POLS 6312: Survey of American Institutions and Public Policy

Mr. Lineberry

Spring 2003

Th 5:30-8:30pm

Office: PGH 427 (743‑3901, 3‑3935 as a backup)

Office Hours: TT 2:30-4       

Email: SSQ@mail.uh.edu

TA: Claudia Baba (claudiababa@hotmail.com)

 

 

Course Description.

This course is designed for students in the doctoral program in political science, although it may meet the needs of other students. It serves as an introductory course in public policy and policymaking. The policy approach to American government, in my opinion, is an extraordinarily useful complement to the "behavioral" or the "institutional" approach.  The course introduces you to American political institutions, the meaning of public policy and economic and political science approaches to it, policy analysis, and some case studies of policy issues ‑‑ schools, the endangered species act, and crime, for example. And that's just breaking a sweat.

 

"Policy analysis" means many things to many people, but we try to examine a little of it here, mostly by case studies. Case studies are venerable in political science, public administration and, of course, the Harvard Business School.  Studying public policy is also an interdisciplinary activity. We will read works not only by political scientists, but also by economists, sociologists and others.

 

In addition to keeping up with the readings, you will want to familiarize yourself with leading journals. In mainline political science, of course, they are the APSR, the JOP and the AJPS. SSQ is the leading interdisciplinary journal (he said modestly). Legislative Studies Quarterly is a venue for legislative specialists. Presidential Studies Quarterly is sometimes a little quirky, but sometimes has good papers on the presidency. Law and Society is an interdisciplinary journal about crime, courts and legal issues. JPAM is perhaps the best policy analysis journal going.

 

Here is how the classes go. We start with the rapporteur, who will set the agenda for the class. I may make some introductory comments, but we will basically go through the readings. I usually ask these questions about the readings: (l) what is the theoretical perspective or the hypotheses of the author? (2) what is the methodology here? (3) what are the conclusions? and (4) what would be your critique of the reading?

 

 

Course Requirements. In addition to regular attendance and participation, there are four major requirements for the course.

 


A. Policy case study, concept paper, data paper, and final papers. For 40% of the grade, you should work on a paper along these lines:

 

Al.  Policy case study.  You should prepare a 5‑6 page case study (plus a bibliography; do not include items in the bibliography that are not in the paper) of some policy issue now being discussed in Washington or the states. You may rely somewhat on popular sources (e.g., newsmagazines or newspapers), but the major sources should be scholarly ones. (See the books in the bibliography on the course website.)  I am very flexible about the subject of the case study (gun control, abortion, the balanced budget amendment, regulating DNA research, the right to die, nuclear power, stem cells, etc., etc.).  Discuss and describe at least one major court case in this area, one specific piece of legislation and one particular regulation of a federal agency. Please be quite specific about the case, the legislation and the regulation. This will require your trundling over to the Law Library or (better) using the Internet and reading one case, one regulation and one law. This is due by February 7. Incorporate at least two studies on the syllabus labeled “C”.  These are articles in your instructor’s opinion which are classics in political science or policy analysis.  This is worth 5 percent of the course grade.

 

A2.  Concept paper.  You should prepare a "Concept Paper and Literature Review" on one of the topics listed at the end of this section This should be 5‑6 pages long, double spaced, plus a bibliography (do not include anything in the bibliography that you do not discuss in the text). This is due February 28. Incorporate at least two of the readings labeled “C” into your paper. This is worth 5 percent of the course grade.

 

Here is the list of concepts you can use in the paper:  institutions, policy experimentation, implementation, privatization, agendas, target population, social construction, rational choice, market approach, incrementalism, decision-making, issue network, rule of law, policy innovation, regulation, federalism, policy evaluation, and group theory.

 

A3. Data and methods paper.  Third, you should prepare a "data sources and methodology" paper about how to research your topic. What, if any, sources of data are now available (say, through the ICPSR) on your topic? Are there laws and regulations that are relevant? What are standard Census sources, if any? Would your topic require interviewing and if so, who and how? At this point, I am not so interested m methodology, in a statistical sense, as I am interested simply in where you might go and what you might do to investigate your emerging research question. Give me a 5‑6 page double spaced paper by April 4 and this is also worth 5 percent of the grade.

