American Governance and Public Policy series – serie

Even before the wreckage of a disaster is cleared, one question is foremost in the minds of the public: "What can be done to prevent this from happening again?" Today, news media and policymakers often invoke the "lessons of September 11" and the "lessons of Hurricane Katrina." Certainly, these unexpected events heightened awareness about problems that might have contributed to or worsened the disasters, particularly about gaps in preparation. Inquiries and investigations are made that claim that "lessons" were "learned" from a disaster, leading us to assume that we will be more ready the next time a similar threat looms, and that our government will put in place measures to protect us. In "Lessons of Disaster", Thomas Birkland takes a critical look at this assumption. We know that disasters play a role in setting policy agendas - in getting policymakers to think about problems - but does our government always take the next step and enact new legislation or regulations? To determine when and how a catastrophic event serves as a catalyst for true policy change, the author examines four categories of disasters: aviation security, homeland security, earthquakes, and hurricanes.He explores lessons learned from each, focusing on three types of policy change: change in the larger social construction of the issues surrounding the disaster; instrumental change, in which laws and regulations are made; and political change, in which alliances are created and shifted. Birkland argues that the type of disaster affects the types of lessons learned from it, and that certain conditions are necessary to translate awareness into new policy, including media attention, salience for a large portion of the public, the existence of advocacy groups for the issue, and the preexistence of policy ideas that can be drawn upon. This timely study concludes with a discussion of the interplay of multiple disasters, focusing on the initial government response to Hurricane Katrina and the negative effect the September 11 catastrophe seems to have had on reaction to that tragedy.

Zahariadis offers a theory that explains policymaking when "ambiguity" is present - a state in which there are many ways, often irreconcilable, of thinking about an issue. Expanding and extending John Kingdon's influential "multiple streams" model that explains agenda setting, Zahariadis argues that manipulation, the bending of ideas, process, and beliefs to get what you want out of the policy process, is the key to understanding the dynamics of policymaking in conditions of ambiguity. He takes one of the major theories of public policy to the next step in three different ways: he extends it to a different form of government (parliamentary democracies, where Kingdon looked only at what he called the United States' presidential "organized anarchy" form of government); he examines the entire policy formation process, not just agenda setting; and he applies it to foreign as well as domestic policy. This book combines theory with cases to illuminate policymaking in a variety of modern democracies. The cases cover economic policymaking in Britain, France, and Germany, foreign policymaking in Greece, all compared to the U.S.(where the model was first developed), and an innovative computer simulation of the policy process.

A love for nature and the forest drew Tomas Koontz to develop a keen interest in the workings of public forest management and forest policy. Beyond policy, however, this book is also about the very human issues of federalism, decentralization of control over public lands, citizen participation, and how agency policies, both state and federal, are formulated and exercised. "Federalism in the Forest" is the first book to examine and compare public policy performance across both state and national levels, explaining why state agencies excel at economic outputs and profitability, the management of land with state income in mind - while national agencies are stronger in citizen participation and the inarguably important role of environmental protection. Instead of focusing on historical development of federal-state roles or on state officials as affected by national policies, Koontz shows how officials, when given authority, both make and implement policy at the state versus the national level. Although arguments fly about the decentralization of public lands - most often based on ideology - Koontz offers empirical evidence that demonstrates not only that devolution matters, but how.

Policymakers and public managers around the world have become preoccupied with the question of how their goals can be achieved in a way that rebuilds public confidence in government. Yet because public policies and programs increasingly are being administered through a complicated web of jurisdictions, agencies, and public-private partnerships, evaluating their effectiveness is more difficult than in the past. Though social scientists possess insightful theories and powerful methods for conducting empirical research on governance and public management, their work is too often fragmented and irrelevant to the specific tasks faced by legislators, administrators, and managers. Proposing a framework for research based on the premise that any particular governance arrangement is embedded in a wider social, fiscal, and political context, Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., Carolyn J. Heinrich, and Carolyn J. Hill argue that theory-based empirical research, when well conceived and executed, can be a primary source of fundamental, durable knowledge about governance and policy management.Focusing on complex human services such as public assistance, child protection, and public education, they construct an integrative, multilevel "logic of governance," that can help researchers increase the sophistication, power, and relevance of their work.

