David Brooks’ column in today’s New York Times is worth reading – and should be old news for anyone who does advocacy.
Brooks writes:
Roughly speaking, there are four steps to every decision. First, you perceive a situation. Then you think of possible courses of action. Then you calculate which course is in your best interest. Then you take the action.
Over the past few centuries, public policy analysts have assumed that step three is the most important. Economic models and entire social science disciplines are premised on the assumption that people are mostly engaged in rationally calculating and maximizing their self-interest…
Perhaps this will be the moment when we shift our focus from step three, rational calculation, to step one, perception.”
As we used to say, no ---- Sherlock. The policy and political worlds are not fixed realities. As Murray Edelman wrote in 1985:
It is language about political events and developments that people experience; even events that are close by take their meaning from the language used to depict them. So political language is political reality; there is no other so far as the meaning of events to actor and spectators is concerned.”
As such, “The critical element in political maneuver for advantage is the creation of meaning.”
Or, as Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones put in Agendas and Instability in American Politics (1993), “definition is at the heart of the political battle.” This is because, as they write, “it is not the issue itself that matters so much as the public or elite understanding of the issue.”
As such, as John Kingdon notes in Agenda’s Alternatives, and Public Policies (1995), “Schattschneider’s oft-quoted statement, ‘The definition of alternatives is the supreme instrument of power,’ aptly states the case.” (Schattschneider wrote this in 1960).
In their 2005 book The Politics of Attention Jones and Baumgartner trace the same policy process that Brooks does – a problem is identified, it is described, alternatives presented, and a solution is chosen. Each stage emerges from the one before it. The description is based on how the issue got on the agenda, the alternatives are based on the description and the solution is selected from among those. If the death penalty is defined as a moral issue the solutions are all based in Right and Wrong – and we keep the death penalty. If it’s a fairness and innocence issue it is found to be unfair and the death penalty fades (for a case study of this see Baumgartner et. al.’s 2008 book, The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence. How you come into an argument determines how you come out of it.
Smart advocates use this insight to their advantage. They put issues on the agenda (step one) that makes step three an inevitable win. Those who define what the debate is about almost always win the debate itself.
Of course Brooks is right, rational decision making is constrained not only by the actors (bounded rationality) but also by the language of the political and policy process itself.