 

A4. Final paper. On the last day of class you should present me with a synthesized version of these three papers and plan to present it briefly in class. Suppose, for example, you selected gun control for your case study and implementation for your concept; you are going to need some kind of data from someplace. The synthetic paper, therefore, should be "Implementing Gun Control Policies." If your concept paper was on evaluation and your case study was on school choice, for example, then the synthetic paper would be on "Evaluation and School Choice." Through the miracle of word processors, it should be unnecessary to start from scratch on this final paper, but you will need to integrate your previous papers into a coherent whole and rethink them.  It is not assumed that you have any original data or secondary data for this paper; it is assumed that you have thought about this, though, in A3. This is worth 25 percent of the course grade, and therefore all of assignment A is worth 40 percent of the course grade. Obviously, I will be more impressed by the final grade of A4 than on any of the components of A1‑3.

 

B. Rapporteur assignment. Each student will serve as a rapporteur for one class session. She or he should review in a 15 minute oral presentation (absolutely no more, and I am a ruthless timekeeper) the major issues raised by the literature, and share with the class a 4‑5 page written synopsis of the presentation. Do not write the paper, though, simply as a summary of A, then B. then C. Integrate them into a perspective. Each rapporteur should review the presentation with the instructor during his regular office hours before the class time. Three things you should include in your discussion are (1) a leading Supreme Court case in this area; (2) one major federal regulation in this area (this does not mean that you should just say "the federal government has regulated dangerous toys." It means "Federal regulations of this date said that…") and (3) a description of a major statute by congress in this area (this needs to be specified ‑‑ not just "Congress in 1988 decided to..." This should say "HR135 in 1988 did this...") Also include (4) a brief list of standard data sources (census materials, NES codebook, court case data base, etc.) which will be relevant here.  Xerox the first page each of a regulation, a court case, and a statute for your rapporteur assignment. This is worth 20 percent of the course grade. 

 

C. Final. You may elect to take either an oral or a written final exam. The written final will contain 3‑5 questions, and you will have some choice among them. You may take it over a 24 hour period, using any materials you desire. The oral exam will be about 30 minutes. These should be taken during the final exam period at a mutually agreeable time, provided that you give me three working days before grades are due. This is worth 30 percent of your grade.

 

D.  American government: the basics.  We need to master the basics of American government, too, for this class.  You should read along each week with the relevant topic in any standard American government text.  As a part of the final, and we’ll discuss this later, you’ll need to pass a basic American government test on the constitution, federalism, and institutions.  This is worth 10% of the course grade. 

 

Books to Buy. You should procure a copy of each of these books:

 

Anne L. Schneider and Helen Ingram, Policy Design for Democracy

Frank Baumgartner and Beth Leech, Basic Interests

Kenneth Shepsle and Mark S. Bonchek, Analyzing Politics

Paul Sabatier, ed., Theories of the Policy Process

Arthur Okun, Equality and Efficiency

David Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection

George Edwards, et al., Government in America, 10th ed.

Roger Cobb and Marc Ross, Cultural Strategies of Agenda Denial

Morris Fiorina, Congress: Keystone of the Washington Establishment

 

Many materials listed under "required" (except these books) will be available in the library in our usual very imperfect way.

 

Note, though, that virtually all articles in major journals in political science, which are three years old or older are available through JSTOR; more recent major journal articles are also typically in the library.

 

On the syllabus, APSR=American Political Science Review; AJPS=American Journal of Political Science; Journal of Politics; SSQ=Social Science Quarterly.

 

You should follow along quite carefully in a standard American government book.

 

Internet Resources.  There are two important internet resources available for this course at the course website.  One is a bibliography of books on public policy issues; the other is a collection of police-oriented websites.

