Attention in American Politics
An Ezra Klein-inspired exploration
TLDR: The role of attention in politics, according to Ezra Klein, is undertheorized. Luckily, we have quite a lot of scholarship to build on, from scholarship on the role of media in elections to the role of politicians in making policy.
In last week’s interview with Nate Silver, Ezra Klein said:
I just think attention in politics is undertheorized.
That caught my attention. First, I felt some kinship: I get regularly made fun of for describing things as undertheorized. Adult friendship? Undertheorized. The importance of campaign staff? Undertheorized. Second, I think Klein might be right.
Attention is actually quite well theorized in public policy research (more below). More broadly, and for many decades, the role of the media in setting the political agenda has been theorized to death by communications scholars.
What Klein has hit on is the apparent lack of theory or empirical research about the agenda-setting role of politicians during campaigns, rather than about (a) media during campaigns, or (b) politicians making policy.
Here’s what Klein has to say about that, edited for clarity:
With Donald Trump, a thing I’ve seen people do is say, “he is more like the median voter on certain things like immigration, or at least he was perceived as more moderate than Hillary Clinton, and that’s why he won.” I think that missing the showmanship of Donald Trump, the entertainment value, the energy he unlocks in people. There’s a reason that Trump had Dana White from the UFC and Hulk Hogan on his night of the RNC.
So in 2020, Joe Biden’s view is that the election should be about Donald Trump, and Donald Trump’s view is that the election should be about Donald Trump. And that was a theory of attention they both agreed on, and it worked out for Joe Biden. In 2024, Joe Biden’s view is the election should be about Donald Trump. Donald Trump’s view was the election should probably be about Donald Trump. And that was a bad theory of attention. Biden had no way of shifting a narrative that wasn’t any good for him. Attention is important. Candidates have different theories of it, but I don’t know that we know how to think about it as rigorously as I wish we did…
The Harris campaign has been staffed by many of the same people, particularly in the first two weeks, and yet the campaign’s tenor has completely changed. The tone of press releases is now they are trying to get you to talk about them, and doing that by courting controversy—by being kind of mean in a way. Democrats have not been mean in a long time. That Tim Walz actually made a JD Vance couch joke in his introducing himself as her vice presidential pick speech — let’s put it this way, that is not something that Joe Biden campaign was going to do. They want people to talk about them. They want to court kind of controversy, outrage. They want attention. What I am see is a radically different relationship to attention than the campaign that the same people were running two weeks ago.
And here’s Nate Silver in response on why the Harris campaign might want all that attention:
Joe Biden, based on the polling, would probably have been better off in election with low turnout…. unlike in the past, marginal voters have been more likely to vote for Trump than for Biden. So maybe by having a really boring campaign, it kind of suited their interests. Harris is bringing back some of the younger voters, voters of color that had defected to Kennedy or Trump, or defected to sitting out the election, those are now some of the more marginal voters. And so now, all of a sudden, she probably doesn’t mind as much higher turnout, which is going to get young Latino women or young Black men to vote for her, when they might not have voted for Biden. And so it kind of matches the incentives of where you want to turnout to be on November 5.”
Finally, here is some work on attention and agenda-setting in public policy that I think will translate to attention and agenda-setting on the campaign trail:
Jones and Baumgardner’s Agendas and Instability in American Politics (1st ed. 1993) launched what became known as Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, in which the authors theorize that policy systems lurch from periods of uneasy stability to sharp, chaotic punctuations full of change—thanks in large part to the not-quite-rational way that humans process information.
This laid the groundwork for The Politics of Attention (2005), a wider theory of attention and information-processing. That work builds on E.E. Schattschneider’s ideas about how political actors use attention to expand or shrink the field of conflict.
Those two authors wrote much, much more—too much to list, frankly. Suffice it to say their work is fundamental to many other theories of the public policy process, short descriptions of which you can get from Paul Cairney’s blog.
Here’s hoping that’s helpful, Ezra!
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