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Policy Punctuations in American Political Institutions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2003

Bryan D. Jones ,
Tracy Sulkin  and
Heather A. Larsen
Bryan D. Jones
Affiliation:
Donald R. Matthews Distinguished Professor of American Politics, Department of Political Science, University of Washington, Box 353530, Seattle, WA 98195 (bdjones@u.washington.edu).
Tracy Sulkin
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Political Science and Speech Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 702 S. Wright, Urbana, IL 61801 (tsulkin@uiuc.edu).
Heather A. Larsen
Affiliation:
Ph.D. student, Department of Political Science, University of Washington, Box 353530, Seattle, WA 98195 (hlarsen@u.washington.edu).
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Abstract

Political institutions translate inputs—in the form of changed preferences, new participants, new information, or sudden attention to previously available information—into policy outputs. In the process they impose costs on this translation, and these costs increase institutional friction. We argue that the “friction” in political institutions leads not to consistent “gridlock” but to long periods of stasis interspersed with dramatic policy punctuations. As political institutions add costs to the translation of inputs into outputs, institutional friction will increase, and outputs from the process will become increasingly punctuated overall. We use a stochastic process approach to compare the extent of punctuations among 15 data sets that assess change in U.S. government budgets, in a variety of aspects of the public policy process, in election results, and in stock market returns in the United States. We find that all of these distributions display positive kurtosis—tall central peaks (representing considerable stability) and heavy tails (reflecting the punctuations, both positive and negative). When we order institutions according to the costs they impose on collective action, those with higher decision and transaction costs generate more positive kurtosis. Direct parameter estimates indicate that all distributions except budget data were best fit by the double-exponential probability distribution; budgets are Paretian.This project was funded by the Political Science Program of the National Science Foundation, Award SES9904700. We appreciate the support of Frank Scioli, the program officer, and various political science program directors. We benefited from comments by Frank Baumgartner, John Brehm, Chris Mackie, Peter John, John Padgett, Bat Sparrow, Jim True and John Wilkerson.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 97 , Issue 1 , February 2003 , pp. 151 - 169
Copyright
© 2003 by the American Political Science Association

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