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Close your eyes and picture a four-year-old child drawing a circle. Strange, I know, but trust me on this one. Unless this four-year-old is an artistic prodigy, their circle will most likely not consist of a smooth curve. Instead, it will be a series of lines connected by angular turns since most youngsters haven’t mastered fine motor skills yet. Why is this relevant? I believe it is a great way to think about today’s policy topic: punctuated equilibrium theory.
PET originated with Harvard evolutionary theorist Stephen J. Gould whose extensive research of fossil records led him to conclude that most species emerge during geologic moments, or ‘punctuations,’ and then continue pretty much ‘as is’ for eons of time, a concept known as stasis. A novel idea in the 1970s, PET challenged prevailing conceptions of ongoing incremental evolutionary change.
Like other scientific theories, PET was eventually appropriated by the social sciences. Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones (1991, 1993) were among the first to claim PET for the public sector. They used it to enhance existing theories of incrementalism to describe why policy changes tend to occur in periods of drastic change followed by long periods of stability. The theory has become popularized because it aligns with what most citizens already know: the creation of public policy is not a smooth process. Far from it.
Okay no more four-year-olds; let’s put our big-kid-pants on and get down in the weeds of what this theory really entails. PET makes sense within a system of pluralism like we have in the US: a society comprised of many sub-sets of governing groups (plural, as opposed to one singular power-hub).
Pluralism has two consequences relevant for PET. The first is that, with so many different power-centers working on their own agendas alongside (and sometimes, against) other sub-sets of government, it will take a long time for anything to ‘get done’ (public administration types call this ‘stickiness’ or ‘muddling through’). Although citizens get frustrated with government bureaucracy – and it indeed can be maddeningly plodding and tedious — slow-reacting government is normative and stabilizing as it allows many voices to be heard. The second consequence is that these sub-sets of power remain autonomous and undisturbed by “public opinion and democratic forces”[i] until enough citizens care enough about an issue to combine and redefine a pre-existing subset.
Put these two consequences together and you have a great example of PET: due to the innate stickiness of democratic government, major policy change often doesn’t occur until there is a drastic-enough shift in power hubs to overcome the inertia of policy stasis. That’s when incremental (and seemingly interminable) muddling through gives way like melting ice.
So what can cause these shifts? Elections can, particularly when one party takes control of two branches of government. So can crises and other events that fall like a rock into the pond of public opinion sending shock waves from shore to shore. The Great Depression of the 1930s called forth drastic new thinking about government’s role in the economy. Some think a New New Deal will come forth from the pandemic-induced economic downturn. On the other hand, mass shootings such as Sandy Hook, which took the lives of 26 children and teachers in 2012, have not yet punctuated prevailing opinions and norms to lead to consensus on gun control.
As with last week’s blog on windows and frames, punctuated equilibrium is another lens for making sense of what’s happening today. We all can agree there’s a lot of punctuation (!) going on – so don’t be surprised when big ideas start coming down the pike.
[i] BriefNote. An Introduction to Punctuated Equilibrium: A Model for Understanding Stability and Dramatic Change in Public Policies, National Collaborating Center for Healthy Public Policy. 2018. Available at https://www.ncchpp.ca/docs/2018_ProcessPP_Intro_PunctuatedEquilibrium_EN.pdf
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