keeping new issues from ever reaching the agendas of decision-makers. This is the first book devoted to examining why some issues proposed by aggrieved individuals or groups are denied access to policy agendas. It develops a theoretical framework for the study of agenda setting and agenda denial, emphasizing the cultural strategies opponents use to impede and defeat policy initiatives, and examining specific strategies of avoidance, attack, and redefinition that explain why certain issues don't receive consideration. The book contains seven case studies that examine the policy process from the perspective of the strategies opponents of policy initiatives use and demonstrate that agenda denial can result when opponents succeed in portraying initiatives as threats to widely held world views and identities. Four cases involving federal agencies show how the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Food and Drug Administration have kept issues off their own agendas, how the accounting profession has avoided SEC regulation, and how pro-life forces kept the French abortion pill off the FDA agenda. Two cases focusing on public health issues examine why national health insurance has never made it onto the federal agenda and how local agencies in Texas prevented residents of minority neighborhoods from obtaining clean water. Finally, a case from outside the U.S. shows how Kurt Waldheim's Nazi past failed to become an issue in his campaign for President of Austria. While most books emphasize issue initiators, Cultural Strategies of Agenda Denial makes a unique addition to the agenda-setting literature by focusing on the actions of opponents and emphasizing the political importance of cultural resources and culturally constituted ideas to the ongoing debate in political science concerning how open and democratic our system really is.

On a fast‐track to a ban: The Canadian policy

Public opposition to the existing policy on the ban of anti‐personnel mines served as a catalyst that dramatically transformed an element of Canadian policy and, more importantly, culminated in an international prohibition of the production and use of a weapon of war, providing the Canadian government with a diplomatic triumph. Tomlin describes how the issue of anti‐personnel mines evolved from being that most wretched of policy dogs for bureaucrats — a loser” to become a top priority on the Canadian government's decision agenda. He provides detailed explanations of the two key elements of the policy process, namely agenda setting and the development of policy alternatives. John Kingdon's policy model is used in the analysis to describe how the mines issue rose to the top of the decision agenda and why a Canadian‐led initiative for a global ban on mines became the preferred policy alternative for the Canadian government, ultimately leading to the policy process that enabled Canada to propose to the world that it follow the path that is now known universally as the Ottawa Process.

Science and technology policy and S&T indicators: trends in Latin America

Starting from evidence that Latin American science and technology policy (STP) is undergoing a transformation, current conditions are analyzed to establish a counterpoint between the STP/indicator interface in advanced countries and in Latin America. Based on introducing in the decision-making agenda a scenario of economic democratization and the satisfaction of social demands, some of the implications of such a transformation in STP for S&T indicators are suggested. The analysis shows that the available indicators are not relevant in shaping STP in advanced countries. It then demonstrates how the institutional supply-oriented model, the structural factors of S&T development and the poor relationship between the social actors responsible for its direction, have given rise to a situation of even greater inadequacy in Latin America. To satisfy the new scenario some suggestions are made for the work required with regard to indicators.

Reorganization of State Governments: 1900-1985

This article focuses on the reasons state executive branches are reorganized. The existing literature has diverse disciplinary sources, including political science, public administration, sociology, and business administration. On balance, the literature suggests that reorganization events are grounded in the short-term struggle for political access and symbolic rewards. The model developed here incorporates this dominant view but broadens its connections to processes for agenda setting, the institutional environment, and long-wave changes in management rhetoric and economic conditions. The research uses event history statistical methods to test hypotheses regarding repeated reorganizations in the forty-eight continental American state governments between 1900 and 1985. The focus is on the period of time, or duration, that passes before a comprehensive reorganization takes place. The major finding is that reorganizations are more likely to occur during long-wave economic declines, when institutional conditions encourage access to the governmental decision agenda and when long-wave declines and rationalistic rhetoric coincide with institutions that encourage access to the governmental agenda. Implications for research and the latest wave of governmental reform are also discussed.

Communicating with the Public

The op-ed (short for opposite editorial, the traditional location of such articles in newspapers) is a much-neglected vehicle for social workers to communicate with the public. (As used here, the op-ed is not to be confused with the letter to the editor. The op-ed is a short essay intending to inform the public about an issue and to indicate some means for its resolution.) Formal communication within the human services community consists largely of articles in the social work literature, a form primarily for a professional audience (Williams & Hopps, 1987, 1988). However, the dissemination of information to the public in many communities has been left with the agency's annual report or the occasional newspaper article or media interview prompted by an inquiring reporter. Social workers can be more proactive in setting the community decision-making agenda by writing op-ed pieces for the local newspaper. Developments in social welfare policy and programs of the past two decades make it imperative for social workers to exploit means for establishing a dialogue with the public. The devolution of program responsibility from the federal to state government and subsequently from state to local government means that important resource allocation decisions are made increasingly at the local level. Reductions in social program expenditures at the federal and state levels have left localities with greater problems--homelessness, acquired immune deficiency syndrome, poverty, gang violence--that must be addressed locally. Having relied on federal and state officials for direction in alleviating these problems, many public officials are now looking to local human services professionals for ways to enhance community welfare. Under these circumstances, an op-ed piece can communicate to the public relevant, effective, and just methods for remediating problems. The op-ed has several advantages. First, it provides almost immediate response to a community problem, because the time between submission and publication is typically one week. Second, coverage is as extensive as the circulation of the newspaper. Third, because the op-ed section of the newspaper provides elected officials with an opportunity to check the pulse of the community on local issues, an op-ed offers access to important decision makers. Fourth, photocopies of op-ed pieces are useful addenda for grant applications, an indication that the personnel of an agency are concerned about community problems. Finally, newspapers usually pay about $100 per op-ed, a modest source of revenue. What is a successful op-ed? The typical length is three to four double-spaced pages. A catchy title should grace the top of the first page (although editors sometimes replace your title with their own), and a brief biography of the authors should appear at the bottom. Unlike articles for the professional literature, an op-ed should be written in a provocative, punchy style without footnotes. Because a public audience is unlikely to appreciate program or policy nuances, these should be avoided, nor should the piece include elliptical references to bureaucratic procedures. Numerical data are useful but should be limited; they should illustrate the point, not confuse the reader. …

Group negotiation: Effects of decision rule, agenda, and aspiration.

Group negotiation: Effects of decision rule, agenda, and aspiration.

The Agenda for Risk Decisionmaking

The Agenda for Risk Decisionmaking

The emergence of sentencing reform and correctional priorities as public issues: Establishing a framework of analysis

Recent public policy literature has placed emphasis on the development of public issues and their placement on governmental decision-making agendas. This study tests the applicability of a particular agenda-building paradigm to the pressing issues of sentencing reform and correctional priorities, at both the state and national levels. The analysis reveals that various models of agenda-building are of descriptive value, and that sentencing reform and correctional priorities have followed different routes in their placement on the formal agendas of governmental decision-makers. Implications of this research point to the need for a thorough knowledge of the public policy process, particularly the dynamics of issue expansion, in evaluating the progress and prospects of meaningful sentencing and correctional reforms.