Replication data for: The Politics of Attention

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 polit ics 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.

在任意既定工作日，政策制定者均需应对海量难题，并就各类议题做出决策——议题范畴涵盖经济、教育、医疗保健与国防等领域。此般情形已延续多年，但迄今为止，尚无研究探讨政治人物如何应对源自多元渠道的海量信息流。他们如何解读并回应此类信息过载？哪些议题会获得他们的关注，背后缘由又是什么？
布莱恩·D·琼斯（Bryan D. Jones）与弗兰克·R·鲍姆加特纳（Frank R. Baumgartner）在《注意力政治》（*The Politics of Attention*）一书中，针对决策流程与优先级排序这两个核心问题给出了解答。二人通过分析五十年的历史数据，完成了首部基于全新信息处理视角的美国政治研究著作。两位作者将注意力分配与治理机构运作整合至统一分析模型中，该模型可追踪公共政策、公众与媒体对政策的关注度，以及跨多机构的政府决策过程。
《注意力政治》基于政策制定者对信息流的响应模式，为美国政治研究提供了突破性研究路径。该书聚焦于政治系统如何解决（或未能解决）各类问题，而非探讨个体偏好如何通过政治行动得以实现。