26.281 - Who Gets to Set the Agenda?
“… power may be, and often is, exercised by confining the scope of decision-making to relatively ‘safe’ issues.”
— Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, 1962, excerpt from “Two Faces of Power,” p. 948
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Peter Bachrach was a political theorist who taught at Bryn Mawr College and Temple University. He drew attention to something easily overlooked: power also shapes which questions get a hearing.
With Morton Baratz, he wrote the 1962 article “Two Faces of Power,” asking scholars to examine how issues are kept outside public consideration as well as how visible decisions are made. In their language, a “safe” issue left a powerful participant’s interests relatively unchallenged.
Bachrach’s commitment to participation also informed his teaching. A Temple colleague remembered a classroom in which students could contribute freely. His work offers a useful starting question for ordinary shared life: what have we made room to consider? We can explore that question without assuming every omission conceals a deliberate strategy. Sometimes the most revealing place to begin is the page prepared before a meeting opens, while there is still time to change what it contains.
Before Anyone Speaks
Imagine a neighborhood association preparing for its monthly meeting. Between seven and eight in the evening, the group plans to work through four items:
Routine reports
A maintenance budget decision
Plans for the autumn gathering
A resident’s proposal for the shared courtyard
The page looks orderly. The chair has included everything submitted, circulated the documents, and welcomed questions. The resident would like to put a few movable chairs in the courtyard, giving neighbors somewhere to sit and talk in a space most currently pass through. Others have reasonable questions about evening noise and keeping the walkway clear. Nobody expects an instant answer, but they would like to begin discussing the possibilities. The proposal was carried over from last month, when the group ran out of time.
At seven, a routine report raises a question that takes longer than expected. The maintenance decision needs attention because a contractor is waiting for an answer. Planning the autumn gathering generates several useful suggestions, followed by a detailed conversation about supplies. At two minutes to eight, the chair reaches the courtyard item. People have arranged their evenings around the advertised finish, and the question plainly deserves more than two minutes. The chair proposes carrying it forward. The meeting ends on time, and the courtyard remains as it was.
Everyone has reasons for the choices made that evening. The deadline mattered, the event required planning, and ending when promised respected people's time. Yet the resident’s proposal has now appeared twice without receiving a hearing. Its place on the agenda makes it visible on paper while the way the hour unfolds keeps it out of discussion. The chair can have done considerable work in good faith and still have something useful to learn from that gap.
Look back at the list. The numbers originally seemed to describe an order of business. After the meeting, they also describe how the group’s attention was spent. The final item depended on time remaining after everything above it had expanded or concluded. Nobody voted that a place for neighbors to gather mattered less. The group nevertheless finished another evening having made progress on familiar business and none on a possible change. Before deciding whether the proposal is any good, the residents need a real opportunity to find out.
The Choices Inside the List
Preparing an agenda involves judgment long before it involves formatting. Someone decides which requests belong in the meeting, whether they are ready for discussion, how to describe them, and how much time they might need. Those decisions can become difficult to notice when the same person has made them for years. If you are that person, the recurring order may feel like a practical inheritance: reports first, money next, upcoming events after that, and new suggestions at the end. It is a familiar way to get the evening started.
You can recognize the same influence without ever joining a committee. Imagine friends planning a trip. Someone starts a group conversation by asking which of two weekends works best, and everyone begins comparing calendars. The discussion is useful, but it has begun after another choice has quietly been made: the kind of trip they will take. A friend wondering about a shorter, less expensive visit has a different question to contribute. “Before we choose dates, could we talk about how long we want to go?” gives the group a chance to consider it. The person organizing the trip may welcome a possibility they simply had not thought to include.
Back at the association, the resident waiting to discuss the courtyard faces the same need for an earlier question to receive attention. Every month introduces another report, another expense, and another event. A place after all of them offers no dependable occasion for the new idea to become the group’s work. The resident can reasonably want a discussion while accepting that other people may disagree. There is much to learn before anyone decides: where chairs could go, who would use them, what they would cost, and what difficulties they might create.
