People are sometimes reluctant to take big steps. Apprehensive about being unable to calculate the political fallout, politicians shy away from grand… - John W. Kingdon

A fair body of scholarship has come to challenge the view that elected officials reign supreme.

Flowing along independently of the problems and policy streams is the political stream, composed of such things as public mood, pressure group campaigns, election results, partisan or ideological distributions in Congress, and changes of administration.

It seemed to me that we knew something about how issues were decided, but that we knew much less about how they got to be issues in the first place.