After disaster: agenda setting, public policy, and focusing events

TLDR

Disasters such as earthquakes act as focusing events, drawing heightened attention from citizens and policymakers to public problems and prompting calls for solutions. The book aims to explain how and why certain public disasters alter political agendas and ultimately shape public policy. He examines four disaster types—earthquakes, hurricanes, oil spills, and nuclear accidents—using empirical data to build a theory of when focusing events gain attention and trigger political reactions, drawing on agenda‑setting, policy‑community, advocacy‑coalition, media, and symbolic‑politics frameworks. Different disaster types produce distinct agenda politics; for example, the Exxon Valdez oil spill’s visible damage broke a 14‑year legislative stalemate on oil‑spill cleanup regulation, whereas the intangible effects of Three Mile Island yielded fewer concrete political outcomes in a polarized arena.

Abstract

Disasters like earthquakes are known as focusing events - sudden calamities that cause both citizens and policymakers to pay more attention to a public problem and often to press for solutions. This book, the first comprehensive analysis of these dramatic events, explains how and why some public disasters change political agendas and, ultimately, public policies. Thomas A. Birkland explores important successes and failures in the policy process by analyzing the political outcomes of four types of events: earthquakes, hurricanes, oil spills, and nuclear accidents. Using this empirical data to go beyond an intuitive understanding of focusing events, he presents a theory of where and when these events will gain attention and how they trigger political reactions. Birkland concludes that different types of disasters result in different kinds of agenda politics. Public outrage over the highly visible damage caused by the Exxon Valdez oil spill, for example, ended a fourteen-year logjam holding back Congressional legislation to regulate oil spill cleanups. On the other hand, the intangible effects of Three Mile Island had less concrete results in a political arena that was already highly polarized. Integrating a variety of theories on the policy process, including agenda setting, policy communities, advocacy coalitions, the political aspects of the news media, and the use of symbols in political debate, Birkland illuminates the dynamics of event-driven policy activity. As the first extensive study of its kind, this book offers new insights into the policy process.