From the chair’s position, an unfinished item can look like the unfortunate result of a busy evening. From the resident’s position, repeated postponement may look like the only answer the proposal will ever receive. Both perspectives contain useful information, but the chair’s has shaped the sequence. Recognizing that difference makes a more specific conversation possible. How many times has the item been deferred? What would it need in order to be discussed? Those questions let the group examine what is happening without first having to settle an argument about anyone’s intentions.
Even the wording of an item can help or hinder that conversation. “Courtyard proposal” leaves room to explain an idea. “Extra courtyard costs” brings one possible consequence to the foreground before the discussion begins. Costs deserve attention, along with the proposal’s purpose and the concerns of people who use the space. If you are writing the agenda, checking the description with the person who submitted it is a small, practical way to improve accuracy. You may discover that what you understood them to be asking for was only part of the request.
The chair’s obligations still matter. A genuine deadline may justify giving maintenance first priority. Some requests need information; others concern something the association has no authority to change. Clear reasons help people understand what can happen next. “We need an estimate before deciding” identifies something that can be supplied. It also leaves room for a preliminary conversation about which options are worth pricing. An idea should not have to arrive as a finished plan before the group can help determine what it needs to know.
Clarity can make organizing less burdensome, too. When the process is unclear, each request can become a separate negotiation with the chair, who must remember every promise and explain every delay. Members who know how to submit an item, how priorities are chosen, and what happens to unfinished business can share more responsibility for keeping the process working. The organizer has reasons others can examine, and participants have a way to ask for reconsideration that does not depend entirely on personal persistence.
Fairness will still involve judgment. A short report and a consequential change need different amounts of attention. What people can reasonably ask for is an explanation they can understand: why does this question go first, and when will the other one receive its turn? Urgency, consequences, preparation, and earlier deferral can all matter. Making those reasons visible gives the group something concrete to improve when the familiar order stops serving its needs.
Making Room for What We Have Yet to Learn
If you regularly organize shared decisions, you may recognize a particular satisfaction in having everything ready. You remember the deadlines, find the documents, and anticipate what will be needed. That competence helps other people participate. Yet knowing the work so well can also make the existing list feel complete. A neighbor’s question may reveal a use for the courtyard you have never considered, just as a friend’s suggestion may reveal a different kind of trip. Your experience remains valuable as someone else adds to what you can see.
A request to change the list can initially feel like criticism, especially after you have spent your evening preparing it. There is room to acknowledge that effort and still become curious about the request. You might ask, “What would you like us to understand before we decide?” The answer could change the discussion, or clarify why the issue belongs elsewhere. Either way, you have given yourself a chance to understand the concern before deciding how to handle it. That is a practical capacity to develop in any role that lets you shape other people’s choices.
Return to the courtyard. Before the next meeting, the chair notices the two deferrals and proposes a protected fifteen-minute discussion near the beginning, after any business with an immediate deadline. Routine updates are circulated in advance, leaving meeting time for questions that need an answer. The resident helps describe the proposal accurately. Everyone knows the first conversation is intended to understand possible uses and concerns, with a decision to follow when the group has the information it needs. The hour has the same limits; its plan now gives this question a definite place.
That place needs to survive the evening itself. If an earlier item overruns, the chair can ask the group to choose explicitly which business will move and why. An urgent problem may still require postponement. Recording a specific next occasion lets everyone see what has been promised and return to it. The resident should be able to follow the proposal’s progress without having to reintroduce it each month as though nobody had heard of it before.
Consider what the eventual conversation might make possible. The chair has always treated the courtyard as a passage between buildings; the resident describes wanting somewhere to have a coffee with a neighbor. Another member explains why clear access through that corner matters. Hearing one another could lead them to consider a different position for the chairs or a small trial. It could also uncover a reason to leave the space as it is. These are possibilities within our imagined scene. The value of hearing them lies in the chance to understand the shared space more fully before deciding what to do.
Something personal can develop through that exchange. The organizer practices making room for a question they did not supply. The resident learns how an idea might change when it meets someone else’s experience. A member who had thought the proposal irrelevant discovers a concern they can help resolve. Each contributes to a task that becomes clearer through their involvement. We can aspire to this kind of growth alongside our individual achievements: becoming more able to recognize what other people know, offer what we know, and work toward a decision we have helped one another understand.
