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Agenda Setting and the Rise and Fall of Policy Issues: The Case of Criminal Victimization of the Elderly

In nearly all studies of federal agenda-setting processes, the focus is on how issues achieve prominence on policy agendas. Seldom dealt with is how some of those issues then disappear, without any substantial action being taken on them. In this paper the life course of a single policy issue—criminal victimization of the elderly—is examined, and the forces that caused this issue to rise and fall on the Congressional policy agenda are analyzed. Abstracted models of those processes—entitled the convergent-voice and the divergent-voice models of issue ascendence and decline—may prove fruitful for understanding the complete life course of many similar issues.