Some policy scholars insist that any policy change is difficult to achieve, while others argue that large change occurs more frequently than we imagine. The work of Baumgartner and Jones reconciles these arguments, suggesting that the extent to which large public policy changes can take place depends on the ability of decision makers to conduct wide-ranging and varied information searches. The more open policy makers are to a diversity of information, the more likely it is that profound change will occur. Given human limitations in cognitive capacity, policy makers cannot simultaneously undertake multiple broad information searches. At any given time, however, such searches occur on a small number of policy topics, and produce significant changes on those topics, while the status quo prevails on the others. As important as this hypothesis is for policy studies, it has not been the object of significant empirical testing, especially outside the US Congress. This article fills this gap through a comprehensive analysis of Canadian federal government regulatory change from 1998 to 2019. We find that Baumgartner and Jones theory is largely corroborated in the Canadian context.

一些政策学者坚持认为任何政策变化都很难实现，而另一些学者则认为重大变化发生的频率比我们想象的要高。鲍姆加特纳和琼斯的工作调和了这些论点，表明公共政策发生重大变化的程度取决于决策者进行广泛和多样化的信息搜索的能力。政策制定者对信息的多样性越开放，就越有可能发生深刻的变化。鉴于人类认知能力的局限性，政策制定者无法同时进行多种广泛的信息搜索。然而，在任何特定时间，此类搜索都会针对少数政策主题进行，并对这些主题产生重大变化，而其他主题则维持现状。尽管这一假设对于政策研究很重要，但它并没有成为重大实证检验的对象，尤其是在美国国会之外。本文通过对1998年至2019年加拿大联邦政府监管变化的全面分析，填补了这一空白。我们发现，鲍姆加特纳和琼斯的理论在加拿大背景下得到了很大程度的证实。