 

Overview of Weekly Topics

            January 16        Introductory festivities

            January 23        Political Institutions, Democracy and Public Policy

            February 6       Building a Policy agenda

            February 13     Congress Makes Public Policy

            February 20     The President

            February 27     Budgets and Policy

March 6           SPRING BREAK NO CLASS

March 13        The Courts and Public Policy

            March 20        Interest Groups and Bureaucracies

            March 27         Policy Design and Implementation

            April 3              Policy Distribution

            April 10            Policy Evaluation

April 17            SOUTHWESTERN SOCIAL SCIENCE ASSOCITION MEETING; NO CLASS

            April 24            The New Political Economy Debate: Markets vs. the Rule of Law

 

January 23.  Political Science, Institutions, and Public Policy

Rapporteur:_________________________

This week acquaints you with the concepts of institutions, public policy and policy analysis and raises some important issues about the use of knowledge in government. In this section are institutional approaches, rational choice approaches, policy approaches, systems approaches, “geological” approaches and social construction approaches.  Enough for everybody.

Required:

 

Paul Sabatier, ed., Theories of the Policy Process

Federalist # 10

David Easton, "An Approach to the Analysis of Political Systems," World Politics (1957): 383-400. (C).

Charles Lindblom, "The Science of Muddling Through," Public Administration Review, Spring, 1969: 79‑88. (C)

Kenneth Shepsle and Mark Bonchek, Analyzing Politics, ch. 1, 2, 11.

Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram, Policy Design and Democracy, ch. 1-3.

Joel Best, “Victimization and the Victim Industry,” Society, 1997:9-17.

Peter Hall and Rosemary C. R. Taylor, “Political Science and the Three Institutionalisms,” Political Studies 44(1996): 936-57.

 


Recommended:

                       

Two good books for approaches to institutions, policy and other political science issues are Robert Goodin, New Handbook of Political Science and Ada Finifter, ed. Political Science: State of the Discipline II.

 

Yehezkel Dror, Public Policymaking Reexamined.

Harold D. Lasswell, A Preview of the Policy Sciences  (C).

Richard Nelson, The Moon and the Ghetto.

Aaron Wildavsky, Speaking Truth to Power.

Bo Rothstein, “Political Institutions: An Overview,” in Robert E. Goodin, ed. A New Handbook of Political Science.

Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons.


 

 

February 6. Building a Policy Agenda

Rapporteur: _______________________

 

There must be something of an agenda in American politics—someone must have it. Who does? How would we explain it—even describe it? Kingdon is certainly a classic book in the agenda area. Stimson and company have a more empirical view of our agenda setting process and, behold, it is democratic to a tee. You need to understand the classic Bachrach and Baratz article in terms of the famous "community power structure" debate, but their question is: why are some very important things not on the agenda in the first place?

 

Required:

 

Bachrach and Baratz, "The Two Faces of Power" APSR, on reserve [C].

John Kingdom, Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies. (C), Chapters 6-8. 

Roger Cobb and Marc Ross, eds., Cultural Strategies of Agenda Denial, chps.  1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 10.

James  Stimson, Michael B. MacKuen and Robert S. Erikson, "Dynamic Representation," APSR, September, 1995 [c]

Anthony Downs, “Up and Down with Ecology – The Issue Attention Cycle,” The Public Interest. 1972 (c).

 

Recommended:

 

Frank Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics.

Roger Cobb and Charles Elder, Participation in American Politics: The Dynamics of Agenda Building.


Paul Light, The President's Agenda.

Bob Woodward, The Agenda (this is an easy, quick read – on Clinton’s first year fiascos).

 

February 13. Congress and Public Policy

Rapporteur:_______________________

 

Congress, of course, has whole courses in most political science departments, and we can capture only some of the issues here. We'll do our best. We take both an institutional approach (see Polsby, Martin and Shepsle) and a representational approach (see Miller and Stokes).

 

Required:

David Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection [C]

Warren Miller and Donald E. Stokes, "Constituency Influence in Congress," APSR (1963): 45‑56. (C) Maybe not very sophisticated today, but one of the most brilliant articles in political science.

