In this innovative account of the way policy issues rise and fall on the national agenda--the first detailed study of so many issues over an extended period--Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones show that rapid change not only can but does happen in the hidebound institutions of government. Short-term, single-issue analyses of public policy, the authors contend, give a narrow and distorted view of public policy as the result of a cozy arrangement between politicians, interest groups, and the media. Baumgartner and Jones upset these notions by focusing on several issues--including civilian nuclear power, urban affairs, smoking, and auto safety--over a much longer period of time to reveal patterns of stability alternating with bursts of rapid, unpredictable change. A welcome corrective to conventional political wisdom, "Agendas and Instability" revises our understanding of the dynamics of agenda-setting and clarifies a subject at the very center of the study of American politics.