Modeling reactive attention among congressional witnesses during the COVID-19 pandemic

Although often considered dichotomous drivers of congressional agenda activity, indicators and focusing events may exist on a continuum if indicators are capable of culminating in a singular event that focuses attention. Identifying this culmination point could help explain how anticipatory, indicator-driven threats such as COVID-19 can dominate policy agendas in a manner similar to a focusing event. This paper investigates whether the culmination point can be identified by quantifying anticipatory and reactive attention of congressional committee witnesses towards an indicator-driven threat. The findings demonstrate that peaks in congressional witness numbers during the COVID-19 pandemic coincided with a transition from anticipatory to reactive attention, which was associated with rapid increases in unemployment. This demonstrates that a transition from anticipatory to reactive attention could mark the culmination point of an indicator-driven event such as COVID-19, and explain how and why some indicators are capable of focusing attention, but others are not.

Sanctuary Cities, Focusing Events, and the Solidarity Shift: A Standard Measurement of the Prevalence of Victims for the Narrative Policy Framework

Numerous state and local jurisdictions across the United States have adopted policies limiting their cooperation with federal deportation efforts carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Sometimes referred to as “sanctuary cities,” these jurisdictions interpret federalism in a way that resists active participation in federal immigration enforcement. Employing the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), we analyze 164 public consumption documents to examine policy narratives disseminated by interest groups engaged in the policy debate surrounding sanctuary cities between 2010 and 2017. Using data derived from a content analysis of these documents, we develop a new measure, the solidarity shift, to capture the prevalence of victims in policy narratives; we find there are significant differences in the narrative strategies employed by advocates and opponents of sanctuary jurisdictions, with opponents’ narratives demonstrating more active responses to external events and a higher proportion of victims, relative to other characters. We also find that the killing of Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco can be seen as a focusing event because of the narrative actions of anti-sanctuary city advocates and their reliance on the solidarity shift, which resulted in significant changes to anti-sanctuary city narrative strategies.

Community Disaster Recovery

Disasters can serve as focusing events that increase agenda attention related to issues of disaster response, recovery, and preparedness. Increased agenda attention can lead to policy changes and organisational learning. The degree and type of learning that occurs within a government organization after a disaster may matter to policy outcomes related to individual, household, and community-level risks and resilience. Local governments are the first line of disaster response but also bear the burden of performing long-term disaster recovery and planning for future events. Crow and Albright present the first framework for understanding if, how, and to what effect communities and local governments learn after a disaster strikes. Drawing from analyses conducted over a five-year period following extreme flooding in Colorado, USA, Community Disaster Recovery: Moving from Vulnerability to Resilience presents a framework of community-level learning after disaster and the factors that catalyse policy change towards resilience.

Magnifying Focusing Events: Global Smoke Plumes and International Construal Connections in Newspaper Coverage of 2020 Wildfire Events

As climate policy focusing events, wildfires are distinct from hurricanes, floods, and tornados because they also result in the release of massive smoke plumes that contribute to the concentration of atmospheric carbon. However, unlike melting glaciers, wildfires may be easier to dismiss as individual acts of human error, spontaneous acts of mother nature, and/or necessary ecological processes of agricultural renewal. This paper presents a mixed-methods analysis of 150 international and domestic English language newspaper articles related to wildfire events occurring in Australia, Canada, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States during the year 2020. The analysis examines how news coverage of wildfire events might focus or diffuse attention to international climate policy and anthropogenic global warming. The quantitative findings provide evidence to suggest that 30% of wildfire coverage is attributed to climate change. However, qualitative analysis suggests that climate change is acknowledged as a blame frame that is often only inferentially attributed to anthropogenic origins. The mixed-methods analysis finds that only 6% of news coverage related wildfire events to emission contributions. The analysis of these exemplar articles suggests that the international travel of wildfire smoke may serve as a focusing event from which to emphasize wildfires as both a consequence of and contributor to, global warming. Findings indicate that environmental coalitions and scientific experts’ engagement with the press are integral to creating frames that link the increasing frequency, duration, and range of wildfire events to climate policy needs.

How the Sans Everything and Ely inquiries put reform of psychiatric hospitals onto the United Kingdom government agenda

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to draw on multiple streams analysis (MSA) and to investigate how policy change emerged from two inquiries into allegations of abusive hospital care in National Health Service (NHS) hospitals in the United Kingdom (UK) in the 1960s.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology of this study is regarding a historical case study of two inquiries.FindingsThe Sans Everything and Ely inquiries had the same legal standing and terms of reference, but the second put psychiatric hospital reform on the agenda, while the first did not. The main factor making Ely rather than Sans Everything the turning point seems to have been concerned with “agency”, linked with a few key individuals.Research limitations/implicationsA study of 1960s event necessarily relies heavily on documentary and archival sources, and cannot draw on interviews which are an important ingredient of many case studies.Originality/valueThe originality of the study is to examines inquiries, which have been largely neglected in MSA, despite their obvious potential role in placing issues on the agenda. Previous studies of MSA have devoted little attention to the ability of the media to provide the focus on “focusing events”.