Kenneth Shepsle and Mark Bonchek, Analyzing Politics, ch. 12.        

Nelson W. Polsby, "The Institutionalization of the US House of Representatives," in Lee Benson, et al, eds., American Political Behavior (originally in APSR). (C)

Morris Fiorina, Congress: Keystone of the Washington Establishment. (C)

Poole, Keith T., and Howard Rosenthal.  1997.  Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting.  New York: Oxford University Press.  Pp. TBA.

Andrew D. Martin, “Congressional Decision Making and the Separation of Powers,” APSR 95(June, 2001):361-78.

 

Recommended:

 

Aage Clausen, How Congressmen Decide.


Lawrence C. Dodd and Bruce Oppenheimer, eds. Congress Reconsidered, 7th ed.

Gary Jacobson, The Electoral Origins of Divided Government.[C]

 John W. Kingdon, Congressmen's Voting Decisions.

 David Mayhew, Divided We Govern. (C)

Charles O. Jones, Separate But Equal Branches.

 

February 20. Presidents and Public Policy.

Rapporteur:_________________________

 

I would have a hard time connecting anything I know about the policy literature to the literature on the presidency ‑‑ but it sure is an interesting literature. Neustadt is a classic, par excellence. Skowronek's is probably the most important recent book on the presidency. Would that someone would write a book called the "policies that presidents make."

 

Required:

 

Samuel Kernell, Going Public, Ch. 1 and 2.

Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power,  selection on reserve.   (C)

Duane M. Oldfield and Aaron Wildavsky, "Reconsidering the Two Presidencies" On

Reserve.

Richard Rose, The Post Modern President, 2nd ed., 1991, ch. 1.

US v. Nixon (1974).

Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make (1993), pp. 3‑32. [C]

Gary Alan Fine, "Reputational Entrepreneurs and He Memory of Incompetence: Melting

Supporters, Partisan Warriors, and Images of President Harding," American Journal of

Sociology, 101(1996): 1159‑93. He was our worst American president—as political scientists

and historians agree. Here a sociologist says "not so fast."

Kenneth Shepsle and Mark Bonchek, Analyzing Politics, ch. 14.

George Edwards and B. Dan Wood.  (1999).  “Who Influences Whom? The President and the Public Agenda.”  American Political Science Review. 93(2): 327-344.

 

Recommended:

 

Charles Jones, The Presidency in a Separated System.

Gary King and Lyn Ragsdale, The Elusive Executive: Discovering Statistical Patterns in

the Presidency. Storehouse of quantitative data on presidents.

Clinton Rossiter, The American President. (C)

 James Pfiffner, The Strategic Presidency.

George C. Edwards, Presidential Approval.  The standard book on presidential popularity.

Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modem Presidency (the new version of his classic Presidential Power)(C)

Paul Light, The President's Agenda.

Forrest McDonald, The American Presidency: An Intellectual History.

 

February 27: Budgets

Rapporteur:________________________

 

The last time I did this course (spring 2000), I began this section with the following introduction: “Now we have a balanced budget, even one in surplus.”  Silly me.  This section introduces the budget process, describes how we spend a nearly a third of our GDP, and focuses on a case study of social security. 

 

Required (general):

 

Aaron Wildavsky and Naomi Caiden, The New Politics of the Budgetary Process. (C), 4th ed. ch. 1 and 8.

William Jacoby, “Issue Framing and Public Opinion on Government Spending,” AJPS, 44(October 2000):750-67.

Arthur Sanders, "Rationality, Self‑Interest, and Public Attitudes on Public Spending," SSQ, 1988, pp. 311‑324.

OMB, “A Citizen’s Guide to the Federal Budget,” available at OMB website (2002 version).

David Stockman, The Triumph of Politics, ch. 12.

Theda Skocpol, "America's First Social Security System: The Expansion of Benefits for Civil War Veterans," in Skocpol, Social Policy in the United States. (on reserve)

 

Required (case study): Reforming Social Security

 

Lyle Gramlich, “Different Approaches for Dealing with Social Security,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 3(Summer 1996):55-66.

