The Death of Policy Process Theories? Agenda-Setting in the Age of Machines

Antoine Claude Lemor
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Antoine Claude Lemor: University of Sherbrooke

No jnds4_v2, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: The Multiple Streams Framework, Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, the Advocacy Coalition Framework, and the Narrative Policy Framework rest on five tacit premises about political information so self-evident when the theories were formulated that they were never explicitly stated: that political information is human-produced, filtered by identifiable gatekeepers, reflective of authentic public opinion, distinguishable from noise, and anchored in verifiable events. However, a radical transformation of the informational ecosystem completely upends these premises: machines — AI and LLMs — now produce political information indistinguishable from that produced by humans. As a consequence, this article argues that the canonical theories are, in the Kuhnian sense, dying. Through agenda-setting, where the four theories converge, it shows that their core mechanisms lose the substrate on which they were built to operate. It proposes a new Epistemic Policy Process (EPP) theory based on three dimensions to circumscribe the conditions under which the classical theories can still hold, and maybe stay alive.

Date: 2026-03-12
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:jnds4_v2

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/jnds4_v2

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