Punctuated Equilibriums: Fossil Records and Public Policy
Growing Meta #2
Hello again and welcome to Growing Meta.
I will be sharing the most insightful bites of scholarly conclusions and discoveries that augment our understanding of knowledge & complexities. This newsletter will slowly converge into a mountain range of meta — what are the best lenses that view all other lenses?
What do you call things that don’t change (remain in stasis), and when they do, they change in a short period of time (after a crisis)?
Introducing the Punctuated Equilibrium, and its Theory
In 1972, two paleontologists questioned Darwin’s assumption that evolution happened incrementally, or gradually. They examined fossil records for gradual changes in evolution, and argued that the rate of evolution is not gradual, but a punctuated equilibrium. [1]
Now, anything that exhibits calm for long periods of time, then changes rapidly, is labelled a punctuated equilibrium.
Their example has been very recently challenged.
Nonetheless, the concept itself became popular in social and political sciences. Researchers found means to describe and analyze public policy and societal changes that follow the same evolutionary pattern.
How do we explain changes in public policy after long periods of calm?
Baumgartner and Jones’s (1993, 2009) theory of punctuated equilibrium in public policy contends that policy changes occur due to the concurrence of a breakdown in an existing policy monopoly and a change in the policy image (or the “issue frame” or “issue definition”). [2][3]
In other words, Baumgartner and Jones indicate that public policy is a city sitting on the edge of a tectonic plate, all the factors affecting public policy are brewing beneath it - and when it breaks out, it breaks out at once, prompting major changes.
How do you explain having many empty colleges in Taiwan?
After nearly 40 years of martial law in Taiwan, various social movements rose to call for education equality. This, amongst other factors, led to the ‘410 Demonstration for Educational Reform’ policy in 1994. Which led to a great increase in higher education institutes. This fits the PET pattern. [4]
Now, Taiwanese birth rates are decreasing. The Taiwanese higher education system is already facing an alarming challenge of decreasing enrollment. Can PET predict a new trend?
Drivers of punctuation: what (or who) kicks an equilibrium out of balance?
The horrific murder of 2 year old James Bulger in 1994 also spurred an avalanche of public moral panic, which led to waves of policy entrepreneurs leveraging the discourse to promises of major changes within the criminal justice system after decades of stagnation. [3] Look at the periodic increase of % of Acts relating to the Criminal Justice System after 1994 before going down to ‘equilibrium’ levels.
… policy entrepreneurs are a key component of punctuated equilibrium theory; as actors seeking opportunities to disrupt the status quo and gain political advantage. … Tony Blair’s response to the Bulger murder was a significant moment in his eventual ascension to the Labour leadership. [3]
One might argue that it is intuitive that events which induce moral panic naturally lead to tectonic policy changes, but having a name for complex phenomena is an essential function of complexity science. Spotting cross-disciplinary patterns allows us to uncover unforeseen ones.
Here is a recent paper [5] (2019) urging policy makers and researchers to view policy processes as complex systems, and to integrate more complexity science paradigms in the study of public policy.
“.. the next chapter in the metaphorical book on subsystems should address the shift of scholarly focus from individual parts of the policy process to a thirty-thousand-foot view of the interactions of individual subsystems, which are complex systems in their own right.”
[1] Gould, Niles Eldredge-Stephen Jay, and Niles Eldredge. "Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism." Essential readings in evolutionary biology (1972): 82-115.
[2] Baumgartner, Frank R., and Bryan D. Jones. Agendas and instability in American politics. University of Chicago Press, 2010.
[3] Jennings, Will, et al. "Moral panics and punctuated equilibrium in public policy: An analysis of the criminal justice policy agenda in Britain." Policy Studies Journal 48.1 (2020): 207-234.
[4] Huang, Yu-Lan, Dian-Fu Chang, and Chiung-Wen Liu. "Higher education in Taiwan: an analysis of trends using the theory of punctuated equilibrium." Journal of Literature and Art Studies8.1 (2018): 169-180.
[5] McGee, Zachary A., and Bryan D. Jones. "Reconceptualizing the policy subsystem: Integration with complexity theory and social network analysis." Policy Studies Journal 47 (2019): S138-S158.