Your opportunity to act will depend on your position. If you prepare the list, you can review how new questions reach it and what happens when they are deferred. If you are one participant among many, you might suggest a discussion period or ask how an item can receive time. Sometimes you can only notice the pattern and understand why your concern remains unanswered. Be clear about what you can change and what you can only suggest. The responsibility for improving a process belongs especially to those who can shape it; the person already waiting to be heard should not automatically inherit the work of fixing it.
At the next neighborhood meeting, the courtyard proposal appears near the top of the page. Beside it is a modest instruction: fifteen minutes to understand the request and agree on the information needed. Nobody yet knows what the courtyard will become. For now, the group has made room for a question whose answer it does not already possess. The resident opens the discussion, someone reaches for a pen, and the shared work begins.
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Practice: Make Room on the Agenda
Estimated time: 10 minutes.
Choose one recent or upcoming agenda, or a plan for a shared discussion. A household decision or a conversation among friends can work as well as a formal meeting. Notice who supplied the questions, who chose their order, and how an overlooked concern could receive attention. Then identify one feasible improvement within your influence, such as asking whether another option should be considered or assigning time to a repeatedly deferred question.
The worksheet will help you separate what you can observe from what you are assuming and prepare a proportionate next step. You can complete it privately using a real or imagined situation. If you do not control the process, the outcome can be an optional suggestion rather than a commitment to change it.
Scientific Summary
Picture two versions of the same meeting: the same people, the same four subjects, and the same sixty minutes. In the first, the courtyard proposal receives whatever time remains. In the second, it has a protected discussion period and a clear next step if it must be deferred. We have changed the plan for the hour while leaving the people themselves unchanged. This thought experiment gives us a way to explore how an arrangement can affect what a group has the opportunity to consider.
Watch the last item in the first version. A vote about the courtyard never occurs, so counting who wins votes would tell us little about what happens to this proposal. We would need to look earlier, at how subjects are admitted, ordered, and repeatedly carried forward. That shift in attention is central to Bachrach and Baratz’s account of the “two faces” of power (1962). Their political theory asks us to examine influence over what reaches consideration as well as influence within visible decisions. A postponement alone cannot tell us whether anyone intended to keep a question out; the pattern and the reasons would need examining.
Now move to the second version, where the proposal receives its fifteen minutes. There is still plenty to check. If the agenda describes an expensive permanent installation while the resident proposed movable chairs, people will be discussing the wrong thing. If the group overlooks residents who need a clear walkway, relevant experience will be missing. And if a mistaken cost estimate cannot be corrected, the decision may continue to rest on bad information. These ordinary questions bring procedural fairness—the fairness of how a decision is reached—into view. Accuracy, representation, and opportunities for correction are among the criteria described in Leventhal’s 1976 framework; consistency also asks whether the process applies its rules reliably.
Suppose the group hears the proposal and declines it because the expense is too high. The courtyard could look exactly as it does in the version where discussion never happens. Yet the meeting records would tell different stories: one contains a considered decision and reasons that can be examined; the other contains a question still waiting for attention. Looking only at the unchanged courtyard would hide that difference. Looking at the discussion would also let us ask whether the cost information was sound and the relevant concerns were heard.
These theories help us notice different parts of a process. Leventhal’s manuscript presents a conceptual framework with acknowledged gaps in the evidence, and our two meetings are illustrations, not research findings. A protected slot therefore remains a practical suggestion to assess in use: did the question actually receive consideration, with a fair chance to clarify information and raise relevant concerns? A better agenda cannot promise agreement. It can give people a more dependable occasion to discover what they need to understand together.
References
Bachrach, P., & Baratz, M. S. (1962). Two faces of power. American Political Science Review, 56(4), 947–952. https://doi.org/10.2307/1952796
Fischer, K. (2008, January 16). Temple professor Peter Bachrach, political scientist and leading theorist of participatory democracy, dies at 89. Temple Now. https://now.temple.edu/news/2008-01-16/temple-professor-peter-bachrach-political-scientist-leading-theorist-participatory-democracy-dies-89
Leventhal, G. S. (1976, September). What should be done with equity theory? New approaches to the study of fairness in social relationships [Manuscript]. Wayne State University. ERIC (ED142463). https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED142463.pdf
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