Eventos focalizadores e a pandemia da COVID-19: a renda básica emergencial na agenda governamental brasileira

Resumo Observar e analisar as causas, os efeitos e as múltiplas consequências econômicas, sociais e sanitárias da pandemia da COVID-19 têm sido primordiais não apenas para a compreensão desse fenômeno mundial, mas também para a elaboração de alternativas e soluções que minimizem os impactos na vida das populações ao redor do mundo. Este artigo tem como principal objetivo entender a ascensão da renda básica emergencial como alternativa viável de política pública no cenário brasileiro, por meio do Auxílio Emergencial. Baseado na literatura de agenda-setting, em específico no conceito de eventos focalizadores (focusing events), recuperamos um breve histórico das políticas de transferência de renda e de combate à pobreza e os principais atores envolvidos, para entender mudanças, adaptações e soluções propostas para que a alternativa de renda básica emergencial pudesse ser considerada e aceita neste momento específico de crise.

The rise and fall of global health issues: an arenas model applied to the COVID-19 pandemic shock

Background The global health agenda is ill-defined as an analytical construct, complicating attempts by scholars and proponents to make claims about the agenda status of issues. We draw on Kingdon’s definition of the agenda and Hilgartner and Bosk’s public arenas model to conceptualize the global health agenda as those subjects or problems to which collectivities of actors operating nationally and globally are paying serious attention at any given time. We propose an arenas model for global health agenda setting and illustrate its potential utility by assessing priority indicators in five arenas, including international aid, pharmaceutical industry, scientific research, news media and civil society. We then apply the model to illustrate how the status of established (HIV/AIDS), emergent (diabetes) and rising (Alzheimer’s disease) issues might be measured, compared and change in light of a pandemic shock (COVID-19). Results Coronavirus priority indicators rose precipitously in all five arenas in 2020, reflecting the kind of punctuation often caused by focusing events. The magnitude of change varied somewhat by arena, with the most pronounced shift in the global news media arena. Priority indicators for the other issues showed decreases of up to 21% and increases of up to 41% between 2019 and 2020, with increases suggesting that the agenda for global health issues expanded in some arenas in 2020— COVID-19 did not consistently displace priority for HIV/AIDS, diabetes or Alzheimer’s disease, though it might have for other issues. Conclusions We advance an arenas model as a novel means of addressing conceptual and measurement challenges that often undermine the validity of claims concerning the global health agenda status of problems and contributing causal factors. Our presentation of the model and illustrative analysis lays the groundwork for more systematic investigation of trends in global health agenda setting. Further specification of the model is needed to ensure accurate representation of vital national and transnational arenas and their interactions, applicability to a range of disease-specific, health systems, governance and policy issues, and sensitivity to subtler influences on global health agenda setting than pandemic shocks.

A multiple streams analysis of drought policies in Ceará state, Brazil

<p>Interactions between society and water are complex, socio-hydrological systems are influenced by policies, which rarely are a simple linear response with the aim of providing the most efficient solution. In drought contexts, a new layer of complexity is added, considering the different uncertainties involved, related to the rainfall season, or the duration of multi-year drought events. We utilized the Multiple Streams Approach (MSA) theory to answer the following question: how do multi-year droughts function as focusing events? Focusing events may trigger greater attention to problems and solutions because they increase the likelihood that more organized interests, including some that are influential and powerful, could advocate policy change. MSA seeks to explain how policy changes. It assumes the policy change happens when three separate streams interact: (1) the problem stream, involving the emergence or recognition of a problem by society; (2) the policy stream, containing policy ideas and alternatives generated by specialists, researchers, politicians, and social actors; and (3) the politics stream, referring to the political, administrative, and legislative context favorable or unfavorable to developing certain actions to overcome the problem. The justification to apply the MSA lenses in this is study is to understand the influences of multi-year drought events as a focusing event that triggered the process of policy change considering the subnational context of Ceará state in Brazil. In this study, the following methodological procedures were used: (a) historical overview of drought occurrence and the policy responses in Ceará; (b) data processing of hydrologic records (rainfall). We found three main different policy approaches to drought impacts: reactive, proactive, and drought preparedness policies. We found in some cases that multi-year droughts served as focusing events that opened windows of opportunities, triggering policy response changes, such as, collaboration, new problem framing, and increased political attention. Our findings have implications for the socio-hydrology field, as there is still significant scope for increasing the understanding of the influences of public policies in the context of coupled-humans systems, especially in the context of drought. </p>