On any given day, policymakers are required to address a multitude of problems and make decisions about a variety of issues, from the economy and education to health care and defense. This has been true for years, but until now no studies have been conducted on how politicians manage the flood of information from a wide range of sources. How do they interpret and respond to such inundation? Which issues do they pay attention to and why? Bryan D. Jones and Frank R. Baumgartner answer these questions on decision-making processes and prioritization in The Politics of Attention.

Analyzing fifty years of data, Jones and Baumgartner's book is the first study of American politics based on a new information-processing perspective. The authors bring together the allocation of attention and the operation of governing institutions into a single model that traces public policies, public and media attention to them, and governmental decisions across multiple institutions. 

The Politics of Attention offers a groundbreaking approach to American politics based on the responses of policymakers to the flow of information. It asks how the system solves, or fails to solve, problems rather than looking to how individual preferences are realized through political action.

Bryan D. Jones is the Donald R. Matthews Distinguished Professor of American Politics and director of the Center for American Politics and Public Policy at the University of Washington. Frank R. Baumgartner is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Pennsylvania State University. They are the authors of the award-winning Agendas and Instability in American Politics and editors of Policy Dynamics, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

“Jones and Baumgartner have become a genre, the leading scholars of a science of policymaking. This is a major scholarly achievement.”--James Stimson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

— James Stimson

“The Politics of Attention moves the classic debate over the character and value of democratic politics to new and more solid ground. In recognizing that political elites are subject to limited attention spans and constrained information-processing, just as are mass citizens, Jones and Baumgartner argue that the great attraction of representative democracy is the way in which it corrects for the limitations of both elites and mass electorates. With these arguments and supportive data, this pioneering book provides perhaps the most persuasive explanation yet of the adaptive resilience of pluralist democracies. The result is a landmark contribution to research on elite decision-making, to the study of policy evolution in postwar America, and to democratic theory.”--Lawrence C. Dodd, University of Florida

— Lawrence C. Dodd

“A terrific book. Based on a decade of meticulous data collection, The Politics of Attention descriptively presents a macroscopic overview of fifty years of American policy development in congressional agenda formation and decision making. The payoff of this impressive empirical exercise is a fresh focus on and understanding of policy punctuations.”--John Padgett, University of Chicago

— John Padgett

— M. C. Price, Texas A&M University, Choice

— Ya-Hui Kuo, Significance

— Scott E. Robinson, Political Science Quarterly

— Paul E. Johnson, Perspectives on Politics