Decision Making vs. Policy Making: Toward an Antidote for Technocracy

Decision Making vs. Policy Making: Toward an Antidote for TechnocracyThe Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups by Mancur Olson,; ThePolicy-Making Process by Charles E. Lindbloom; Public Policymaking Reexamined by YehezkelDror; The Study of Policy Formation by Raymond A. Bauer; Kenneth J. GergenReview by: Theodore LowiPublic Administration Review, Vol. 30, No. 3 (May - Jun., 1970), pp. 314-325Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Society for Public AdministrationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/974053 .

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314 PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW

The authors of Agenda for the Nation have made a significant contribution toward this much needed process of examination and dis- cussion. They, and the many other individuals and organizations who are assisting in

the contemporary search for improved governmental machinery and for a clarification of goals and priorities, must be considered to be an indispensable part of our governmental process.

DECISION MAKING VS.

POLICY MAKING:

TOWARD AN ANTIDOTE

FOR TECHNOCRACY

THEODORE Lowi University of Chicago

THE LOGIC OF COLLECTIVE ACTION: PUBLIC GOODS AND THE THEORY OF GROUPS, Man- cur Olson, Jr. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Pp. 176, $1.95 paper.

THE POLICY-MAKING PROCESS, Charles E. Lindbloom. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Pren- tice-Hall Inc., 1968. Pp. 122, $4.95 cloth, $1.95 paper.

PUBLIC POLICYMAKING REEXAMINED, Yehez- kel Dror. San Francisco: Chandler Publish- ing Co., 1968. Pp. 370.

THE STUDY OF POLICY FORMATION, Raymond A. Bauer and Kenneth J. Gergen (eds.). New York: The Free Press, 1968. Pp. 392, $9.95 cloth.

THE NUMBER OF NEW BOOKS, articles, and anthologies on public policy and policy making suggests a growing awareness among social scientists that some important variables were neglected during the behavioral revolution of the 1950's and '60's.1 Behavioral social science is primarily a focus on the socially microscopic phenomena of interpersonal relations, small

groups, and opinions; the larger phenomena have been taken as aggregates of the microscopic or as environmental factors that interact with the microscopic. What was neglected, al- beit not entirely abandoned, were those more macroscopic things within which individual behavior takes place.2 This includes rules and norms, institutions and other social structures that any individual or interpersonal behavior must presuppose. This context is the public and formal, which is distinct from, yet the correlative to, the private and informal or behavioral.

Coercion

The most important dynamic concept tying together all of the structural variables is coercion. Inevitably there is an element of coercion in collective life. Organization is a means of stabilizing relations among members of a collectivity so that, despite efforts of some to displace costs on the collective, a rough sharing of the costs of collective benefits can be made. Institutions are means of moralizing coercion. Administration is a means of routinizing coercion. Government is a means of legitimizing it. Power is simply the relative share a person or group appears to have in shaping and directing the instruments of coercion. Coercion is perhaps to the macrosocial level what power is to the microscopic or behavioral. Traditionally, this was the level thought to be political society. As David Hume put it in 1740:

Two neighbors may agree to drain a meadow, which they possess in common: because it is easy for them to know each other's mind; and each must perceive, that the immediate consequence of his fail- ing in his part, is the abandoning of the whole proj- ect. But it is very difficult, and indeed impossible,

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that a thousand persons should agree in any such action; it being difficult for them to concert so com- plicated a design, and still more difficult for them to execute it; while each seeks a pretext to free himself of the trouble and expense, and would lay the whole burden on others. Political society easily rem- edies both these inconveniences. . ..3

Policy making, one would have thought, is a way of reintroducing the structural elements; it looks as though it implies the older notions, merely in a new language more compatible with the contemporary requirements of science. After all, policy is deliberate coercion-state- ments attempting to set forth the purpose, the means, the subjects, and the objects of coercion. It implies the coming together again of policy and administration, just as it implies a recombination of government with politics. But further scrutiny reveals that the change in vo- cabulary has not been that significant. Only economics seems to have maintained any balance of macro and micro levels of analysis.

