Exhibit 1223 ยท Magazine essay (theory)
Up and Down with Ecology: the 'Issue-Attention Cycle'
during the time that interest was sharply focused on this problem, new institutions, programs, and policies may have been created to help solve it. These entities almost always persist and often have some impact even after public attention has shifted elsewhere.
Downs describes five stages in public attention to a domestic problem: pre-problem, alarmed discovery, recognition of the costs of progress, gradual decline of interest, and a post-problem stage. He says the institutions and programs created while attention was high almost always persist after attention moves on.
- Source
- Anthony Downs, The Public Interest no. 28
- Date
- Summer 1972
- Quoted from
- Stage 5 (the post-problem stage), p. 41; scanned copy with text layer
- Grade
- Primary record
- Document
- https://gwern.net/doc/sociology/1972-downs.pdf
- Accessed
- 2026-11-10
- Cited by
- Findings citing this exhibit
- Note
- Downs offers the cycle from observation, not measurement. The scan breaks 'elsewhere' across a line as 'else- where'; the quote prints it joined.