With this question in mind I have looked at The Bahia State Policy for Improving Life in the Semi-Arid Region – established by Law No. 13.572/2016, focusing on sustainable strategies for communities in dry regions; and also The Technical Assistance and Extension for Urban Poor Self-Employed Workers – developed under the state’s socio-productive inclusion program Vida Melhor (Better Life), created by Decree No. 13.167/2011 and later reinforced by Law No. 13.460/2015.
Many researchers have studied why some policies remain a priority while others fade away. Typically, they compare policies by looking separately at different factors, such as:
- Budget allocations
- Statements from political leaders
- Legislative activity
- Media coverage
- Public opinion trends
- Political party priorities and government programs
This approach provides valuable insights, but it treats these factors in isolation rather than considering how they interact over time.
My research suggests that these factors don’t act independently. Instead, they form a dynamic system that determines how much attention a policy receives. I call these combined influences aggregates of attention, i.e. the sum of measurable indicators’ outcomes that describe how much attention a policy receives within the institutional and decisional agenda.
These aggregates can become dense or diluted, meaning that a policy may receive strong and sustained attention during certain periods while being largely ignored at other times. To explain this variation, I borrowed a concept from physics: density. In this case, density refers to how concentrated attention is on a particular policy over time.
Another useful analogy comes from chemistry: concentration gradients, which measure how
much a variable change from one area to another. In the context of policy analysis, I propose replacing the spatial dimension with the temporal one, so that agenda-setting gradients represent variations in the intensity of attention given to a policy over time.
Measuring Policy Attention: The AGI Index
To make this concept measurable, I developed the Agenda-Setting Gradient Index (AGI). This index ranges from 0 to 1, where:
- Closer to 0 = The policy is weakly present or barely discussed, possibly only appearing in a legal framework without real action.
- Closer to 1 = The policy receives strong, sustained attention from government leaders.
The first attempt at modelling and calculating the AGI for the studied policies resulted in curves that align with the patterns observed in the qualitative analysis. Besides providing an opportunity for critique and discussion, I hope these Ideas may become useful tools for further quantitative and qualitative comparative agenda-setting research.