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The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America. By Baumgartner Frank R. and Jones Bryan D. . Chicago : University of Chicago Press . 2015. 264p. $85.00 cloth, $27.50 paper.
Review Symposium: Agenda Setting and the Politics of Information
This is the third and most refined of a series of books emerging from the monumental data-collection enterprise known as the Policy Agendas Project (http:www.policyagendas.org). The Policy Agendas Project and its companion Comparative Agendas Project have lead to a substantial body of important work that goes far beyond the three books themselves. The topic of this particular effort is the conflict between complexity and control in information processing about public policy in the U.S. over the last six decades (1947-2008).
The Politics of Information is divided into three parts. The first--"seek and ye shall find"--lays out the basic nature of the problem: Complexity leads to greater information and search, then discovers more complexity and new problems. Baumgartner and Jones identify the paradox of search in greater detail in both Chapters 1 and 2, arguing that "[g]athering information about complex problems, prioritizing those problems, and understanding the myriad repercussions that current policies may have on different elements of society ... require that we organize diversity into the process of gathering information. ... But implementing solutions and doing so efficiently requires clarity of organizational design and a clear mission (pp. 6-7).
Chapter 3 formalizes this concept by distinguishing between "expert search" and "entropic search"--with the latter more critical for identifying and prioritizing problems. To measure entropy, the authors employ Shannon's H, which is an index of the spread of objects across categories, initially developed as a measure of market concentration. In policy agenda terms, entropy is the spread of topics across a large number of different categories, such as a policy considered by a variety of congressional committees. The term "entropy" has much to recommend its usage for describing the general phenomenon, particularly in statistical terms, but...