Do Focusing Events and Narratives Drive Pharma Rent-seeking: Evidence from Disease Outbreaks

Abstract

Kingdon argues that for an issue to gain agenda status, three “streams” have to come together. When these independent stream meet, a window of opportunity is created for a policy change to occur. Various factors can cause the window of opportunity to occur and one of them is a focusing event or in our case a disease outbreak (Kingdon, 1995). We hypothesize that when disease outbreaks occur pharmaceutical and related companies use this as an opportunity to seek rents. Congress passes funding when focusing events and narratives provide the opportunity to payback different pharmaceutical companies who have contributed to politicians. We use ProQuest News to track the media narratives during six different disease outbreaks and use Google Trends News to see how people interact with the narratives. We find that for five outbreaks there is support for our hypothesis, and the sixth outbreak provides a constraint on our hypothesis.