From the Revolution until the Panic of 1837 Americans accepted state intervention in the economy as a legitimate, even an essential, function of government. The Decline of Authority examines the transformation of New York State government between 1800 and 1860, a critical period during which governmental authority diminished as most state governments withdrew from interventionist economic policies and relinquished their role in the allocation of resources to the private sector. Exploring the relationship between socioeconomic change, public economic policy, and political development, L. Ray Gunn offers an innovative explanation for the new configuration of politics and governance in New York State that emerged during this era
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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.
THE EDITOR HAS ASKED ME, AS AN ECONOMIST, TO RESPOND TO PROFESSOR MEAD'S ESSAY ON THE RELATION BETWEEN ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE IN THE STUDY OF PUBLIC POLICY. THIS REQUEST SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN PROMPTED BY PROFESSOR MEAD'S STATEMENT TO THE EDITOR THAT HIS ESSAY HAD NOT BEEN WELL RECEIVED BY THOSE ECONOMISTS WHO HAD READ IT. BUT I HAD NO SUCH NEGATIVE REACTION, SO WHATEVER DUEL THE EDITOR MIGHT HAVE ANTICIPATED WOULD RESULT WILL NOT TAKE PLACE. PROFESSOR MEAD'S CONTENTION THAT THE STUDY OF PUBLIC POLICY "HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE JOINT CONTRIBUTION OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE TO THE STUDY OF PUBLIC ISSUES," SEEMS EMINENTLY REASONABLE TO ME. INDEED, THE AUTHOR DO NOT SEE HOW IT COULD BE OTHERWISE, ONCE IT IS RECOGNIZED THAT ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE REST UPON THE SAME FOUNDATION. THIS FOUNDATION IS WHAT ECONOMISTS REFER TO AS SCARCITY, WHICH MEANS THAT THE WANTS PEOPLE HAVE EXCEED THE CAPACITY THAT EXISTS WITHIN A SOCIETY TO FULFILL THOSE WANTS. BECAUSE OF SCARCITY, SOME MEANS OF RESOLVING CONFLICTS AND REPRESSING WANTS ARISE IN ALL SOCIETIES, AS DO PATTERNS OF COOPERATION TO ENHANCE THE EXTENT TO WHICH WANTS CAN BE FULFILLED.
Advocates of complexity theory describe it as a new scientific paradigm. Complexity theory identifies instability and disorder in politics and policy making, and links them to the behaviour of complex systems. It suggests that we shift our analysis from individual parts of a political system to the system as a whole; as a network of elements that interact and combine to produce systemic behaviour. This article explores the use of complexity theory in public policy, highlighting a small literature using the language of complexity directly to describe complex policy-making systems, and a larger literature identifying complexity themes. It then highlights the main problems to be overcome before complexity theory can become truly valuable in politics and policy making.
