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Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is a thirty year old policy whose implementation continues to be debated today among all three institutions of government in the United States. Although the focus of these current Title IX debates surrounds the issue of gender equity in athletics, Title IX legislation as originally written and debated did not reference sport. Title IX states that: No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subject to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. (P.L. 92-318 sec. 901) Title IX arrived on the agenda as a means of combating sex discrimination in education. In particular, those who fought for Title IX’s passage focused on issues such as equal pay, tenure track opportunities, and sex bias in school texts. So how and when was it that Title IX’s focus shifted from gender equity in education to gender equity in sport? What factors led to this shift in the agenda? Some would argue that Title IX’s policy focus shifted to sport because that’s where outside interest groups and lobbyists chose to focus their attention. This may be true to a certain extent, as there is a plethora of evidence that illustrates that interest groups were in fact focusing their arguments on gender inequity in athletics when Title IX’s proposed regulations were released; however, the question concerning agenda change is still left unanswered. Why did these groups shift and narrow their focus from larger issues of gender discrimination in education to gender equity in athletics at that particular time? Some would argue that discrimination in athletics was more easily quantifiable than discrimination in education in general; therefore, those groups fighting for equity in education used sport as a focal point. This paper, however, argues that Title IX’s history reveals the importance of political timing among all three institutions of government in understanding policy agenda change. As John Kingdon argues in his work, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, policy change is most likely to occur when problems, solutions and political events align themselves to open policy windows, which create opportunities for change. This paper goes a step beyond Kingdon by discussing the importance of all three institutions of government and their institutional processes for understanding policy change. Title IX’s history also reveals that the policy agenda within the institutions of government shifted to athletics within a political and social context that enhanced thed development of this policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines agenda setting as a dynamic, reciprocal process in which various institutions engage in a dialogue over the way in which a policy should be shaped and how the future agenda should be addressed by other institutions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current relationship between government and sport policy is useful for understanding an important context relevant to political and social change. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on agenda setting has long focused on the factors that lead certain ideas and issues to be addressed by institutions. In general, the focus of these studies has been on the agenda of a single institution—with Congress or an agency most commonly serving as the variable examined—with other institutions, policy actors, and policy actions serving as independent variables in the analysis. The goal of these studies is to understand what factors lead an institution to consider an issue seriously and then to consider changing the policy that governs the issue in question. The independent variables in the agenda setting process are seen as being causal factors having a direct impact on the agenda of the institution under examination. These independent factors range from factors exogenous to the institution, such as the media or public opinion, to endogenous factors including shifting committee jurisdictions and the volume of congressional hearings. Additionally, although rarely stated explicitly the causality is typically assumed to be one-way; for example, the President’s State of the Union address is an example of an agenda setting variable typically assumed to affect the congressional agenda. However, the idea that there is reciprocity in this process—that the agenda the president attempts to set for Congress may be influenced by the agenda that the Congress itself desires—is rarely considered. In this paper, we examine the agenda setting as a dynamic, reciprocal process in which various institutions engage in a dialogue over the way in which a policy should be shaped and how the future agenda for that policy should be addressed by other institutions. We present a model of institutional dialogues to explain the ongoing agenda-setting process across institutions and test this theory using data on the evolution of Title XI, an education law that states “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subject to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal assistance.” Using data on legislative, executive, and judicial activities to support our claims, we show that agenda setting is ongoing and often occurs simultaneously across institutions,. Agenda setting is therefore an ongoing process whereby various policy actors have an ongoing dialogue about the location of the ideal point of the policy in question. Congress, the Courts, and the executive branch, influenced by their own interests and exogenous pressures, take actions that both shape policy and set the agenda for other the actors. Each actor regularly acts in ways that explicitly shapes the agenda for other actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]