This is ironic in a way, because modern liberal social science, especially political science, has followed so closely in the philosophic foot- steps of economics. Beginning with the scientific administration movement and culminating with scientific pluralism in the 1.940's and '50's, the study of political phenomena required a stateless polity, first as did classical economics. For Woodrow Wilson this took the form of proposing adoption of Prussian principles of administration dissociated from the Prussian State. Since that time, whether one refers to Gulick or Simon, to Appleby or other politics- of-administration exponents, one tends to be dealing with analysis that takes the state and political order for granted in order to deal with politics and/or administration as a nat- ural phenomenon, subject to regularities as in nature. More recently, but prominent since the 1930's, political scientists and political sociol- ogists followed even more closely the structure of 19th century economics. Even if the con- scious purpose were different from the human engineering of the Gulics or of the scientific management people from Taylor to Simon, the behaviorists no less held themselves pretty strictly to those relatively automatic things that seem most susceptible to generalizations and least susceptible to individual variability.

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In the mid-20th century polity, the conceptual equivalent to the 19th century concept of nature's own market system is "the pluralist political process." 4

But now economics possesses a near monopoly on the scientific study of such macro phenomena as state and coercion because it never completely assumed them away as merely a part of the ceteris that are paribus. While political science got its science by taking on a stateless polity, economics, even the purest laissez-faire economics, never took on a stateless economy. One of the great strengths of the classical economics was that it systematically defined the limits of its own applicability. Within the confines of its applicability, classical economics was and remains an almost im- peccable theory-perhaps the closest thing to pure theory at the societal level in all the social sciences. This clarity of theoretical boundaries also helped clarify the character of the things with which the theory would not deal. These were coercive things, things that impinged upon personal choice and interfered with the inter- play of personal choices. There are many forms and sources of coercion, beginning with the attempt by one individual physically to force his will upon another. But the most effective, as well as the most systematic, sources of coercion were deemed to be the state and its apparatus. For example monopoly is one of the most important elements outside the classical universe, for its existence interferes with the working of the market in almost every re- spect, both in theory and in practice. But to the classical economist, monopoly is a political force, inconceivable without the state and the exercise of state power to prevent the rise of substitutable goods or services at submo- nopoly prices. Thus, whether correct or sup- portable in political ideology and program, the 19th century economists had a basis for a systematic theory of the state, a political theory, even if it remained unarticulated. It was part and parcel of their identification of their own universe.

Post-classical economists have not abandoned this tradition. There were no flaws of logic or shortness of deductive power in the classical economics. It was a pure and simple case of being deliberately too narrow in defin-




ing the economy. In order to accommodate to new economic developments as well as to new ideologies that viewed the state favorably, modern economists simply included many variables that classical economists recognized but rejected.

Two consequences flow directly from this: First, modern economics remains richly nor- mative and yet infinitely more systematic, theoretical, and scientifically respectable than political science or any of its subfields. This suc- cessful maintenance of something of a fusion of facts and values seems to have been possible largely because the economists never seem to have lost sight of the essential character of state government, policy, and all other instruments and techniques of control. This grasp of all the variables seems to me to be far more important than the availability of firm numbers in the development of an economic science. If the intellectual components are weak, no amassing of firm numbers will improve it, but if the intellectual components are strong, as in economics, a little data can go a long way. At the moment, therefore, almost any economist is a better political theorist than almost any political scientist, because the economist can han- dle quite systematically for his own purposes the significance of the state even when he does not do a good analysis of the particular processes by which power is shaped and shared. A contemporary political scientist, in contrast, understands a few of these processes but has given all too little attention to grasping systematically and theoretically why these processes are worth studying in the first place.

Second, and closer to the ensuing analysis, the intellectual product in a stateless polity, even at its scientific best, is rendered essentially technocratic. To assume the existence of a given political order-or to assume that bargaining, administrative incrementalism, and other behavioral variables are the political order-is to be either rigorous and irrelevant or relevant and supportive in a tinkering sort of way.

These tendencies are underscored, if not necessarily confirmed, by the following fact: among the four major efforts under review here, only that of an economist, Mancur Ol- son, confronts the very special collective fac-

tors beyond the behavioral level. Olson dem- onstrates beyond any reasonable doubt that voluntary association, de Tocqueville notwith- standing, has not solved the problem of coercion. Olson's case is so clear that one feels justified in using a more antequated language and summarizing his case by saying that coercion is built into the nature of collective life. That indeed is the logic of collective action. Just as Hume suggested long ago, relations between individuals in face-to-face situations are qualitatively not the same as relations between people in larger collectivities.

