Bryan Jones’ “A Change of Mind or a Change of Focus? A Theory of Choice Reversals in Politics” (Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory Vol. 4 (1994) No. 2, pp.141-177) offers a clear example and explanation of the importance of issue definition in legislative advocacy.
Jones (who often collaborates with Frank Baumgartner) uses the question of why “In 1992 seventy-nine members of the U.S. House of Representatives, who voted in favor of the superconducting supercollider in 1991, voted on virtually the same appropriations bill amendment to kill the big science project” to develop his theory of choice based on attentiveness. Legislators don’t change their minds – they change what they are thinking about. As Jones puts it, “Our basic guiding thesis, then, is that preferences generally change only grudgingly but attentiveness to those preferences can shift rapidly…The choices that people face are almost underlain by multiple attributes.” The attributes determine the outcomes.
In developing his explanation Jones walks through traditional rational actor theory and moves quickly to bounded rationality – that is, people do not clearly and objectively evaluate every new datum they encounter and make maximizing choices but rather make choices that make sense within limited constraints. As decision makers our choices make sense – at least to us, in the time, place and conditions under which we make the decisions (when someone says, “it seemed like a good idea at the time…” they usually mean it).
Boundedly rational decision makers take shortcuts to narrow the scope of the problem. We are bears of little brains, we cannot consider all things at once. We are not, to steal a line from Jones that he steals from Herbert Simon, “omnisciently rational.”
The first shortcut is one of focus, what the thing we are deciding about is the “about.” As Jones puts it, “what is important is the information the decision maker attends to.” In the case of the superconducting supercollider the entry points, the “abouts”, were funding economic growth and adding to the deficit. If the project was about the deficit it was voted against, if it was about investment (jobs, growth) then it was supported. Members of Congress have relatively fixed ideas about how they feel about both; the changed votes did not reflect a change in positions but rather a change in approach.
One reason that this first step is so important is that everything else flows from it; “each step in the process of finding a solution is dependent on prior decisions.” If a decision maker sees a project as about economic growth the next step must be about supporting or opposing economic growth.
This is a critical insight for advocates. Smart advocates define their issue as one that will inevitably result in the decisions they want. There are a lot of roads out of Washington – put your decision maker on the right one and he or she will eventually get where you want them to go.
