On The Causes And Mechanisms Of The Failure Of Focus Events In Policy Agenda Setting

With the rapid accumulation of social challenges and the acceleration of national governance reform in recent years,the mode of public agenda setting has also undergone significant changes.Specifically,the outbreak of a series of major emergencies and the concentration of social problems in a short time have rapidly promoted the agenda setting and policy reform in many policy issues.This phenomenon presents the setting mode of "responsive agenda" formed by the government under the pressure trigger of focus events.In fact,not all focus events can successfully trigger the policy agenda.From the micro level,many focus events seem to have the conditions to trigger the policy agenda,but in reality,they encounter various "failures" and fail to successfully push social issues to the policy agenda.Few scholars have conducted indepth discussions on the "failure" events that failed to trigger the policy agenda,resulting in a gap between the reality and theoretical research of the focus event "failure".Considering that in current China,it has become a fact that the focus event triggers the responsive agenda.At the same time,combined with the construction demands and capacity gap of "responsive government",it is undoubtedly of great significance to study the "failure" phenomenon of focus events in the setting of responsive agenda.Therefore,this paper attempts to start from the opposite direction of the current mainstream research,and build an analytical framework based on the modified multiple streams theory.This paper defines the influencing factors of the failure of focus events in responsive agenda setting from the three levels of "insufficient triggering of problem stream","failure of political stream" and "failure of policy stream",and select 40 focus events in the field of emergency management as research cases,qualitative comparative analysis is used for research verification.The analysis results show that the failure of focus events is not only related to the focus ability,but also affected by the fuzziness of feasible schemes and decision-making risk factors.It further reflects the dominant role of "political stream" on "problem stream" and "policy stream".In some policy areas where political ideology is prominent or feasible schemes are lacking,it often depends on the active choice of government decision makers on agenda setting,and it is also more prone to "failure" of focus events.Based on this,this paper puts forward the resolution strategy of "failure" of focus events in responsive agenda setting from three aspects: focusing on public issues,promoting consensus construction and regulating the use of power,in order to further enhance the normative and scientific nature of responsive agenda setting in technology,system and procedure,and ensure that the value choice of decision-making does not deviate from the public interest as much as possible.