Face-to-Face Relationships

What this means, at a minimum, is that microscopic study of behavior cannot be sus- tained in all situations, and that generalizations developed under truly individual, interpersonal, or small group conditions are going to be simply ludicrous when those conditions do not apply. This is bound to include face-to-face relationships in the context of larger collectivities, and this condition is the essential situation for so much of that part of behavior worthy of the term political. In an administrative agency, for example, a large part of the day for any one administrator is spent interacting with one or two persons at a time on a face-to-face basis. Most organization men probably feel somewhat out of place if they must deal with large numbers of people simulta- neously as politicians do. However, the face- to-face relations of that administrator are in no way comparable to the face-to-face relations of that same person in some role other than his organizational role.

It is far fetched to ask an economist to fulfill standards that neither professional political theorists nor organization theorists can fulfill, but I will do so only to emphasize our weaknesses rather than Olson's. The book falls short of being a comprehensive political (and organization) theory for two reasons. First, he applied most of his attention to the voluntary associations to the neglect of state and government as such (except insofar as they are dragged into the group process). His analysis of groups performed a real and essential service, but others, even if perhaps

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less systematically, have made similar contributions in recent years. A particularly good example is Grant McConnell's Private Power and American Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1966).

The second shortcoming of Olson's volume, taken again as a work of political theory, lies in his lack of effort to characterize and sys- tematize coercion once he has established it as the organizing concept in collective action. True to his last as an economist, he has provided a basis for beginning such a classification by focusing upon distinctions among types of goods which collectivities can provide. To students of the political, the most meaningful effort in the book is his pursuit of the distinction between collective and noncollective goods and the proposition that the process of providing only the former necessarily entails any "loss of freedom" (pp. 95-97). But first, as we shall see momentarily, this is not an exhaustive classification. And second, it is a distinction that may only be meaningful in and among nongovernmental groups. He proposes explicitly that a government "can provide noncollective goods without restricting economic freedom" (p. 96). But that tends unfairly to reduce the distinction to mere rein- forcement of the prevailing liberal ideology concerning the possibility of a benevolent and noncoercive state. Blurring the distinction between public and private may seriously weaken the critical and analytic value of his distinctions. Where the state is concerned one can make the coercive factor more or less remote, but one cannot remove it altogether. To try to do so by definition is only to weaken the definition and to bring state and government closer to the condition in which it has already been put by the present behavior schools. Government goods are simply not economic goods even when the goods in question are physically identical to goods that could be or are provided by nongovernments.

We should, however, pursue these problems through the other three efforts. Olson's little volume has contributed enough even if it merely establishes the terms of discourse which we are able to utilize here. Greater expectations should be applied to efforts of a more intensive and detailed sort, and yet they

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seem to fall far shorter than Olson's in developing the necessary analyses.

Contemporary students of the policy-making process tend to share one or more weaknesses that explain why they fall short of making any new contributions to policy or to the institutions that make policy. They tend to blur the distinction between collective vs. face-to-face relationships and collective vs. noncollective goods. Or, they tend to blur the distinction, or deny it, between public and private policies. Or, they tend to treat policy as though it were synonymous with decision, thus blurring the distinction between the macro and the micro level of reality. Or all of these.

Definition of Policy

It is difficult to find explicit and systematic definitions of policy, but it would not be wild interpolation to say that according to Professors Lindblom, Bauer, and associates, and Dror, policy is simply any output of any decision maker, whether it be an individual or a collectivity, a small collectivity or a large one, a government or a nongovernment. Moreover, they tend to operate, as do most students of policy making, as though the substantive character or level of that output is of no consequence to the process by which the output becomes an output. A policy dealing with false labeling or going to the moon is indistinguishable from the policy in the classic Chinese joke, "I regret to inform you, sir, that the inviolable policy of this establishment is, 'no tickee, no laundlee... .' "

