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John W. Kingdon Quotes
born 1940 United States
John Wells Kingdon (born 1940) is Professor Emeritus and former Chair of Political Science at the University of Michigan. He is a graduate of Oberlin College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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21 quotes
Consensus is built, sometimes very rapidly, by cutting in many and diverse interests.
Setting the agenda and getting one's way, however, are two very different things.
People in and around government sense a national mood.
The mere fact of being behind in "the greatest country on earth" is enough to constitute a problem for some people.
A fair body of scholarship has come to challenge the view that elected officials reign supreme.
The chances for a problem to rise on the decision agenda are dramatically increased if a solution is attached.
The opportunity passes if the ready alternative is not available.
Somehow, open heart surgery means more to most of us then the Alton, Illinois, Lock and Dam 26.
A good idea catches on, snowballing as it picks up adherents. Sometimes a bad idea does the same.
There is nothing automatic about campaign pledges finding their way into public policy.
We still encounter considerable doses of messiness, accident, fortuitous coupling, and dumb luck.
People are sometimes reluctant to take big steps. Apprehensive about being unable to calculate the political fallout, politicians shy away from grand departures.
Public opinion may sometimes direct government to do something, but it more often constrains government from doing something.
One goal of a senator or representative is satisfying constituents. Publicity is essential, and one way to get publicity is to push for new policy initiatives.
The phrase "an idea whose time has come" captures a fundamental reality about an irresistible movement that sweeps over the politics and our society, pushing aside everything that might stand in its path.
Ideas become prominent and then fade.
It seemed to me that we knew something about how issues were decided, but that we knew much less about how they got to be issues in the first place.
The agenda, as I conceive of it, is the list of subjects or problems to which government officials, and people outside of government closely associated with those officials, are paying some serious attention at any given time.
Participants perceive swings in national mood, elections bring new administrations to power and new partisan or ideological distributions to Congress, and interest groups of various descriptions press (or fail to press) their demands on government.
Flowing along independently of the problems and policy streams is the political stream, composed of such things as public mood, pressure group campaigns, election results, partisan or ideological distributions in Congress, and changes of administration.
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