Cultural Strategies of Agenda Denial: Avoidance, Attack, and Redefinition (Studies in Government and Public Policy) Paperback – Import, 30 November 1997

This text is an essential read if you're studying, or simply interested in, the federal agenda-setting process. For many readers, the first, second, and final chapters of the text will most likely be the most profitable unless they have interests in the areas of securities, the FDA, or public health issues. The first chapter gives an excellent overview of the ontology and tactics of policy initiators, or those who attempt to place issues on the agenda. It covers the steps that an initiator must go through to transform a problem into an issue, various categories of initiators (e.g. initiators that are outside of government, are within government and need to attract public support, or are inside the policy subsystem and just work within it), and a few of their most common tactics and issues. It also identifies the groups who may oppose getting an issue onto the agenda, and the likely strategies that different opponents are likely to adopt.The second chapter provides a detailed walk through of the strategies that opponents will deploy to keep issues off the government's formal agenda. It identifies four different strategy groupings: low-cost strategies (largely dependent on ignoring the problem); medium-cost strategies reliant on attacking the legitimacy of the initiators' policy and/or the initiators' own legitimacy; medium-cost strategies that focus on symbolically placating initiators, and high-cost strategies that include electoral threats, legal measures, and physical coercion.The text concludes by drawing conclusions from the various cases in chapters three through nine. It evaluates likely governmental responses to policy initiators of varying composition, based on the empirical research, and concludes that against legitimate opponents or issues symbolic placation is most common. While symbolic gestures are an unhappy 'solution' to some policy initiators, to those with low levels of legitimacy such placation can serve to enhance the policy initiators' status in subsequent issue conflicts. Further, symbolic placation may also see policy initiators getting a seat at the table when decisions around the issue are made: this can potentially be a significant 'win' for initiators. Directly affected parties - governmental or not - are likely to more fervently oppose the proposed policy in an effort to delegitimize the issue or its proponents. From the text, it's less clear how the government, corporate, of civil actors might deploy 'flankers' to oppose initiators without getting directly involved in medium- or high-cost attack strategies. To contain issues, attention is regularly paid to costs and the potential unfairness of distributing the effects of the policy.If I were to find a quick (and, perhaps, obvious) fault with the book, it is that the text is very definitely focused on federal agenda-setting. Given that many of the 'big' problems facing the world have assumed a multi- and supra-national character the book is less helpful for understanding how local or national policy initiators might influence supranational agendas, or how they might try to bypass the national agenda in its entirety and work directly with multi- or supra-national agendas. Similarly, little theoretical attention is given to the multi-national stakeholders who may oppose a policy at a variety of levels, potentially working well out of reach of policy initiators when opposing an issue's arrival to the national agenda. This lack is party derived from the book's focus on federal politics, as well as the text's datedness (i.e. before globalization truly consumed vast portions of the political science discipline). Nevertheless, these are considerations to keep in mind whilst reading the text and working through the theory's application.