If anyone doubts that policy analysis is like a hot dog—its contents are both variable and suspect— Sabatier's essay in this issue should remove those doubts. His outlines of the open systems/funnel of causality, rational actors within institutions, policy streams, and advocacy coalitions approaches make pellucid that adherents to any one of these perspectives will examine different variables in searching for truth, beauty, or at least explanation in public policy-making. A full illustration of how each of these lens, when focused on the same policy area, would yield a somewhat different image would require a volume of significant length. While the profession waits for Sabatier to produce such a volume, perhaps we can be satisfied with a brief discussion of how the pursuit of equal educational opportunity would be viewed through a pair of these lenses. The rational actors within institutions and advocacy coalition lenses are used to examine this important policy area.

When the U.S. Supreme Court accepted the “separate but equal” interpretation of the constitution (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896) and followed that quickly with a decision ignoring the “but equal” part of the phrase in public education (Cumming v. County Board of Education, 1899), racially segregated schools were legitimized. What followed was a long war, waged most obviously by the legal arm of the NAACP (Tushnet, 1987), which led to the Supreme Court's reversal of the Plessy decision (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954, 1955). At that point policy-making in the area of equal educational opportunity shifted from a focus on overturning a loathsome judicial precedent to implementing a favorable one. Initial euphoria led to overly optimistic predictions about the speed with which segregated school systems could be dismantled.

In the twentieth century, the savings-and-loan crisis rivals only the bank failures of the Great Depression and the hyperinflation of the 1970s in threatening Americans' confidence in their financial institutions. The costs promise to be truly astronomical. The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) estimates that at least $325 billion, probably much more, and at worst perhaps $500 billion, will be needed over the next thirty years to fund the bailout (Bowsher, 1990a, p. 15). Five United States Senators, the so-called “Keating five,” stand sullied in the fallout.

With such high costs and malfeasance, a host of villains but no fingerprints left at the scene of the crime, the bailout's problems are legion. The amount of money involved demands tight control, but the huge potential for political blame discourages any elected official from wanting to come close to the issue. Seats on the congressional banking committees, once prized plums because they often attracted PAC money, are now difficult to fill.

The “Autumn of the People” of 1989 was a dismal failure of the predictive power of political science. Any retrospective explanation of the fall of communism must not only account for the historical developments but must also identify those theoretical assumptions that prevented us from anticipating these developments. If we are so wise now, why were we not equally sage before?

As I learned recently, most terminal cancer patients die of pneumonia. Social science is not very good at sorting out underlying causes and precipitating conditions: witness the 50 years of controversies over the fall of Weimar. And the response to the question “why communism collapsed?” is not the same as to “why did it collapse in the autumn of 1989?” It is easier to explain why communism had to fall than why it did.

The theory of “totalitarianism” could not answer either question: it could not diagnose the cancer and hence the vulnerability to pneumonia.

This paper explores the relationship between economics and politics in the creation of democracy. The first section examines the shaping influence of the revenue imperative; the second, of end-game bargaining between retreating despots and insurgent democrats; and the third, of human capital. The paper is informal in argument and playful in spirit. It is designed to stimulate and provoke rather than to educate and inform.

I do, however, seek to maintain a consistent set-up for the analysis: On one side stands a sovereign—in an earlier period, most likely a monarch; in the present typically a political party. The sovereign maintains a monopoly over the formulation of public policy and possesses the power to extract resources from the economy. On the other side stand the citizens. They own the factors of production: land, labor, and capital. They care about public policy, but they cannot make it. However, the decisions they do make influence the level of economic resources that can effectively be mobilized by the sovereign.

The United States Congress has long been known for its lack of partisan cohesiveness and the inability of its majority parties to formulate and enact programs of policy. In the modern era (since the 1930s), policy leadership in the national government has come largely from the executive branch during the few periods of reasonably unified party rule (Roosevelt's New Deal, Johnson's Great Society). Over the past 35 years, the prevalence of divided government of a particular sort (Republican presidents with Democratic congressional majorities) has highlighted the internal divisions and lack of centralized power among congressional Democrats. There is, therefore, a natural interest in instruments of party leadership that are designed to offset the tendencies toward fragmentation and parochialism in Congress. The focus of this paper is on the Senate Democratic Policy Committee.