The politics of building dams and levees and other structures are just part of the policies determining how American rivers are managed or mismanaged. America's well-being depends upon the health of those rivers and important decisions go beyond just dam-building or dam removal. American rivers are suffering from poor water quality, altered flows, and diminished natural habitat. Current efforts by policymakers to change the ways American rivers are managed range from the removal of dams to the simulation of seasonal flows to the restoration of habitat, all with varying degrees of success. Efforts to restore American rivers are clearly delineated by William Lowry in "Dam Politics" as he looks at how public policy and rivers interact, examines the physical differences in rivers that affect policies, and analyzes the political differences among the groups that use them. He argues that we are indeed moving into an era of restoration (defined in part as removing dams but also as restoring the water quality, seasonal flows, and natural habitat that existed before structural changes to the rivers), and seeks to understand the political circumstances that affect the degree of restoration.Lowry presents case studies of eight river restoration efforts, including dam removals on the Neuse and Kennebec rivers, simulation of seasonal flows on the Colorado river, and the failed attempt to restore salmon runs on the Snake river. He develops a typology of four different kinds of possible change - dependent on the parties involved and the physical complexity of the river - and then examines the cases using natural historical material along with dozens of interviews with key policymakers. Policy approaches such as conjunctive water management, adaptive management, alternative licensing processes, and water marketing are presented as possible ways of using our rivers more wisely. "Dam Politics" provides a useful and systematic account of how American waterways are managed and how current policies are changing. American rivers are literally the lifeblood of our nation. Lowry has written a lively and accessible book that makes it clear as a mountain stream that it matters deeply how those rivers are managed.

This volume analyzes the politics of hazardous waste siting and explores promising new strategies for siting facilities. Existing approaches to waste siting facilities have almost entirely failed, across all industrialized countries, largely because of community or NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) opposition. This volume examines a new strategy, voluntary choice siting - a process requiring mutual decisions negotiated between facility developers and the host communities. This bottom-up approach preserves democratic rights, recognizes the importance of public perceptions, and addresses issues of equity. In this collection, an interdisciplinary group of experts probes recent examples of waste facilities siting in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Japan. Both the successes and the failures presented offer practical insights into the siting process. The book includes an introductory review of the literature on facility siting and the NIMBY phenomenon as well as instructive essays on the use of voluntary processes in facilities siting.This book will be of value to policymakers, industry, and environmental groups, as well as to those working in environmental studies and engineering, political science, public health, geography, planning, and business economics.

Economic reasoning has thus far dominated the field of public policy analysis. This new introduction to the field posits that policy analysis should have both a broader interdisciplinary base - including criteria from such fields as political science, sociology, law, and philosophy, as well as economics - and also a broader audience in order to foster democratic debate. To achieve these goals, MacRae and Whittington have organized their textbook around the construction of decision matrices using multiple criteria, exploring the uses of the decision matrix formulation more fully than other texts. They describe how to set up the matrix, fill in cells and combine criteria, and use it as an aid for decision making. They show how ethical assessment of the affects that alternatives have on various parties differs from political analysis, and then they extend the use of the decision matrix to consider alternatives by affected parties, periods of time, or combined factors. The authors also thoughtfully address the role of expert advice in the policy process, widening the scope of the field to describe a complex system for the creation and use of knowledge in a democracy.An extended case study of HIV/AIDS policy follows each chapter (in installments), immediately illustrating the application of the material. The book also contains a glossary. "Expert Advice for Policy Choice" provides a new basis for graduate education in public policy analysis and can also serve as a text in planning, evaluation research, or public administration. In addition, it will be of interest to students and professionals wishing to aid policy choice who work in such fields as sociology, political science, psychology, public health, and social work.

