Over more than two decades, Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones have built a remarkably successful model of policymaking grounded in punctuated attention to public problems and the imperfect inertia of public institutions. This record of scholarship stands as a sterling example of the potential for carefully crafted, cumulative building of a theory of the policymaking system. In The Politics of Information, the authors return to the roots of agenda setting while connecting questions of policymaking to key issues in congressionsal politics. In this review, I briefly summarize the contribution of this new book to its tradition of policy process research. The next section discusses the limitations of the approach in the book, with special attention to areas where the research tradition leaves important questions. Finally, the last section argues that the policymaking model used here could benefit from closer engagement with recent scholarship in public management and public administration.

Baumgartner and Jones build on their previous work on the allocation of attention to policy issues in order to shift the discussion to the organization of information in the U.S. policy system. They illustrate the important linkages between the systems through which the U.S. Congress detects and defines policy problems and the growth of government activity as a whole. The complexity of policy problems makes these processes of definition essential—but inherently limiting. All such definitions prioritize some dimensions or qualities of problems over others. The result can be ignored dimensions unless the policy system increases its capacity to recognize and analyze ever more complex dimensions of public problems. The first half of the book traces the development of this process as the U.S. Congress experienced the Great New Issue Expansion (pp. 120–22). The period of the late 1950s to the early 1970s saw a dramatic expansion of the U.S. federal policy system to involve new issues. Baumgartner and Jones characterize this expansion as a broadening of the policy agenda, which ushered in an age of new policy institutions to manage these new issues. They finally distinguish the organizational implications of this broadening of the agenda from the thickening of the policy system—that is, increasing activity on preexisting policy problems.

While an excellent contribution to our understanding of problem definition and the policy process generally, the book is limited in two key respects. First, the discussion of problem definition uses a sometimes sterile, decontextualized account of the nature of the problem it discusses. As is common in the literature on congressional organization and decision making, problems are said to have separable dimensions around which the system organizes activity. The diversity of dimensions leads to general strategies like venue shopping and expansion of conflict. However, the generality of these activities limits the discussion of the content and nature of the problem-definition activities. For example, the consideration of hydraulic fracturing as an energy issue or an environmental issue has implications beyond the limits of these two frames. The substance of the dimensions is an essential part of the process. While the informational approach to problem definition provides potential tools for understanding the shifts through these different dimensions of fracking, the discussion typically avoids this sort of specific context.

The limited discussion of the content of the issue dimensions makes it more difficult to engage fundamental issues of power. The debate over problem definition has tremendous importance when the operation of power in a political system is considered. Ignoring or deemphasizing the substantive nature of the expanding, shrinking, or competing dimensions of problem definition risks concealing how these processes serve as a significant instrument of power. Again, the example of fracking serves as a useful illustration. The dynamics of the dimensionality of the debate over fracking reveal operations of power. If the expansion of dimension adds potentially disrupting actors—such as the inclusion of transportation safety regulators—you have a substantive change in the politics of fracking that has a broader effect than is represented as a simple expansion of the scope of conflict or audience. There is nothing inherent in the authors’ information approach to problem definition that prevents the engagement of these aspects of problem definitions and their dimensionality. I hope that future work will take the connections among problem definition, power, and substantive connections between the dimensions of the policy definition more seriously.

The coverage of the informational process of policymaking has a second gap. Baumgartner and Jones discuss the role of administrative agencies in the information-centered policy system (pp. 141–42). They note that these organizations are significant producers of knowledge that serve as inputs into the policy system. However, it would also be interesting to consider the implications of previous iterations of institution building that created these information-providing administrative agencies that generate the inputs for future rounds of the policy system. In an informational sense, the institutions built during the broadening of the policy system serve to reinforce particular problem definitions moving forward. This may create an incremental tendency to the informational process.

The authors’ informational theory of policymaking also offers important insight for the study of the administrative agencies. From a public management perspective, the operation of problem definition and the organization of policymaking along the lines of these dimensions have tremendous significance for the actors who must implement these policies. Scholars of administrative agencies can find within this book an important perspective on policymaking that can contribute to greater understanding of key public management topics, such as the use of discretion in the implementation of policy, the design of regulation, and the organization of policy regimes to carry out the policies created by this information-focused system.

The Politics of Information may well serve as an important juncture in the development of Baumgartner and Jones’ theory of the policy process. The theoretical framework and extensive data have reached a point where the theory can return to address fundamental questions of power in a democracy or how the treatment of policies in the legislative process creates constraints on policy implementation. This stands as the most important contribution to their theoretical tradition in over a decade, and an essential read for anyone following the scholarship on the public policy process.