This paper summarizes lessons from the agenda setting literature for people seeking to make and influence policy. This literature identifies two key limits to policymaking. First, policymakers can only pay attention to a proportion of their responsibilities, ignoring most issues and promoting some to the top of their agenda. Second, they can only pay attention to one of many possible ways to understand and seek to solve problems. So, agenda setting is about exercising power to generate attention for some issues over others. Successful ‘policy entrepreneurs’ combine many strategies - identifying the rules, manipulating the cognitive biases of policymakers, forming coalitions, and finding the ‘windows of opportunity’ to pursue their favoured policy solutions. Although these strategies and ways of thinking are well established, they need to be restated continuously to counter romantic stories of government in which we expect policymakers to produce ‘rational’ or ‘evidence based policymaking.’
