On any given day, policymakers are required to address a multitude of problems and make decisions about a variety
of issues, from the economy and education to health care and defense. This has been true for years, but until now
no studies have been conducted on how politicians manage the flood of information from a wide range of sources.
How do they interpret and respond to such inundation? Which issues do they pay attention to and why? Bryan D. Jones
and Frank R. Baumgartner answer these questions on decision-making processes and prioritization in The Politics
of Attention.Analyzing fifty years of data, Jones and Baumgartner�s book is the first study of American politics
based on a new information-processing perspective. The authors bring together the allocation of attention and the
operation of governing institutions into a single model that traces public policies, public and media attention
to them, and governmental decisions across multiple institutions. The Politics of Attention offers a groundbreaking
approach to American politics based on the responses of policymakers to the flow of information. It asks how the
system solves, or fails to solve, problems rather than looking to how individual preferences are realized through
political action.