The Senate's version of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 included provisions for the establishment of party policy committees. This legislation stemmed largely from the work of the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress, known as the LaFollette-Monroney Committee. The Joint Committee's report called for the establishment of policy committees “to formulate overall legislative policy of the two parties” (Bone 1956, 342). The Committee's work was informed by, and part of, an active reform effort at that time (which included many political scientists) aimed at bringing about stronger parties that could be held accountable for certain policy outcomes (see for example Committee on Congress, American Political Science Association 1945; Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress 1946; Galloway 1946; Committee on Political Parties, American Political Science Association 1950).

As the taxpayers' bill for the cost of the savings and loan debacle continues to increase—recent estimates suggest total costs of about $500 billion—and the insurance fund for the nations' banks runs close to empty, many people are asking how and why we got here, and where is the accountability for such a disaster? What was the government doing while all of this was happening? While much has been written about who should be blamed and the lessons learned from this crisis, it is important for those of us in government to evaluate our contributions to the analysis of this issue and examine what we have learned.

As an evaluator of the General Accounting Office (GAO), Congress' “watchdog” agency, I will focus on GAO's evolving role in the analysis of the savings and loan crisis. GAO combines the expertise of accountants, economists, and analysts familiar with the internal operations of the federal agencies to provide a unique and comprehensive analysis of major policy issues. The S&L issue is a particularly useful case study for GAO because it illustrates the dramatic growth in our expertise and ability to contribute to policy analysis over the last decade. In 1980 GAO issued no reports relating to the thrift industry, while in 1989 GAO issued 28 reports and testimonies specifically about thrifts.

The juxtaposition of “political science” with the “savings and loan crisis” is interesting in part because it appears a peculiar pairing. What does, or should, political science as an academic discipline have to do with the current crisis in the savings and loan industry? A case can be made, and indeed is arguably the present dominant view within the discipline, that political scientists ought not to seek to be involved in any systematic way with public sector management problems or with governance generally. Following this reasoning, political science ought not to be interested in the savings and loan crisis other than, possibly, to study it after the fact as a political phenomenon.

There are other political scientists, however, who are uneasy with this passive view of the discipline. They have seen the emergence of a massive institutional crisis in the financial system of the nation and no one has thought to seek their advice and counsel towards a solution to the crisis except for them to participate as taxpayers in picking up the bill. But of even greater concern to many of the thoughtful in these ranks is the realization that if someone were to call upon the discipline for advice and assistance, the discipline might have little to contribute. Few of the leaders in our discipline have expertise in the management of complex fields. Indeed, it is unusual today to find political scientists with any experience at all in governmental institutions or affairs. The estrangement between political science and the governance process of the Republic appears nearly complete.

Why not use swing as a measure of electoral change in the United States? ask David Butler and Stephen D. Van Beek in PS (1990). This article shows why one should look before one swings, for the conditions of meaningful use are so limiting that swing is unsuited for the great majority of countries, including many elections in the United States and Britain. Instead of swing, it is better to employ a more precise and more robust measure of the ups and downs of parties.

Definition

Swing is the average of the change in the share of the vote won by two parties contesting an election. If party A gains 5 percent of the vote between election x and election y, and party B loses 5 percent, then there is a swing of 5 percentage points from B to A. By definition, swing is a measure of movement between two, and only two parties. In an attempt to control for the effect of other parties, the two-party measure of swing treats the votes for parties A and B as equal to 100 percent of the total vote, whatever the share of the vote taken by one or more “third” parties.

