Materials for PPA 210, Section 1 (Lascher)
SLIDES
ASSIGNMENTS
PPA
210 Spring, 2003
ASSIGNMENT
#1: AGENDA SETTING MEMO
OVERVIEW
This assignment is aimed at
having you apply Kingdon's concepts to the contemporary state legislative
arena.
GUIDELINES
Imagine you are the chief of
staff for a first-term member of the California State Senate or California
State Assembly. Your boss is anxious to
gain exposure, a reputation for being out front on important issues, and a
reputation for effective legislating.
Your boss has asked you to
prepare a memo to the other members of the legislator's staff and provide
him/her with a copy. The memo is
intended to help staff members identify appropriate issues for the
lawmaker. The memo should be divided
into two parts of roughly equal length.
The first part of the memo should consist of an analytical framework (or
checklist of questions) staff can use to predict how issues and
initiatives will move up the agenda.
Naturally you will draw from the Kingdon book, but you need to translate
Kingdon's political science prose into guidelines that are of practical use
to the staff. In the second part of the
memo you should apply your framework to one or two (no more!) promising,
emerging issues.
In writing this memo you may
choose a legislator of any party, region and ideology, but you should be
explicit about your choice. I recommend
that you describe the legislator in a one paragraph (no more!) preface to the
memo. You may pick a real person who is
now serving or has in the past served in the state legislature, but it is also
fine to make up the legislator and his/her characteristics, within reason (e.g.,
don=t pick a
Rush Limbaugh Republican to represent Berkeley).
NUTS AND BOLTS
Your memo should be single
spaced and no more than three pages in length, not counting the single
paragraph preface mentioned earlier (you may wish to leave space extra space at
certain places, such as between memo sections). You should use a conventional type face and font (e.g., Arial 12
point, Times New Roman 12 point). Your
memo is due in class on February 10.
EVALUATION
In evaluating this memo I will
mainly be concerned about: 1) how well you can distill key ideas from Kingdon,
2) how useful your framework is likely to be for staff in (over) selecting
issues, 3) how well you can apply your framework to a concrete issue(s), and 4)
the clarity of your writing. You should
not worry if you are unfamiliar with some of the details of the issue(s) you
pick, although it is desirable to be as accurate as possible. This is not a test of how knowledgeable you
are about the details of current policies.
HINTS
1. Take the words
"promising, emerging" seriously; they were chosen very deliberately.
For example, by 2002 airport
security could not be considered an @emerging@ issue for the federal
government since it had been widely discussed in the aftermath of the September
11 attacks and major federal legislation in the area already had been enacted.
2. Be careful about defining
your issue(s) too broadly. It would not
be appropriate to indicate that Aeducation@ is an Aemerging issue@ for state
government. Given that about half the
state budget is devoted to education some aspect of that policy area is
virtually certain to be on the agenda for California=s government.
3. It may be helpful to consider
the career goals of your legislator in choosing your issue(s).