Heuristic Agenda Closure in Administrative Government

Agenda-setting shapes the problems that occupy the sustained attention of those who craft laws and policy, and the heuristics and solutions used to address those problems. An extensive political science literature has elucidated agenda formation, concluding that (1) policy change happens under the conjuncture of solution streams and policy streams (given a structure or moment of political opportunity), and (2) “there is an impressive congruence between the priorities of the public and the priorities of Congress across time” (Jones and Baumgartner 2004), conditioned upon wider legislative agendas than those for the public. I contend here that the rise of administrative government qualifies these conclusions. That delegation trades off expertise for agency preferences is well known, but it also embeds a second trade-off: between a forum with more open agendas (the legislature) and one that restricts them (administration). Indeed, delegation to administrative agencies presumes, if it does not favor, agenda closure – a tightly constrained focus on a limited set of issues to which the legislature has entrusted the agency’s authority and resources, and a narrow set of methods and consiliaria (experts, lawyers, adversaries, commenters) from which the agency seeks and gets its information. Agenda limitation may be desirable but may also worsen the quality of public problem solving, and agenda democracy itself may be normatively desirable. This tension is ineluctable. Hypothetically, it might be ameliorated by (a) the development and embedment of greater expertise in law-making assemblies and/or (b) the restriction or deliberative aperture (or both) of administrative policymaking.