preview

How Do Issues Get On Public Agendas?

Good Essays

Throughout times, democracy has emerged as the best political way to rule a country. Within democratic systems, citizens have to vote for people who will represent them in the decision-making system. The question that John Kingdon wanted to understand in his writing of How Do Issues Get on Public Agendas? is how the legislative process and the public policies are made. John Kingdon well illustrates the processes by which an issue becomes policy issue, named the Cohen-March-Olsen, and the coming together of three processes. In the Cohen-March-Olsen, Kingdon proposed three stream: problem-recognition, policy stream of proposals and political stream.
To begin, problems are hard to be recognized by important people in the legal system. Government pay more attention to some problems over others because they have indicators telling them which one is important. Indicators are in form of rate or numbers, problem recognition become significant when there is a big shift within the data. Also, it cost money to pay those people who collect data to for evidences that an issue is an issue. Sometimes, politicians’ will considered a crisis or a disaster as their main problem if it happens. Most of the time, the government will manage the policy-making in incrementalism way. Instead of following the normal agenda, politicians will pass the most burning issues. The best example of a crisis is an event that was all over the news and in the social media like the airplane in the Indian Ocean.

Get Access