President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security, “Strengthening Social Security and Creating Personal Wealth for Americans,” final report, December 21, 2001, skim.  www.csss.gov.

Shylvester J. Schieber and John B. Shoven, The Real Deal: The History and Future of Social Security, pp. 3-25.

Peter Orszag and Robert Greenstein, “Voluntary Individual Accounts for Social Security:  What Are the Costs?” Council on Budget and Policy Priorities, www.cbpp.org.

 

Recommended:

 

Robert Eisner, How Real is the Federal Deficit? Not very, Eisner says.

Alan Schick, The Capacity to Budget, 1990.

Martha Derthick, Uncontrollable Spending for Social Programs, 1975.  This is the book which introduced the concept of uncontrollable spending.

Michael J. Graetz, The U.S. Income Tax.

Jeffrey Birnbaum and Alan S. Murray, Showdown at Gucci Gulch: Lawmakers, Lobbyists and the Unlikely Triumph of Tax Reform, 1987.  Easy read book on tax reform in the Reagan administration.

 

March 6. Courts and Policy

Rapporteur:___________________

 

Everyone concedes that American courts are more powerful than any in the world. Some think they have been more powerfu1 than ever in American politics (though it would be hard to


match Marbury v. Madison.) How courts operate in our "separated system" is our subject this week.

 

Required:

 

Marbury v. Madison (l803).

Robert A. Dahl, "The Supreme Court as National Policy Maker,"  (c) APSR on reserve.

Tracy E. George and Lee Epstein, "On the Nature of Supreme Court Decision-Making,'' APSR, 86(1992):323‑337.

Donald Horowitz, The Courts and Social Policy, pp. 255‑84.

Gregory Caldeira and John R Wright, "Organized Interests and Agenda Setting in the U.S. Supreme Court," APSR (December, 1988).

Kenneth Shepsle and Mark Bonchek, Analyzing Politics, ch. 15.

Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America

(1974), pp. 3‑29.

Darrell Steffensmeier and Chester L. Britt, “Judges’ Race and Judicial Decision Making: Do Black Judges Sentence Differently?” SSQ 82(December 2001): 749-64.

 

Recommended:

 

Henry Abraham, Justices and Presidents.       

Lawrence Baum, The Supreme Court.

Lawrence Tribe, God Save this Honorable Court.

Jeffrey  Segal and Harold J. Spaeth, “The Influence of Stare Decisis on the Votes of United States Supreme Court Justices”, AJPS, November, 1996: 971‑1003. There is a huge literature on the quantitative analysis of judges' decisions; this article will get you started on this area if you are interested.  See also their book, The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model.

 

March 20. Bureaucracies and Interest Groups

Rapporteur:____________________________

 

This is such an amalgam of research that I am inclined to call it just “research about the Beltway."   The idea here is that policymaking is not just about presidents and congress, but about a complex interaction of elected officials, plus bureaucracies (who may have their own logic) and interest groups.  Journalists—William Greider, Kevin Phillips, Thomas Edsall ‑‑ and many others write regularly and seriously about it. Today, it's more, much more, than the classic study of Weberian bureaucracies. Here is where we read a bit on regulatory policy, too.

 

Required:

 


Max Weber “On Bureaucracy.” (C)

M. Lipsky  “Street Level Bureaucracies” (C)

Kenneth J. Meier, “Bureaucracy and Democracy: The Case for More Bureaucracy and Less Democracy,” Public Administration Review, 57(May-June, 1997):193-99.

Frank Baumgartner and Beth L. Leech, Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups  in Politics and Political Science.

Hugh Heclo, "Issue Networks and the Executive Establishment," in Anthony King, ed.  The New American Political System, 1978. (C)

Jack L. Walker, "The Origin and Maintenance of Interest Groups in America," APSR,

June 1983. (C)

Susan and Martin Tolchin, Dismantling America, ch. 4.