Environmental groups for the first time formalized their role in shaping U.S. and international trade policy during their involvement in NAFTA negotiations. John J. Audley identifies the political forces responsible for forging this new intersection of trade and environment policy during NAFTA negotiations, analyzes the achievements of the environmentalists, and explores their prospects for influencing future trade policy. The need to reconcile the conflicting paradigms of economic expansion through free trade and that of limited sustainable development played a significant part in the political debate. Reluctant to acknowledge any relationship between these two principles, traditional trade policy actors were forced to include environmental interest groups in negotiations when the latter seriously threatened the treaty by aligning themselves with other anti-NAFTA interest groups, particularly labor. Other environmental groups worked with trade advocates to secure compromises in the agreement. The final bill included unprecedented environmental provisions, but not without serious infighting within the environmentalist community.Drawing on his access to private as well as public documents exchanged among participants, Audley explores the interactions among the political actors. He explains how political compromises between environmental groups and trade policy elites came about, focusing in particular on the roles played by eleven national environmental organizations. In identifying their accomplishments, he concludes that although the environmentalists won some procedural changes, they failed to modify the norm of unfettered growth as the guiding principle of U.S. trade policy. The first book to probe the role that environmental politics play in trade policy, this volume offers new insights into the political effectiveness of environmental organizations.

Disasters like earthquakes are known as focusing events - sudden calamities that cause both citizens and policymakers to pay more attention to a public problem and often to press for solutions. This book, the first comprehensive analysis of these dramatic events, explains how and why some public disasters change political agendas and, ultimately, public policies. Thomas A. Birkland explores important successes and failures in the policy process by analyzing the political outcomes of four types of events: earthquakes, hurricanes, oil spills, and nuclear accidents. Using this empirical data to go beyond an intuitive understanding of focusing events, he presents a theory of where and when these events will gain attention and how they trigger political reactions. Birkland concludes that different types of disasters result in different kinds of agenda politics. Public outrage over the highly visible damage caused by the Exxon Valdez oil spill, for example, ended a fourteen-year logjam holding back Congressional legislation to regulate oil spill cleanups.On the other hand, the intangible effects of Three Mile Island had less concrete results in a political arena that was already highly polarized. Integrating a variety of theories on the policy process, including agenda setting, policy communities, advocacy coalitions, the political aspects of the news media, and the use of symbols in political debate, Birkland illuminates the dynamics of event-driven policy activity. As the first extensive study of its kind, this book offers new insights into the policy process.

States are increasingly important players in the current efforts to reform U.S. health care, as the federal government withdraws from this responsibility. Robert B. Hackey analyzes the varied routes states have taken in reformulating health care policy and provides a road map of what specific strategies work and why. In this comparative case study, Hackey focuses on four states - Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Rhode Island - that have had markedly different experiences with regulating health care over the past two decades. Hackey's detailed comparisons show how the states' policies changed over time, moving from regulatory to market-oriented solutions, and examines which policy programs appear best poised to meet the future. Hackey uses regime theory to explain how the states' policy choices concerning cost control and entry regulation were shaped by the prevailing political culture and institution of each state. He concludes that the autonomy of state government form special interests is vital to the successful adoption, implementation and outcome of state initiatives."Rethinking Health Care Policy" offers policymakers, planners and specialists useful insights into the politics of state regulation and into future directions for health care reform.

Despite America's pluralistic, fragmented, and generally adversarial political culture, participants in pollution control politics have begun to collaborate to reduce the high costs of developing, implementing, and enforcing regulations. Edward P. Weber uses examples from this traditionally combative policy arena to propose a new model for regulation, "pluralism by the rules," a structured collaborative format that can achieve more effective results at lower costs than typically come from antagonistic approaches. Weber cites the complexity and high implementation costs of environmental policy as strong but insufficient incentives for collaboration. He shows that cooperation becomes possible when opposing sides agree to follow specific rules that include formal binding agreements about enforcement, commitment to the process by political and bureaucratic leaders, and the ensured access and accountability of all parties involved. Such rules establish trust, create assurances that agreements will be enforced, and reduce the perceived risks of collaboration.Through case studies dealing with acid rain, reformulated gasoline, and oil refinery pollution control, Weber demonstrates the potential of collaboration for realizing a cleaner environment, lower compliance costs, and more effective enforcement. Challenging the prevailing view that endless conflict in policymaking is inevitable, "Pluralism by the Rules" establishes a theoretical framework for restructuring the regulatory process.

