John W. Kingdon

John Wells Kingdon (born 1940) is Professor Emeritus and was Acting Chair of Political Science (1989–1990 when the Chair, Jack L. Walker, was on leave) at the University of Michigan. He is a graduate of Oberlin College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was a Guggenheim fellow. He resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Behavioral Studies at Stanford. He served as Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan and as President of the Midwest Political Science Association, and has often been a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution.

Kingdon is a specialist in American politics, and has written influential books such as "Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies", and "America the Unusual".

Despite critiques of his work being theoretically shaky, the work has retained a prominent place in the policy literature, garnering hundreds of citations since its publication.

Kingdon argues that the structure of American political institutions, especially Congress, encourages fragmentation and splintering in American national governance. He also believes this occurs more in the United States than elsewhere.

In his book Agendas, alternatives and public policies he proposed that for an issue to get on the political agenda, three flux must encounter:

• The problem;
• The solution;
• The political will.

Effectively, if there is no solution to a problem, it would be impossible to get the political attention. There can be a wonderful idea in the air, but if this is not answering any prominent problem, no political attention will be raised. Finally, there can be a political will to solve a problem, but if no solution is available, nothing will happen. Political will comes from both predictable elements such as post-elections and unpredictable ones like natural disasters. The three flux must encounter in order to get the political attention to use an available solution to solve an existing problem. Individual policy entrepreneurs are needed to build acceptance for solutions and to create couplings between these streams of problems, solutions, and political will.