To Lindblom a policy is an outcome of any process, whether that process be political com- promise among policy makers, something that springs from new opportunities rather than defined problems, or something that may simply happen but was not something really decided upon at all (p. 4). Professor Bauer introduces his multiauthored volume with a more relevant definition-policy is a "course- setting involving decisions of the widest ram- ifications and longest time perspective in the life of an organization" (p. 2). However, a decision by a business to diversify and a decision by a general hospital to build a psychi-




atric wing are both policies completely indistinguishable from a government decision to pursue an anti-Communist policy in Vietnam (p. 1). Moreover, as we shall see, for most of the authors in the Bauer volume, policy becomes indistinguishable from decision as they proceed simply to apply decision-making theories to policy-making problems.5 To Dror, policy is the "direct output of public policy making" (p. 35). Dror's focus is almost totally on public decision, but for him any contin- uous "output" is a policy, so much so that "nominal policies" might as well be disregarded (pp. 34ff)A6

The first important consequence of this permissive, all-inclusive, nondefinitional approach to policy is that we are provided with nothing distinctive in the phenomena studied. Whenever there is quality in these volumes- and indeed there is considerable technical quality in them-it is simply a restatement of some other discipline in a new language or a slightly different context. Lindblom's work becomes simply a brief treatment of Ameri- can government in a slightly altered, policy- making language. But as an American government book, it is woefully inadequate while at the same time it provides almost nothing of the elementary understanding of policies which political science students so badly need and which Professor Lindblom could so easily have provided.

The volume by Professor Bauer and associates is, as already suggested, a mere restatement of a few principles of social psychology with a bit of utility theory thrown in. This means that, despite Professor Bauer's own ad- monitions, we know no more about decision making, since these were basically restate- ments of decision-making notions already well established, and on the other hand, we know almost nothing new about policy and policy formation (as opposed to decision making), because so little effort was expended on that problem as such.7

Dror combines certain of the characteristics of both the other volumes. He is not as systematic in his approach to decision making as certain of the authors in the Bauer volume, but he is more governmental and therefore somewhat more concerned with policy as op-

posed to decision. On the other hand, he is far more systematic than economist Lindblom but he is also far less substantive. A great deal of his book is simply an appeal to use science and scientific decision making, and he offers very little by way of a real model in operations. In any event, none of the books is distinctive either as a work on policy and policy making or as a book unabashedly on decision making. Worse, in the end the distinction between the two is nearly wiped out altogether.

The second important consequence of the permissive and nondefinitional approach to policy-the consequence that is perhaps a good deal more relevant to the future work of political science in this area-is that such an approach becomes essentially technocratic and instrumental in values, in analysis, and in ultimate impact. When one assumes that "policy making is policy making is decision making" and therefore does not enter into a priori analysis of the character of the choices being made, one almost inevitably becomes incrementalist and manipulatve. One inevitably falls into the questions of how the tinkering takes place now, and how one might make improvements in the tinkering and perhaps even reduce the tinkering and replace it with something more deliberate. If one does not analyze the character of the choices made, one need not ask any question about the impact of those choices (taken as variables) upon the processes themselves or upon the society at large.

Ideologies

There are probably several reasons why political scientists (including students of administration) and other social scientists have been making the assumption that policies are simply more noticeable or more expensive decisions, that public policies are not particularly different from private policies, and that policy making is either decision making or simply politics stated another way (see, for example, Bauer, p. 4). One of the reasons is political ideology; most social scientists are liberals and Democrats who simply like what is being done and are quite sincerely inter-

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BOOK REVIEWS 319

ested in improving upon it. Another reason is academic ideology, the commitment to the belief that science is only possible where facts and values are kept strictly apart. This distinction is constantly being assaulted these days, and very properly so. We can see its consequences most clearly in the area of public policy and policy making. When the goals of policies are not questioned because they are the values which must be kept separate from facts, the analyst becomes committed to the value context of those policies even if his political ideology would not support them if he looked more carefully at them.8