How do you explain the outcomes of modern presidential elections? This is the central dilemma of American politics. Why, for instance, did the Democrats, the so-called majority party, lose again in 1988? And why have they gone down to defeat in five of the last six presidential elections? Curiously, there appears to be no dearth of answers to these questions.

Many pundits, such as neoconservative William Schneider (1988), have argued that the Democrats are too liberal to win a national election. Others maintain that presidential elections are retrospective referenda on the economy and peace issues. According to this view, the incumbent party never loses when times are prosperous and the nation is at peace. Still others argue that presidential elections are actually beauty contests in which voters select the candidate who demonstrates the most attractive combination of personality traits, leadership qualities, and political credentials (Miller, Wattenberg, and Malanchuk 1986). Yet others contend that most losing Democratic candidates have run notoriously inept campaigns. In the Yiddish vernacular, Dukakis was a “Putz.” Finally, some analysts (Burns, Peltason, and Cronin 1989: 276–77) try to please everyone by advancing umbrella explanations that include all of these arguments.

Unfortunately, none of these explanations, taken individually, is particularly persuasive. And most appear to be little more than post hoc rationalizations. Of course, when something cannot be fully understood, we are prone to make fun of our ignorance.

The discussion of Perestroika has suffered on the whole from inadequate attention paid to the nature of Soviet society. Yet, it is only upon knowing the kind of society we have before us that we can grasp the specificity of its problems and the possibilities within the system for resolving them. Hence any serious inquiry into Perestroika and Glasnost must begin by determining the best way to characterize the Soviet Union.

There has probably never been a society anywhere that has been burdened with so many different names: “socialism,” “communism,” “actually existing socialism,” “state socialism,” “bureaucratically deformed socialism,” “dictatorship of the proletariat,” “workers' state,” “people's democracy,” “state capitalism,” “totalitarianism,” “red fascism,” and there are others. The problem of finding the right label, of course, is a reflection of the difficulty people have had in deciding which one or few of its attributes have been decisive in giving the Soviet Union its distinctive character, including too its real history and potential for future change.

Are the movements transforming Europe about to cross the Atlantic and pass the baton of reform from the old world to the new? If so, then the transfer may be in the form of constitutional amending rather than revolutionary upheaval.

After the two U.S. House elections of 1986 and 1988, with their 98% reelection rates for incumbent members, resentment has intensified against the skillfully crafted techniques whereby incumbents secure homesteads for themselves in Congress. Indeed a Gallup poll conducted in January 1990 found 70% of Americans supportive of restricting congressional tenure. And in Oklahoma, Colorado and California—the three states where a systematic constitutional application of term limits appeared on the ballot—rotation in the legislative branch won handily.

Yet the election results in 1990 (96% reelection) showed the same electoral dominance by incumbent House representatives that has prevailed since World War II. For the last few elections at least, public support for rotation in office has run high, while hardly a blip has appeared in the trend toward incumbents at the ballot box.

The results of the 1990 elections looked rather like late night TV reruns—it felt like we had seen this show before. In a sense, we had. Once again, over 90% of House incumbents running for reelection were successful. In the Senate, only one incumbent was defeated for reelection (which unique race in Minnesota the author had the good fortune—and, he would like to think, the excellent foresight—to be involved with in a central way). And once again, the monetary advantage held by incumbents was overwhelming and was apparently a major factor in the results.

This continued pattern was widely noted—and lamented—in the news media, as it had been after the 1988 election. A Los Angeles Times article was typical. The Times concluded, “With a few notable exceptions, the results … reinforced the basic tenet of American politics that well-financed incumbents are almost impossible to beat” (Fritz, Morris, 1990, p. A25). And, as the Times and many other news organs noted, that sky-high reelection rate came in a year supposedly awash in anti-incumbent sentiment after the fiasco of the budget process and other developments. The L.A. Times appropriately quoted Ellen Miller of the Center for Responsive Politics to the effect that the “big story of this election was that incumbents were insulated by money, in spite of the incredible frustration that many voters felt” (Fritz, Morris, 1990, p. A25).