| The purpose of this study was two-fold: to discover how county commissions interact to process agenda setting information, and to determine how this process takes place for low salience issues, in particular, earthquake preparedness. Earthquakes present a danger for Missouri and other states; yet attention devoted to this matter by local officials is sporadic.; An ethnographic interviewing methodology was chosen. County commissioners and emergency preparedness directors were interviewed, serving as informants for the commission as a whole.; Each county commission was also observed in its natural setting, providing insight into the interactions between the county commissioners and how the commissions function as well as validating hypotheses emergent from the interviews. Hypotheses were checked further by a second round of interviews.; Three findings emerged from this study: First, the work of the county commissions is informal, organic, and immersed in the larger community, with considerable activity taking place between sessions of the county commission. Second, the county commissions function as demand and solution processing systems within a culture of reasonableness and consensus, based on criteria they develop. Commissions make decisions on the basis of consensus, and seek to educate individuals who bring problems to them that do not meet the reasonableness criteria. Third, the response of county commissions to low salience issues such as earthquake preparedness is governed by experience, information, constituent demand, and solution availability.; This culture of reasonableness and consensus sheds considerable light on the "black box" of how issues do or do not get on the action agendas of local governments. Furthermore, this study confirmed Wildavsky's notion of problems and solutions coming in pairs, mutually interacting. This explains that the lack of agenda status of earthquake preparedness is due as much to the vague definition of the solution, as to the vague definition of the problem. |