Thus, Professor Dror feels that it is impossible to learn anything from what he calls "nominal policy." But note an anomaly. In his introductory chapter, he expresses faith that knowledge about intentions to make policy (which he calls metapolicy) and knowledge about the facts that would enable policy makers to make choices (which he calls policy-issue knowledge) can be expressed in good generalizations (pp. 7-8). That is, he has faith in policies about policy making. However, for some reason it is not possible to get dependa- ble knowledge on the character of the policy itself, the "nominal policy." In any case, such knowledge is not necessary. For the rest of the book is basically an effort to improve policy by improving policy making. Even his criteria for assessing the quality of a policy are such secondary criteria as the quality of the information and the quality of the personnel which constitute the decision-making unit.9 This means one thing, that a good process means a good policy. With all of the high energy physicists in the Atomic Energy Commission and its helpmate the National Academy of Sci- ences, we obviously have the best atomic energy policy possible. With all of the systems analysts in the Defense Department, we obviously have or could have the best possible defense policies. But whatever element he is dis- cussing or analyzing, its character is basically technocratic and manipulative. All of his pro- posals at the end of the book (chapters 18 and 19) are for improving the policy-making system regardless of goals. Urban renewal would be better if we had better information by which to fulfill the planning requirements of the Act,

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all other things like Negro removal and resto- ration of high downtown densities being equal. He can even suggest, without analysis as in an act of faith, that corporate practices associated with Facist Italy might be just the thing for contemporary policy making (p. 281). The best example is his dispassionate suggestion that in evaluating policy results, the goal of industrialization is [for instance] accepted in some of the developing countries as the dominant value for policy-making; effects on traditional family structure and culture, which are re- garded as more expendable, do not have to be heavily considered by the policy-makers in evaluating the industrialization policy (p. 39).

Similar examples of the technocratization of policy analysis can be found in Lindblom and, more particularly, in the Bauer volume, but it would be overly burdensome to identify and analyze them here.10 There is neither politics nor political science left when we can look at Eichmann and ask only whether his policy- making system was as good as it could have been.

But being instrumental and technocratic has far greater intellectual impact than merely de- priving us of good policy criticism and providing us only with repetition on the theme of administrative incrementalism, bargaining, and individual decisions. Being instrumental and technocratic means that the analyst becomes blinded to certain fundamental political patterns that his individualist and informal view defines away. Operating as though there is no need for any antecedent analysis of the institutional level, they fall into the intellectual trap once identified by Keynes-they tend to be- come the slaves of some defunct economist. Operating on the assumption, whether articu- lated or not, that substantive policy-the institutional level-is part of the ceteris that are paribus leads not only to the ideological posi- tion of the technocrat, as already suggested, but also to logical and empirical impossibilities.

Professor Shoettle represents the situation best in her explicit acceptance of "Braybrooke and Lindblom's 'single strategy of disjointed incrementalism' as the most useful description of how the policy-making process operates in a democratic political system, notably in the United States" (Bauer, p. 150). Operationally




this means, as Dahl has proposed, that "when two individuals conflict with one another . . . they confront three great alternatives: deadlock, coercion, or peaceful adjustment." 11 And, in a democratic political system like the United States, deadlock and coercion-which to Dahl means virtually physical imposition-are quite rare. A close analysis of these operational cor- relates of incrementalism will reveal the degree and character of the one-sidedness of the en- tire model.

The underlying dimensions of this logical model are two contiua, as shown on Table I. When spelled out even roughly, it seems clear that one important possibility is missing.

TABLE 1 THE PROPERTIES OF POLITICAL RELATIONSHIPS

Likelihood of Peaceful Adjustment

Low High

Likelihood of Remote Deadlock Negotiation Coercion Immediate "Coercion" ?

In my earlier account I filled that fourth cell with administration, to suggest that it includes all of the governmental processes in which people have internalized the sanctions that might be applied:

The element of coercion may seem absent when in actuality the participants are conducting themselves in a certain way largely because they do not feel they have any choice. Since it is well enough accepted to go unnoticed, this coercion can be called legitimate. Since it is regular and systematic, it can be called administrative. . . . This immense fourth "great al- ternative" is missing from Dahl's scheme because it is beyond the confines of the theory of the perfect, self-regulating pluralist society.'2

Even in a stable polity, where the likelihood of peaceful adjustment is high, there is no reason in the world to expect that a policy- making process and the individual behavior therein can possibly be the same under all conditions. Why, in any case, should we assume at the outset that all conditions are the same? That students of decision making and policy making fall unintentionally into this assumption is a measure of the ideological and analytic consequences of their approach.

