|
|
Article: The local roots of federal policy change: transportation in the 1990s.(Statistical Data Included)
- Article from:
- Polity
- Article date:
- December 22, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Palgrave Macmillan, a Division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
An increasing number of political scientists have begun to peer into the murky waters of policy change, seeking to explain major shifts in legislative and administrative outcomes in the United States. In a pathbreaking work, for example, Baumgartner and Jones used empirical analyses of national media, public opinion surveys, and Congressional testimony to help unravel the mystery of the "punctuated equilibria" that mark many areas of national policy--that is, episodes of decisive policy change amidst longer periods of stable policymaking. (1)
Implicit in most of the research on policy change is the assumption that the relevant debate over policy is a national ...