Once hailed as a revolutionary change in U.S. federal aid policy that would return power to state and local governments, "General Revenue Sharing" was politically dead a decade later. Bruce A. Wallin now offers the only complete history of the General Revenue Sharing program - why it passed, why state and local governments used it the way they did, and why it died. He examines its unique role in the history of U.S. federalism and explores its relevance to intergovernmental aid policy at the turn of a new century. This book is crucial to understanding the changed environment of U.S. intergovernmental relations in the 1990's and makes a strong case for reconsidering a program of federal unrestricted aid.

Comparing national efforts to preserve public lands, William R. Lowry investigates how effectively and under what conditions governments can provide goods for future generations. Providing intergenerational goods, ranging from balanced budgets to space programs and natural environments, is particularly challenging because most political incentives reward short-term behavior. Lowry examines the effect of institutional structure on the public delivery of these goods. He offers a theoretical framework accounting for both the necessary conditions - public demand, political stability, and official commitment to long-term delivery - and constraining factors - the tensions between public agencies and politicians as well as between different levels of government - that determine the ability of a nation to achieve long-term goals. In support of this argument, Lowry evaluates data on park systems from more than one hundred countries and provides in-depth case studies of four - he United States, Australia, Canada, and Costa Rica - to show how and why the delivery of intergenerational goods can vary.For each of the cases, he reviews background information, discusses constraints on agency behavior, and assesses expansion of the park systems and restoration of natural conditions at specific locations. This extensive comparative analysis of the preservation of public lands offers new insights into the capability of nations to pursue long-term goals.

This book is the first comprehensive analysis of the politics behind the use of mandates requiring state and local governments to implement federal policy. Over the last twenty-five years, during both liberal and conservative eras, federal mandates have emerged as a resilient tool for advancing the interests of both political parties. Revealing the politics that led to the policies, Paul L. Posner explores the origins of these congressional mandates, what interests and needs they satisfy, whether mandate reform initiatives can be expected to alter their use, and their implications for federalism. This book reveals how mandates have changed the way policy is formed in the United States and the fundamental relationship between the federal government and the state and local governments.

This book is the first comprehensive analysis of the politics behind the use of mandates requiring state and local governments to implement federal policy. Over the last twenty-five years, during both liberal and conservative eras, federal mandates have emerged as a resilient tool for advancing the interests of both political parties. Revealing the politics that led to the policies, Paul L. Posner explores the origins of these congressional mandates, what interests and needs they satisfy, whether mandate reform initiatives can be expected to alter their use, and their implications for federalism. This book reveals how mandates have changed the way policy is formed in the United States and the fundamental relationship between the federal government and the state and local governments.

Today organized interests fight most of their major battles within coalitions. Whether joining forces to address tobacco legislation or proposed air safety regulations, Washington lobbyists with seemingly little in common are combining their clout to get results. Kevin Hula here examines why coalition strategies have emerged as a dominant lobbying technique, when lobbyists use them, and how these strategies affect their activities. His is the first book to focus on the formation and use of coalitions by lobbyists, examining the broader scope of interest group coalitions and explaining their roles as institutions of collective leadership, bargaining, and strategy for member organizations. Combining collective action theory with data gleaned from 130 interviews with lobbyists and interest group leaders in the fields of transportation, education, and civil rights, Hula explores how the use of coalitions differs at various stages of the policy process and with different activities. In the course of his study, he also shows how the communications revolution is changing interest group tactics.The single most detailed work available on this subject, "Lobbying Together" offers scholars and students alike a fresh and accessible look at this increasingly important factor in the policy process.