Kip Viscusi "Economic Foundations of the Current Regulatory Reforms," Journal of

Economic Perspectives, Summer, 1996: 119‑34.

Kenneth Shepsle and Mark Bonchek, Analyzing Politics, ch. 13.

McCubbins, Matthew D., and Thomas Schwartz.  “Congress Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols versus Fire Alarms.”  American Journal of Political Science.  29(1984):165-179.

 

Recommended:

 

Leonard W. Weiss and Michael W. Klass, eds., Regulatory Reform.

James Q. Wilson, Regulation.

Theodore Lowi, Interest Group Liberalism.

 

March 27.  Policy Design and Implementation

Rapporteur:________________________

 

The idea that policy should be "designed" seems a pretty good one. There are “Designer jeans" and “Designer genes." In a society which spends more money marketing Moulin Rouge than in investigating what a policy should do and be like, this seems a sensible idea. Design, if there is any, presumably happens before a policy gets enacted. Implementation happens after. The Pressman‑Wildavsky volume single‑handedly created the field of policy implementation. The case study here is the spotted owl and, by implication, the environmental policy system. I'm going to make the argument that the endangered species act was the worst public policy in the history of the United States. Here is a fair question: What is "good" public policy or "bad" public policy?  Is the secret in the design or the implementation?

 

Required (general):

 

Jeffrey Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky, Implementation, pp. xi‑xv, 1‑ó, ch. 5. (C)

Anne L. Schneider and Helen Ingram, Policy Design and Democracy, ch. 3-7.

Richard E. Matland, "Synthesizing the Implementation Literature: The Ambiguity‑Conflict Model of Policy Implementation" Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 5(1995):145‑174.

 

Required (case Study): The Spotted Owl Problem

 


Richard Tobin, The Expendable Future (1990), pp. 15-47.

Charles C. Mann and Mark L. Plummer, "The Butterfly Problem," Atlantic, January, 1992, 47‑70.

New York Times, "Owls, Trees and People."

Andrew Metrick and Martin L. Weitzman.  “Conflicts and Choices in Biodiversity Preservation.”  Journal of Economic Perspectives, 12 (Summer 1998): 21-34.

William R. Freudenberg, Lisa J. Wilson, and Daniel J. O’Leary, “Forty Years of Spotted Owls: A Longitudinal Analysis of Logging Industry Job Losses,” Sociological Perspectives 91(1998):1-26.

Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, 2001, chap. 23.

 

Recommended:

 

Daniel Mazmanian and Paul Sabatier, Implementation and Public Policy.

Paul Sabatier, "Top Down and Bottom Up Approaches to Implementation Research," Journal of Public Policy, 6:21‑48.  A classic on implementation research and thinking.

Malcolm Goggin, et al., Implementation Theory and Practice: Toward a Third Generation, 1990.

Martha Feldman, Order without Design.

Lawrence Lynn, Designing Public Policy.

Stephen H. Linder and B. Guy Peters, "Perspectives on the Design of Public Policy," in Dennis Palumbo and Donald J. Colister, eds., Implementation and the Policy Process.

 

April 3. Policy Distribution.

Rapporteur:______________________

 

Anthony Downs, William Riker, and the average person on the street believe that politicians reward their supporters and punish their opponents by distributing benefits or burdens of public policy. Or do they? Machiavelli actually advised against this strategy. How do benefits and burdens in the political system get distributed? Does "them that has gets"? When you control a third of the GDP and have an sorts of regulations and laws, you get to have a big say in "who gets what when how" - Lasswell's classic definition of "politics."  Part of the point here is that government makes all sorts of decisions which distribute and redistribute – almost entirely without our having those questions explicitly on the policy agenda.

 

Required (general):

 

Bruce Ray, “Congressional Promotion of District Interests," in Barry Rundquist, ed., Political Benefits.

Mark Rank and Thomas Hirschl, “Rags or Riches: Estimating the Probabilities of Poverty and Affluence across the Adult Life Span,” SSQ 82(December 2001): 651-69.

