Suchergebnisse

Political scientists who are policy scholars often trace their lineage back to the pioneering work of Lerner and Lasswell (1951). But public policy did not emerge as a significant subfield within the discipline of political science until the late 1960s or early 70s. This resulted from at least three important stimuli: (1) social and political pressures to apply the profession's accumulated knowledge to the pressing social problems of racial discrimination, poverty, the arms race, and environmental pollution; (2) the challenge posed by Dawson and Robinson (1963), who argued that governmental policy decisions were less the result of traditional disciplinary concerns such as public opinion and party composition than of socioeconomic factors such as income, education, and unemployment levels; and (3) the efforts of David Easton, whose Systems Analysis of Political Life (1965) provided an intellectual framework for understanding the entire policy process, from demand articulation through policy formulation and implementation, to feedback effects on society.Over the past twenty years, policy research by political scientists can be divided into four types, depending upon the principal focus:1. Substantive area research. This seeks to understand the politics of a specific policy area, such as health, education, transportation, natural resources, or foreign policy. Most of the work in this tradition has consisted of detailed, largely atheoretical, case studies. Examples would include the work of Derthick (1979) on social security, Moynihan (1970) on antipoverty programs, and Bailey and Mosher (1968) on federal aid to education. Such studies are useful to practitioners and policy activists in these areas, as well as providing potentially useful information for inductive theory building. In terms of the profession as a whole, however, they are probably less useful than theoretical case studies—such as Pressman and Wildavsky (1973) on implementation or Nelson (1984) on agenda-setting—which use a specific case to illustrate or test theories of important aspects of the policy process.2. Evaluation and impact studies. Most evaluation research is based on contributions from other disciplines, particularly welfare economics (Stokey and Zeckhauser 1978; Jenkins-Smith 1990). Policy scholars trained as political scientists have made several contributions. They have broadened the criteria of evaluation from traditional social welfare functions to include process criteria, such as opportunities for effective citizen participation (Pierce and Doerksen, 1976). They have focused attention on distributional effects (MacRae, 1989). They have criticized traditional techniques of benefit-cost analysis on many grounds (Meier, 1984; MacRae and Whittington, 1988). Most importantly, they have integrated evaluation studies into research on the policy process by examining the use and non-use of policy analysis in the real world (Wildavsky, 1966; Dunn, 1980; Weiss, 1977).3. Policy process. Two decades ago, both Ranney (1968) and Sharkansky (1970) urged political scientists interested in public policy to focus on the policy process, i.e. the factors affecting policy formulation and implementation, as well as the subsequent effects of policy. In their view, focusing on substantive policy areas risked falling into the relatively fruitless realm of atheoretical case studies, while evaluation research offered little promise for a discipline without clear normative standards of good policy. A focus on the policy process would provide opportunities for applying and integrating the discipline's accumulated knowledge concerning political behavior in various institutional settings. That advice was remarkably prescient; the first paper in this symposium attempts to summarize what has been learned.Policy design. With roots in the policy sciences tradition described by deLeon (1988), this approach has recently focused on such topics as the efficacy of different types of policy instruments (Salamon 1989; Linder and Peters 1989). Although some scholars within this orientation propose a quite radical departure from the behavioral traditions of the discipline (Bobrow and Dryzek 1987), others build upon work by policy-oriented political scientists over the past twenty years (Schneider and Ingram 1990) while Miller (1989) seeks to integrate political philosophy and the behavioral sciences.

Political science has its laws, and they can predict what will happen in politics. One such law can predict whether George Bush will be reelected President in 1992.It is true that political science is not politics. This relationship between the two is no different than that between any science and the reality which it analyzes. Every science is a repository of abstractions which model the critical aspects of a much more complex underlying phenomena. While some political scientists have expected a one-to-one, deterministic relationship between the science and the material it studied, most anticipated the "deterministic randomness" (or "chaos") paradigm becoming popular even in the physical sciences today. Deterministic, because the science assumes that there are intrinsic underlying laws; but random because, with the inherent complexity, much will necessarily remain unpredictable (in statistical terms, that there always will be an "e" in the equation).

A great opportunity, coupled with a strong moral obligation to accept it, confronts political science: to give major attention to the separation of powers between the President and the Congress in the Constitution of the United States. The critical scrutiny of a growing number of public persons reminds us that this separation was attacked by the redoubtable Charles H. McIlwain as posing a danger to constitutional government itself.Mcllwain on the Separation of Powers"Among all the modern fallacies that have obscured the true teachings of constitutional history, few are worse than the extreme doctrine of the separation of powers and the indiscriminate use of the phrase 'checks and balances.'" When representative assemblies took over from kings, "they assumed a power and a responsibility that had always been concentrated and undivided." McIlwain rejected the separation of powers in favor of the limitation of powers. "The true safeguards of liberty against arbitrary government are the ancient legal limitation and the modern political responsibility" or "full political responsibility … to the whole people." The latter is "utterly incompatible with any extended system of checks and balances."McIlwain could find no "good precedents" in history for "this dissipation of government" which has "worked disaster ever since it was adopted." He feared that if the dissipation of government developed much further it would precipitate a reaction that might sweep away "every protection of any sort, legal as well as political, to leave the individual naked and unprotected against the ever-present danger of arbitrary government."