Martin A. Levin – författare

Even when effective treatments become available, efforts to control disease often fall short. Written to improve the prospects for managing AIDS, this work draws on previous large-scale public health initiatives to show how management effectiveness can meet threats to public health.

In The New Politics of Public Policy, Marc Landy and Martin Levin bring together a group of leading experts to challenge the view of the Bush-Reagan era as one characterised by policy gridlock. They demonstrate that there were a surprising number of impressive policy outcomes and that many were not in the least "conservative." The number and scope of these innovations, they argue, refute the conventional wisdom that the policy process in those years was biased against change, dominated by obstructionary interests, and characterised by incrementalism. The authors examine the most important arenas of modem domestic policy reform - health, entitlements, environment, and taxation as well as the changes that have taken place in the key policy-making institutions of Congress, the executive branch, the states, and the courts. They provide in-depth investigations of the 1986 and 1990 immigration Reforrn Acts, the 1986 Tax Reform Act, Aid to Children with Special Needs, the Superfund, and the Clean Air Act.They show how changes in Congressional structure affect the representation of interests, deliberation, and the resolution of conflict and how these effects, in turn, influence the passage of legislation. They explain how the replacement of on-budget funding by mandates requiring others to pay has made it easier to enact expensive laws and regulations. Most importantly, they demonstrate that a new politics of public policy has emerged - one characterised by a competition for novel ideas, a lowering of the legitimacy barrier regarding governmental intervention, and a broader understanding of rights.

Promoting competition has been a leading theme of public policy over the past 30 years. In the United States, the movement began in the 1970s with efforts to rewrite the rules for aviation, trucking, and telecommunications. Since then, many other industries have come in for similar treatment, with banking, securities, agriculture, and energy heading the list. This trend is often described as ""deregulation,"" but ""market design"" is a better term. Promoting competition is not just about removing legal controls and then getting out of the way. It also requires that policymakers consciously design new markets, often with significant rules and regulations to promote efficiency. In Creating Competitive Markets: The Politics and Economics of Regulatory Reform, leading experts from academia, government, and the private sector evaluate more than a dozen efforts at market design. The contributors to this volume analyze a broad range of sectors, including airlines, electricity, education, and pensions. They examine developments in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan, as well as the United States. In each case, the authors ask three critical questions: Can markets be designed? How significant are the impediments to competition found in different sectors? And how do the politics of market design shape the policies that result? Taken together, these chapters help explain why few recent cases of market design have proven to be as unambiguously successful or as relatively uncontroversial as the deregulation of trucking, airlines, and telecommunications. They also provide valuable lessons for future participants in the never-ending process of market construction and redesign. Rich in analysis and detail, Creating Competitive Markets is essential reading for anyone interested in regulatory politics and policy. Contributors include John Cioffi (University of California-Riverside), Darius Gaskins (Norbridge, Inc.), Jacob Hacker (Yale University), Udi Helman (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), Frederick Hess (American Enterprise Institute), Edward Iacobucci (University of Toronto), Alan Jacobs (University of British Columbia), Michael Levine (New York University), Jonathan Macey (Yale University), Richard O'Neill (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), Eric Patashnik (University of Virginia), Andrew Rich (City College of New York), Peter Schuck (Yale University), Steven Teles (Yale University), Michael Trebilcock (University of Toronto), Steven Vogel (University of California-Berkeley), Graham Wilson (University of Wisconsin), and Ralph A. Winter (University of British Columbia).

In an age when partisan politics has reached a deafening-and arguably impotent-pitch, how does the real work of politics get done? This book opens the door on backroom politics and gives readers an insider's perspective on the efforts of policymakers from three presidential administrations to get past the naysayers and effect real and lasting policy changes. The editors take a comparative approach, offering a thorough overview of policymaking during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, with further discussion of President Obama's successful and failed attempts to build coalitions and get past no. The contributors, a national network of prominent political scientists, reveal the sausage-making of politics and policy. Readers can almost see the political players in the proverbial smoke-filled room, shirtsleeves rolled up and BlackBerrys in hand, developing the strategies and hammering out the compromises designed to hold the party base while winning over independent voters.Combining an insider's perspective with actual case studies, the volume examines the policymaking behind such programs as: No Child Left Behind; tax cuts; Social Security privatization; Medicare prescription drug reform; education and immigration reform; environmental policy; judicial politics; and, national security. Covering all major areas of policymaking, "Building Coalitions, Making Policy" gives instructors in political science, public administration and policy, American government, and American presidential studies plenty of provocative examples for classroom debate.

"Transatlantic Policymaking in an Age of Austerity" integrates the study of politics and public policy across a broad spectrum of regulatory and social welfare policies in the United States and several nations of Western Europe. The editors and a sterling list of contributors look at policymaking in the 1990s through the present - providing a comparative politics framework - stressing both parallel development and the differences between and among the nations. Similar prevailing ideas and political factors can be identified and transatlantic comparisons made - providing for a clearer understanding of the policymaking process. Faith in regulated markets and the burden of rising welfare costs are concerns found on both sides of the Atlantic. Western democracies also share political climates colored by economic austerity; low trust in government, pressures from interest groups, and a sharply divided electorate. Because of differing political processes and differing policy starting points, a variety of disparate policy decisions have resulted.Real world policymaking in the areas of welfare, health, labor, immigration reform, disability rights, consumer and environmental regulation, administrative reforms, and corporate governance are compared. Ultimately, the last decade is best characterized as one of "drift", sluggish changes with little real innovation and much default to the private sector. In general, policymakers on both sides of the ocean, constrained by economic necessity, have been unable to produce policy outcomes that satisfy the key segments of the electorate. The contributors examine the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany, as well as a number of other European countries, and study the European Union itself as a policymaking institution. "Transatlantic Policymaking in an Age of Austerity" distills the prominent issues, politics, and roles played by governmental institutions into a new understanding of the dynamics of policymaking in and among transatlantic nations.

During the past decade, Democrats and Republicans each have received about fifty percent of the votes and controlled about half of the government, but this has not resulted in policy deadlock. Despite highly partisan political posturing, the policy regime has been largely moderate. Incremental, yet substantial, policy innovations such as welfare reform; deficit reduction; the North American Free Trade Agreement; and, the deregulation of telecommunications, banking, and agriculture have been accompanied by such continuities as Social Security and Medicare, the maintenance of earlier immigration reforms, and the persistence of many rights-based policies, including federal affirmative action. In "Seeking the Center", twenty-one contributors analyze policy outcomes in light of the frequent alternation in power among evenly divided parties. They show how the triumph of policy moderation and the defeat of more ambitious efforts, such as health care reform, can be explained by mutually supporting economic, intellectual, and political forces.Demonstrating that the determinants of public policy become clear by probing specific issues, rather than in abstract theorizing, they restore the politics of policymaking to the forefront of the political science agenda. A successor to Martin A. Levin and Marc K. Landy's influential "The New Politics of Public Policy" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), this book will be vital reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in political science and public policy, as well as a resource for scholars in both fields.