Steven  Rhodes, “How Much Should We Spend to Save a Life?" The Public Interest, Spring, 1978.

Benjamin Page and James R. Simmons, What Government can Do: Dealing with Poverty and Inequality, pp. 125-55.

Robert Blank, Rationing Medicine, chapter 3.

Kenneth J. Meier, Joseph Stewart and Robert England, "The Politics of Bureaucratic Discretion: Educational Access as an Urban Service," AJPS, 35(1991):155‑77.


Kenneth N. Bickers and Robert M. Stein, "The Electoral Dynamics of the Federal Pork Barrel" AJPS, November, 1996: 1300‑26.

 

Required (case study): Welfare Reform (TBA)

 

 

April 10. Policy Analysis and Evaluation.

Rapporteur:_________________

 

Wouldn't it be loverly if we could spend as much deciding whether a policy would work or accomplish its goals as we spend test marketing a new potato chip brand?  What policy evaluation tries to do – post hoc – is assess the performance of a policy.  Policy evaluation can become quite cranky – often finding that policies do not work as their proponents had hoped or their opponents had feared. The centerpiece here, though, is the classic Don Campbell article on "Reforms as Experiments.” 

 

Required (general):

 

Donald T. Campbell, "Reforms as Experiments," American Psychologist. (C)

Richard Nathan, Social Science in Government: The Role of Policy Researchers, pp. 3-33.

Charles Lindblom, Inquiry and Change, ch. 9.

Evan J. Ringquist, "Does Regulation Matter? Evaluating the Effects of State Air Pollution Control Programs," JOP (1993).

David Weimer and Aiden Vining, Policy Analysis, read ch. 1, skim ch. 8.

David Greenberg, et al., “The Social Experiment Market,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 13(Summer 1999): 157-172.

Harry Holzer and David Neumark, “Assessing Affirmative Action,” Journal of Economic Literature, 38(September 2000):483-568, skim this.

 

Required (case study): Controlling Crime

 

Kevin B. Smith, "Explaining Variation in State‑Level Homicide Rates: Does Crime Policy Pay?" JOP (1997).

Langbein article on guns - SSQ

Tony Pate, et al, The Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment (on reserve)

 

April 24. The New Political Economy Debate: Markets vs. the Rule of Law.

Rapporteur:

 

Here is one of the key issues – if not the key issue - of both real world politics and the social sciences today. How much should we rely on the market as conservatives would want versus how much should we use “rule of law" mechanisms, or what Schultze calls command and control policies? Maybe we should privatize everything in sight, including the schools.  Almost nothing splits conservatives and liberals more than this issue in this country and abroad.  Hirshman and Okun are short but powerful books, which anyone who wants to understand politics and economics from a policy perspective will find essential.

 

Required (general):

 


Kenneth Shepsle and Mark Bonchek, Analyzing Politics, ch. 10, skim 8-9.

Albert O. Hirshman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (C)

Arthur Okun, Equality and Efficiency. (C)

Charles Lindblom, Politics and Markets, 65‑89. (C)

Max Neiman, "The Virtue of Heavy‑Handedness in Government," Law and Policy Quarterly, 1980, pp. 11‑14. 

E. S. Savas, Privatization, introduction.  Savas is something of a “godfather” of the privatization movement.

Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, pp. 7-37. (c)

 

Required (case study): School Choice

 

John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe, "Politics, Markets and the Organization of Schools," APSR (1988).

Gregory Weiher and Kent L. Tedin, “Does Choice Lead to Racially Distinctive Schools? Charter Schools and Household Preferences?” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 21(2002):79-92.

Selection from Witte on Milwaukee school choice and other critiques of same.

Richard Arum, “Do Private Schools Force Public Schools to Compete?” American Sociological Review 61(1996:29-46.

 

Recommended:

 

John Chubb and Terry Moe, Politics, Market’s and America’s Schools.

Jeffrey Henig.  Rethinking School Choice.

Max Neiman, Defending Government.

Charles Schultze, The Public Use of Private Interest.

Martin and Susan Tolchin.  Dismantling America.