Much research within the punctuated equilibrium framework demonstrated that policy agendas are invariably punctuated, due in part to cognitive and institutional frictions that constitute barriers to change in attention. While the bulk of past scholarship explored the extent to which institutional friction varies by organizational design, little scholarly attention has been devoted to the empirical examination of the cognitive aspect of disproportionate information processing. In an attempt to close this gap, I utilize a newly available dataset that codes nearly a million Americans’ responses to the ‘most important problem’ question from 1939 to 2015 to analyze the distribution of annual changes in the policy priorities of the American public. Drawing on the punctuated equilibrium theory literature, I argue and show that punctuations in the public’s policy priorities are more severe and frequent than those in institutional agendas. These results emphasize the need for a more subtle treatment of disproportionate information processing within the public, calling for relaxing the implicit assumption that cognitive friction is constant within organizations and across issues.

间断均衡框架内的大量研究表明，政策议程总是间断的，部分原因是认知和制度摩擦构成了注意力变化的障碍。虽然过去的大部分学术研究探讨了机构摩擦在多大程度上因组织设计而异，但很少有学术关注对不成比例的信息处理的认知方面的实证检验。为了缩小这一差距，我利用了一个新的数据集，该数据集编码了近百万美国人对 1939 年至 2015 年“最重要问题”问题的回答，以分析美国公众政策优先事项的年度变化分布。借鉴间断均衡理论文献，我论证并表明，公众政策优先事项中的标点符号比机构议程中的标点符号更为严重和频繁。这些结果强调了对公众内部不成比例的信息处理进行更微妙处理的必要性，呼吁放宽隐含的假设，即认知摩擦在组织内和跨问题是恒定的。