Political Process

Many, notably Ranney, would nonetheless argue that it is the political process which ties all students of politics together, including students of public policy.13 One may grant this proposition, however, only so long as it does not involve the kinds of commitments and as- sumptions we have discovered in the works under scrutiny here. As we have already begun to see, the danger lies in falling lightly into the commitment that policy content is irrelevant. The first paradigm suggests some of the dangers involved. But a second paradigm can pursue more systematically the general question raised by the first paradigm. That is to say, when we take a step beyond Olson and provide an actual typology of coercion (syn- onymously, policy content), it begins to come clear that each kind of coercion may very well be associated with a quite distinctive political process. If that is even in small part the case, then we will have to restrain generalization about the policy-making process and begin anew with lower-level generalizations that take these contextual limits into account.

Only cursory study of Table 2 suggests that any generalization about the policy process is very likely to have to treat a majority of cases as exceptions. Moreover, if the generalization were reversed with a "not," a majority of cases would still be exceptions to the rule. It is not necessary to burden the argument with definitions of the terms in each cell,14 because the purpose here is merely to establish a prin- ciple of analysis. Distributive policies include the classic 19th century disposal of public lands (for which the term distribution was coined), traditional tariffs, 4-H type of services to farmers, and other forms of patronage. Since these work entirely on the benefits side, and coercion is displaced onto the general revenue system or to all who have no access to the program in question, it is possible to disaggre- gate the available resources and to treat each decision in isolation from other decisions. In the short run, decision makers can treat distributive policies virtually as if they had un- limited resources. Until the data show other- wise, there ought to be some strong reason to expect that a political process involved with

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TABLE 2

TYPES OF COERCION AND TYPES OF POLICY

Applicability of Coercion Works through:

Individual Environment Conduct of Conduct

Likelihood of Remote Distributive Constituent Coercion Immediate Regulative Redistributive

this type of policy would differ in a number of fundamental respects from a political process that develops around, say, regulative policies. A regulatory policy can be more or less coercive, but it would seem to be in the nature of regulation that poltical processes in regulatory areas would be more dynamic, decentralized, yes, pluralistic, than distributive processes. Still other characteristics ought to obtain-and Ta- bles 3 and 4 show that they do-for the politics of redistributive policy, where coercion, though usually quite immediate, works not upon individual conduct directly but through the environment of conduct. Even incremental changes here can activate broad class relationships, and can involve whole models of commitment rather than individual issues and pair- wide comparisons.

The purpose of this classifying activity is to produce theory that can manage the empiri-

cal patterns in policy making and yet keep them attached to the basic functions of the state.'5 Research in progress, moreover, suggests that it performs rather well as a predictive model in low-level data analysis. Data cumu- lated from a variety of sources on different institutions are beginning to confirm the existence and precise character of each of the political processes and power structures. A very small part of this total is presented in Tables 3 and 4. These data are restricted entirely to the variations in the place of Congress in the policy-making process."'

Table 3 is based upon a ubiquitous but little-used datum, the amending process, which is used as a rough index of the relation between congressional committees and Con- gress as a parliamentary body. Among other things, the results show first that Woodrow Wilson's proposition that "congressional government is committee government" is unsup- ported in about two-thirds of the cases. Only among distributive bills do committees tend to maintain control of their bills as they pass through parliamentary processes. To be brief, review of the three types suggests three quite different processes: (1) The process for distributive bills is almost entirely committee centered, with very little floor creativity. (2) The process for regulative bills is very

TABLE 3

LEGISLATIVE CREATIVITY OF CONGRESS IN THREE AREAS OF POLICY *

(3) Per Cent Significant (4) ( 1 ) Amendments Passed Scale Score

Average Number of (2) over Objections of Summary of 8 Amendments Per Cent Sponsoring Attributes

Proposed per Bill Passed Committee of Amendments Distributive House Senate

Bills, N=22 5.8 41.8 0 1.09 2.12 Redistributive

Bills, N=25 9.1 62.4 24 1.81 4.50 Regulative

Bills, N=15 12.8 48.9 67 4.28 4.85 * Sources: L. John Roos, unpublished master's thesis, University of Chicago, 1968, and The End of Liberalism (see Note 4), p. 308. The bills included: (1) all bills in 87th Congress, First Session, that received roll call votes in House and Senate, and (2) 13 major bills since 1948 on which major case studies were published. Roos worked out an ingenious scaling device based upon 8 possible amending actions on a bill. Bills were then scaled along these 8 attributes, which included Columns 1, 2, and 3 on the table plus 5 others. For Column 4, co- efficients of reproductibility averaged over 95, indicating excellent scales. The scores on Column 4 can be interpreted as follows: the higher the/score, the easier it was for the parliamentary body of Congress (the floor) to take some legislative functions back from its committees.

