When Bad News Becomes Routine: Slowly-Developing Problems Moderate Government Responsiveness

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129211070306
• Published date: 01 March 2023
• Date: 01 March 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2023, Vol. 76(1) 3–13

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129211070306

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When Bad News Becomes Routine:

Slowly-Developing Problems Moderate

Government Responsiveness

Derek A. Epp

1

and Herschel F. Thomas

2

Abstract

Established theories of the policy process recognize the challenges governments face in processing information. We

examine how the ways in which public problems develop over time condition subsequent policy actions. We contend

that policymakers will become routinized to and consequently under-respond to the accumulating signals of slowly-

developing problems (i.e., those featuring long runs of relatively small changes). Event history analyses leverage variation

across the United States in the development of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent implementation of social

distancing policies. Looking across the 50 states and Washington DC, we f‌ind that regions that saw protr acted de-

terioration in their health situation were slower to respond with social distancing than those that saw an abrupt

deterioration to the same point. These results highlight the risks associ ated with problems that worsen only gradually

over time.

Keywords

change blindness, agenda setting, problem stream, coronavirus, COVID-19, boiling frog

Before policymakers can solve problems they must attend

to them. For this reason, policy studies have emphasized

the importance of understanding how cognitive pro-

cessing routines govern how policymakers allocate their

attention. Fundamental limitations to the quantity of in-

formation that individuals can process simultaneously are

thought to ensure that government agendas will feature

bottle-necks (Lindblom, 1959;Jones, 2001). Conse-

quently, there is a disconnect between problems that

develop continuously and the policies designed to solve

them, which change in f‌its and starts as the attention of

policymakers lurches across competing agenda items

(Jones & Baumgartner, 2005).

A limited faculty for multi-tasking is far from the only

constraint weighing on human cognition, although thus

far it is the only one to receive serious attention in policy

studies. Instead, we draw from a rich psychological lit-

erature documenting evidence of change blindness, which

is a systematic bias tounderweight environmental changes

that are either small or occur routinely (Simons & Levin,

1997;Rensink, O’Regan, and Clark, 1997;Simons, 2000;

Caird et al., 2005). We introduce and test the hypothesis

that policymakers are less responsive to problems that

develop continuously (i.e., featuring long runs of small

changes) versus those that develop more rapidly. In doing

so, we push the agenda-setting literature forward to con-

sider not only the relative overabundance of salient policy

information but also the longitudinal characteristics of that

information. Both elements are important for understand-

ing how policymakers allocate their attention.

To test this hypothesis, we use data relating to the

COVID-19 pandemic. Doing so has three advantages: (1)

the pandemic poses a serious policy problem that gov-

ernments around the world have had to respond to, (2)

there is high-quality longitudinal data documenting both

the scale of the problem and resulting social distancing

policies at subnational levels, and (3) there is variation

across the US states in the progression of the virus making

it possible to compare governmental responses between

1

Department of Government, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin,

TX, USA

2

Department of Political Science, West Virginia University, Morgantown,

WV, USA

Corresponding Author:

Derek A. Epp, Government, University of Texas at Austin, 158 W 21st

ST STOP A1800, Batts Hall 3.126, Austin, TX 78712-1704, USA.

Email: depp@austin.utexas.edu