American state and Canadian provincial governments have dealt with rapidly rising auto insurance rates in different ways over the last two decades, a difference many attribute to variances in political pressure exerted by interest groups such as trial attorneys and insurance companies. Edward L. Lascher, Jr., argues that we must consider two additional factors: the importance of politicians' beliefs about the potential success of various solutions and the role of governmental institutions. Using case studies from both sides of the border, Lascher shows how different explanations of the problem and different political structures affect insurance reform. In his conclusion, Lascher moves beyond auto insurance to draw implications for regulation and policymaking in other areas.

Disputes over hazardous waste sites usually are resolved by giving greater weight to expert opinion over public "not-in-my-back-yard" reactions. Challenging the assumption that policy experts are better able to discern the general welfare, Gregory E. McAvoy here proposes that citizen opinion and democratic dissent occupy a vital, constructive place in environmental policymaking. McAvoy explores the issues of citizen rationality, the tension between democracy and technocracy, and the link between public opinion and policy in the case of an unsuccessful attempt to site a hazardous waste facility in Minnesota. He shows how the site was defeated by citizens who had reasonable doubts over the need for the facility. Offering a comprehensive look at the policymaking process, McAvoy examines the motivations of public officials, the resources they have for shaping opinion, the influence of interest groups, and the evolution of waste reduction programs in Minnesota and other states. Integrating archival material, interviews, and quantitative survey data, he argues that NIMBY movements can bring miscalculations to light and provide an essential check on policy experts' often partisan views.This book will be of value to those who work or study in the fields of hazardous waste policy, facility siting, environmental policy, public policy, public administration, and political science.

In recent decades, local governments across America have increasingly turned specialized functions over to autonomous agencies ranging in scope from subdivision-sized water districts to multi-state transit authorities. This book is the first comprehensive examination of the causes and consequences of special-purpose governments in more than 300 metropolitan areas in the United States. It presents new evidence on the economic, political, and social implications of relying on these special districts while offering important findings about their use and significance.

Rapid and controversial, the spread of school choice initiatives across the United States has radically changed political debate about public education. In this book, Michael Mintrom explores the complex world of open-enrollment policies, charter schools and voucher plans to reveal how and why school choice has become a major issue, and he draws important conclusions about how innovative individuals can spur significant change in the policy arena. Policy entrepreneurs - individuals who take up a cause and make it part of the political agenda - have largely remained background figures without clear definition in the policymaking literature. This book is the first comprehensive and systematic treatment of the concept of policy entrepreneurship, providing an important foundation for explaining how policy proposals are initiated, considered, and adopted. Mintrom uses the emergence of school choice in state politics to examine how policy change originates.He shows how policy entrepreneurs have been instrumental in placing school choice onto state legislative agendas, despite the lack of compelling evidence about its merits, and how they use social networks, reframe policy issues, and attempt to shift the sites of policy debate. Blending innovative theory with both qualitative and quantitative investigation, Mintrom explains how energetic individuals made school choice a real choice. In doing so, he changes our broader understanding of how policy is formed.

Americans have witnessed inconsistent and seemingly dramatic turnabouts in legislators' attitudes toward trade, with strong bipartisan support for free trade and the Uruguay Round in one instant and heated debate over participation in the World Trade Organization the next. Martha L. Gibson systematically traces the competing forces that interject conflict into an overall consensus on the value of a liberalized trade policy. Cutting through the tangled web of congressional politics, Gibson shows why it is impossible to understand trade legislation without first understanding how electoral politics and the institutional rules of Congress distort legislators' interests, incentives, and policy goals. Gibson's book clearly shows that trade legislation is not made in a vacuum, but it is just one in a series of simultaneous games with competing goals in which legislators engage to satisfy the conflicting demands of constituents.

