The Policy Stream and Punctuated Equilibrium Models

To make the case that the failure of SEI was not inevitable, this study employs two theoretical models to guide the narrative analysis of how the initiative reached the government agenda and what factors led to its ultimate demise. John Kingdon’s Policy Streams Model describes how problems come to the attention of policy makers, how agendas are set, how policy alternatives are generated, and why policy windows open.[3] This theory will be utilized to develop the story of SEI’s rise and fall, and will more specifically be used to assess who the important actors are within the space policy community. Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones’s Punctuated Equilibrium Model depicts the policy process as comprising long periods of stability, which are interrupted by predictable periods of instability that lead to major policy changes.[4] This model will be utilized to provide a better understanding of the larger trends that led to SEI s promotion to the government agenda and may explain its eventual downfall.[5] These two models contributed a number of descriptive statistics that were used to develop a collection of lessons learned from the SEI experience.

In 1972, Michael Cohen, James March, and Johan Olsen introduced Garbage Can Theory in an article describing what they called “organized anarchies.” The authors emphasized the chaotic character of organizations as loose collections of ideas as opposed to rational, coherent structures. They found that each, organized anarchy was composed of four separate process streams: problems, solutions, partici­pants, and choice opportunities. They concluded that organizations are “a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work.” Finally, a choice opportunity was:

…a garbage can into which various kinds of problems and solutions are dumped by participants as they are generated. The mix of garbage in a single can depends on the mix of cans available, on the labels attached to the alternative cans, on what garbage is currently being produced, and on the speed with which garbage is collected and removed from the scene.

Therefore, the three found that policy outcomes are the result of the garbage avail­able and the process chosen to sift through that garbage.[6]

In his classic tome Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies, John Kingdon applies the garbage can model to develop a framework for understanding the policy pro­cess within the federal government. He found that there were three major process streams in federal policy making: problem recognition; the formation and refine­ment of policy proposals; and politics. Kingdon concludes that these three pro­cess streams operate largely independent from one another. Within the first stream, various problems come to capture the attention of people in and around govern­ment. Within the second stream, a policy community of specialists concentrates on generating policy alternatives that may offer a solution to a given problem. Within the third stream, phenomena such as changes in administration, shifts in partisan or ideological distributions in Congress, and focusing events impact the selection of different policy alternatives. Kingdon argues that the key to gaining successful policy outcomes within this “organized anarchy” is to seize upon policy windows that offer an opportunity for pushing one’s proposals onto the policy agenda. Taking advantage of these policy windows requires that a policy entrepreneur expend the political capital necessary to join the three process streams at the appropriate time.[7] Kingdon’s model provided a useful structure for assessing the role of the policy community in placing SEI on the government agenda and formulating alternatives to solve a perceived problem—a lack of strategic direction within the American space program. Furthermore, it provided benchmarks that were used to evaluate the flawed policy making process for the initiative. In particular, it provided an analytic tool for understanding why Vice President Quayle and Mark Albrecht were not able to successfully join the three process streams when a policy window opened for human exploration beyond Earth orbit.

In Agendas and Instability in American Politics, Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones introduce a punctuated equilibrium model of policy change in American politics, based on the emergence and recession of policy issues on the government agenda. This theory suggests that the policy process has long periods of equilibrium, which are periodically disrupted by some instability that results in dramatic policy change. Baumgartner and Jones describe “a political system that displays consider­able stability with regard to the manner in which it processes issues, but the stability is punctuated with periods of volatile change.” Within this system, they contend, the mass public is limited in its ability to process information and remain focused on any one issue. As a result, policy subsystems are created so that scores of agenda items can be processed simultaneously. Only in times of unique crisis and instability do issues rise to the top of the government agenda to be dealt with independently. At a fundamental level, the punctuated equilibrium model seeks to explain why the policy process is largely incremental and conservative, but is also subject to periods of radical change.[8]

Baumgartner and Jones argue that to understand the complexities of the policy making process, one must study specific policy problems over extended periods of time. To comprehend the policy dynamics of an issue, one must develop indicators that explain how the issue is understood. They introduce a new approach to policy research that attempts to meld the policy typology literature and the agenda status literature—the former based on cross-sectional comparisons of multiple public policy issues, the latter focused on longitudinal studies of a single issue over time. The new approach concentrates on the long-term trends related to interest in, and discussion of, important policy questions. In particular, they are interested in two related concepts, whether an issue is on the agenda of a given institution (venue access) and whether the tone of activity within that institution is positive or nega­tive (policy image).[9] The two utilize an eclectic group of measures to gauge venue access and policy image. Baumgartner and Jones’s model provided a useful method for understanding where SEI fits within the history of the American space program. More importantly, it provided a means to evaluate whether long-term space policy trends predetermined the initiative’s failed outcome.