A century of democratic deliberation over American and British national health care: extending the Kingdon model

Abstract

The issue of national health care has actively plagued the 20th century political spectrum in both the U.S. and the United Kingdom. It has been an issue of astounding resilience and vexation, alluding almost all simple-quick answers while consuming an ever increasing amount of public resources.

There have been three principal time periods when both the United States and Great Britain have actively addressed universal coverage: the 1910s; the 194Os; and the 1990s. This dissertation extends John Kingdon's theory on policy agenda formation by examining the aforementioned debates.

The conclusions that come from this study are four fold. (1) Contemporaneous interactions can occur between nations. (2) Century-long longitudinal development of a single policy area is possible and is illustrated. (3) Kingdon's policy streams approach can be utilized to conduct a comparative analysis of the policy agenda formation process. (4) Kingdon's conceptual model is more accurate at depicting the policy agenda formation process of the British parliamentary system than it is for the divided government structure of the U.S.