Consensus is built, sometimes very rapidly, by cutting in many and diverse interests. - John W. Kingdon

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

There is nothing automatic about campaign pledges finding their way into public policy.

Ideas come from anywhere, actually, and the critical factor that explains the prominence of an item on the agenda is not its source, but instead the climate in government or the receptivity to ideas of a given type, regardless of source.