Most decision making in environmental policy today is based on the economic cost-benefit argument. Criticizing the shortcomings of the market paradigm, John Martin Gillroy proposes an alternative way to conceptualize and create environmental policy, one that allows for the protection of moral and ecological values in the face of economic demands. Drawing on Kantian definitions of who we are as citizens, how we act collectively, and what the proper role of the state is, Gillroy develops a philosophical justification for incorporating non-market values into public decision making. His new paradigm for justice toward nature integrates the intrinsic value of humanity and nature into the law. To test the feasibility of this new approach, Gillroy applies it to six cases: wilderness preservation, national wildlife refuges, not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) siting dilemmas, comparative risk analysis, the Food and Drug Administration's risk regulation, and the National Environmental Policy Act. He also encourages others to adapt his framework to create alternative policy models from existing philosophies.This book offers new insights, models, and methods for policymakers and analysts and for scholars in philosophy, political theory, law, and environmental studies.

As budgetary concerns have come to dominate Congressional action, the design and implementation of welfare programs have come under greater scrutiny. This book focuses on the food stamp program to examine how the growing integration of welfare and budgeting has affected both politics and people. Applying insightful analysis to this important policy topic, Ronald F. King looks at the effects on welfare transfers of the kinds of budgetary rules adopted by Congress: discretion, entitlement, and expenditure caps. King uses models based on these forms to interpret the events in the history of the food stamp program up to the welfare reform of 1996, and he shows how these different budget rules have affected political strategies among key actors and policy outcomes. King analyzes tensions in the program between budgetary concerns and entitlement, revealing that budget mechanisms which seek to cap the growth of entitlement spending have perverse but predictable effects. He also explores the broader conflict between procedural and substantive justice, which pits inclusive democratic decision-making against special protections for the needy and vulnerable in society.The food stamp program offers a valuable opportunity for studying the influence of shifting institutional factors. In an era when budgetary anxieties coexist with continuing poverty, King's book sheds new light on the increasing fiscalization of welfare in America.

This book explores how policy ideas are spread - or diffused - in an age in which policymaking has become increasingly complex and specialized. Using the concept of enterprise zones as a case study in policy diffusion, Karen Mossberger compares the process of their adoption in Virginia, Indiana, Michigan, New York, and Massachusetts over a twelve-year period. Enterprise zones were first proposed by the Reagan administration as a supply-side effort to reenergize inner cities, and they were eventually embraced by liberals and conservatives alike. They are a compelling example of a policy idea that spread and evolved rapidly. Mossberger describes the information networks and decision-making processes in the five states, assessing whether enterprise zones spread opportunistically, as a mere fad, or whether well-informed deliberation preceded their adoption.

As elected lawmakers confront complex social problems, they inevitably make choices to single out certain populations for government-sanctioned benefits or burdens. Why some groups and not others are targeted is the central question explored in this analysis of the congressional response to two related public health crises. Weaving case studies from the wars against AIDS and drugs with an empirical analysis of fifteen years of congressional action on these issues, Mark Donovan shows how members of Congress balance problem solving with re-election concerns, paying particular attention to their need to craft compelling rationales for their actions. His analysis shows that, counterintuitive as it may seem, most target populations with negative public images are selected to receive benefits rather than burdens. Demonstrating that it is possible to analyze simultaneously both policy rhetoric and policy outputs, this book shows how problem frames and policy decisions evolve through the dynamic interplay of conflict participants.

Since the 1980s a distinctive suburban politics has emerged in the United States, Juliet F. Gainsborough argues in "Fenced Off". As suburbs have become less economically and socially dependent on the central cities, suburban and urban dwellers have diverged not only in their voting patterns but also in their thinking about national politics. While political reporters have long noted this difference, few quantitative studies have been conducted on suburbanization alone - above and beyond race or class - as a political trend. Using census and public opinion statistics, along with data on congressional districts and party platforms, Gainsborough demonstrates that this "ideology of localism" weakens when suburbs experience city-like problems and strengthens when racial and economic differences with the nearby city increase. In addition, Gainsborough uses national survey data from the 1950s to the 1990s to show that a separate suburban politics has arisen only during the last two decades.Further, she argues, the political differences between urban and suburban voters have found expression in changes in congressional representation and new electoral strategies for the major political parties. As Congressional districts become increasingly suburban, "soccer moms" and liveability agendas come to dominate party platforms, and the needs of the urban poor disappear from political debate. "Fenced Off" uses the tools of political science to prove what political commentators have sensed - that the suburbs offer a powerful voting bloc that is being courted with sophisticated new strategies.

