Vituperation

It's hard to keep the notion of attributing a cause separate from the notion of casting blame.  That seems a shame.  The Latin, at least, is clear.  Casting blame can be fairly called "vituperation."  It's a combination of vitium, "fault" and parare, "to make or prepare." 

So "making a fault" falls on the "casting blame" side.  Causal attribution has nothing to do with fault.  It seems that it ought not to be as hard as it is to keep them separate.

Are the Problems Too Big?

I start my course in political psychology by introducing "the problem." We start with "frictional" rather than "normative" problems. The friction is easy to describe: either you wanted something you couldn't have or do or something you didn't want was done. Those are frictions. "Wanting" seems a fundamental part of human motivation. It is the "willing" part of "willing and able." But the narrower condition that this leaves out is "wanting and in consequence, trying." For class purposes, the question is this: "Is just 'wanting' in the absence of any specific attempt to achieve the purported goal, useful evidence of an actual intention?" The conventional notation has been W = wanted to, b1 = because, but (D) = was not able to, b2, because. The first explanation (b) says why you wanted to; the second, why you were not able. But what if we changed it to I = intended to; to to T = tried to? "Tried to" captures the immediacy I am after. It screens out "I always wanted to live in Japan," which certainly needs to be screened out. "Intended to" is helpfully broader, but it raises the question of what ought to count as an "intention." It is more than wanting to but less than trying to.

399 Offering Issues

So imagine that you are a farmer who grows organic vegetables. You are also an organic farmer, but that is another story. You want to sell your vegetables to a local vegetarian restaurant. You need to offer to sell them to the restaurant and the restaurant needs to, for reasons of its own, buy the vegetables.

That describes the interface between the politicization of an issue, the last phase of the political psychology process, and the agenda acquisition, which is the first phase of the public policy process. People who bring issues to the political system--who petition the school board, or who have a talk with the division chair or the dean of the College of Urban and Public Affairs, who contact their representatives about bills the Oregon State Legislature might consider, etc.--are offering the fruit of their own reflection. They may be grievances or solutions or special advantages. When you have offered them to a political system, you have become "a policy entrepreneur."

The next question is whether there is room on the agenda. Will the legislature or the school board or the dean make a place for your proposal on the agenda? Always, there are reasons why they might not want to. There are many items on the agenda already and time is always short. This new proposal might disadvantage someone who matters to the "gatekeepers," the people who say what makes it to the agenda and what does not.

Politicization, in any case, is the process of making an issue relevant to a government. If it calls on their authority or their competitive advantage or their funding mechanism or the urgent need for a regulation of some sort, you have politicized the issue. Congratulations.