Policymakers and public managers around the world have become preoccupied with the question of how their goals can be achieved in a way that rebuilds public confidence in government. Yet because public policies and programs increasingly are being administered through a complicated web of jurisdictions, agencies, and public-private partnerships, evaluating their effectiveness is more difficult than in the past. Though social scientists possess insightful theories and powerful methods for conducting empirical research on governance and public management, their work is too often fragmented and irrelevant to the specific tasks faced by legislators, administrators, and managers.Proposing a framework for research based on the premise that any particular governance arrangement is embedded in a wider social, fiscal, and political context, Laurence E. Lynn Jr., Carolyn J. Heinrich, and Carolyn J. Hill argue that theory-based empirical research, when well conceived and executed, can be a primary source of fundamental, durable knowledge about governance and policy management. Focusing on complex human services such as public assistance, child protection, and public education, they construct an integrative, multilevel "logic of governance," that can help researchers increase the sophistication, power, and relevance of their work.

Now that responsibility for welfare policy has devolved from Washington to the states, Pamela Winston examines how the welfare policymaking process has changed. Under the welfare reform act of 1996, welfare was the first and most basic safety net program to be sent back to state control. Will the shift help or further diminish programs for low-income people, especially the millions of children who comprise the majority of the poor in the United States? In this book, Winston probes the nature of state welfare politics under devolution and contrasts it with welfare politics on the national level. Starting with James Madison's argument that the range of perspectives and interests found in state policymaking will be considerably narrower than in Washington, she analyzes the influence of interest groups and other key actors in the legislative process at both the state and national levels. She compares the legislative process during the 104th Congress (1995-96) with that in three states - Maryland, Texas, and North Dakota-and finds that the debates in the states saw a more limited range of participants, with fewer of them representing poor people, and fewer competing ideas.The welfare reform bill of 1996 comes up for renewal in 2002. At stake in the U.S. experiment in welfare reform are principles of equal opportunity, fairness, and self-determination as well as long-term concerns for political and social stability. This investigation of the implications of the changing pattern of welfare politics will interest scholars and teachers of social policy, federalism, state politics, and public policy generally, and general readers interested in social policy, state politics, social justice, and American politics.

Democratic government is about making choices. Sometimes those choices involve the distribution of benefits. At other times they involve the imposition of some type of loss—a program cut, increased taxes, or new regulatory standards. Citizens will resist such impositions if they can, or will try to punish governments at election time. The dynamics of loss imposition are therefore a universal—if unpleasant—element of democratic governance. The Government Taketh Away examines the repercussions of unpopular government decisions in Canada and the United States, the two great democratic nations of North America.Pal, Weaver, and their contributors compare the capacities of the U.S. presidential system and the Canadian Westminster system to impose different types of losses: symbolic losses (gun control and abortion), geographically concentrated losses (military base closings and nuclear waste disposal), geographically dispersed losses (cuts to pensions and to health care), and losses imposed on business (telecommunications deregulation and tobacco control). Theory holds that Westminster-style systems should, all things being equal, have a comparative advantage in loss imposition because they concentrate power and authority, though this can make it easier to pin blame on politicians too. The empirical findings of the cases in this book paint a more complex picture. Westminster systems do appear to have some robust abilities to impose losses, and US institutions provide more opportunities for loss-avoiders to resist government policy in some sectors. But in most sectors, outcomes in the two countries are strikingly similar.The Government Taketh Away is essential for the scholar and students of public policy or comparative policy. It is also an important book for the average citizen who wants to know more about the complexities of living in a democratic society where the government can give-but how it can also, sometimes painfully, "taketh away."