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strongly parliamentary, regardless of whether initiatives came from committee or Executive Branch. (3) The process for redistributive bills is also strongly parliamentary but other data and existing case-study literature strongly confirm original expectations that such redistributive cases as fiscal and monetary policies, social security, and the like are strongly executive centered. We could, therefore, call the redistributive arena a structured or sep- aration-of-powers model in contrast to the balance-of-power model suggested by the regulatory pattern.'7 These data on the amending process are supported by the more impres- sionistic but perhaps more plausible reanaly- sis-to be published in later papers-of 35 major policy-making case studies.

Table 4 deals with a different dimension of the process but suggests again how fundamental must be the differences in political behavior in each of the areas of policy. Table 4

is based on Yule's Q, which is a simple measure of association among items-in this case, roll call votes. Our reasoning in the use of Q was as follows: the degree of association between items can be taken as a measure of the scalability of those items. If that is the case, then closely associated roll calls (higher Q values) are part of some underlying quali- tative dimension which gives all bills within that dimension a certain orderliness with re- spect to each other. That is, across a range of such items, the congressmen would either agree with one another or would disagree in a predictable fashion. Other bills do not partake of membership in any underlying dimension and are thus discrete items that bear only haphazard relation to other bills. A bundle of bills with relatively higher average Q (the average taken from the Q value of each pair of bills in the bundle) means that we have identified bills that do share "unidimensional-

TABLE 4

SCALABILITY OF POLICIES AND ORDERLINESS OF BLOC STRUCTURES IN CONGRESS: VARIATIONS BY TYPES OF POLICY *

Type of Policy (Controlling for Party)

Democrats Republicans Redistributive Regulative Redistributive Regulative

Congress Average Values of 0 81st .32 .07 .16 .07 82nd .40 .02 .49 -.19 83rd .35 .19 .51 .27 84th .24 .03 .37 .09 85th .59 -.05 .43 .30 86th .13 .07 .39 .10 87th .44 .31 .28 .20 88th .80 .20 .47 .17

* Sources: L. John Roos, unpublished research memorandum, and Theodore J. Lowi, Arenas of Power, forthcoming. Average Q was derived in the following manner, and for purposes of discourse here it should be thought of as synonymous with scalability: (1) first, separate out all roll calls according to the three predefined policy categories. (2) Then, take the Q coefficient for all roll calls within each category, taking the roll calls two at a time-i.e., cross tabulation of the yeas and nays on roll call A against those on roll call B, etc. For the precise formula see Duncan MacRae, "A Method for Identifying Issues and Factions from Legislative Votes," American Political Science Review (December 1965). (3) Then take av- erages for all values of Q in each of the three policy categories. The higher (+ or -) the average value of Q, the more scalable the items are. Values range between 1.00 and -1.00, but the minus signs can be disregarded. Toward 0.00 the relation among items approaches randomness. Only one roll call per bill was allowed, so that there is no artificial clustering attributable to the close association of, say, a vote to recommit and then a vote on the same bill for final passage.

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ity," even if we do not know precisely what to call the underlying dimension. Further- more, this unidimensionality of bills also defines a bloc structure among the congressmen who produced the roll calls, and that means a more stable and orderly set of political relationships where average Q is higher than where it is lower. Other data confirm these patterns by showing how these congressional coalitional tendencies are parallel with behavior patterns involving the same sets of issues outside Congress.

Table 4 needs no elaborate analysis here to carry forth this reasoning. In every Congress for the past 20 years, average Q has been overwhelmingly and consistently higher for redistributive issues than for regulative issues. This is strong confirmation of predictions made by the policy model two or more years before Q became available for making the re- quisite test of the propositions: redistributive policies are class issues that produce class politics and a more highly structured, Marx- ian or Millsian system, while regulative issues approach the dynamically unstable pluralist system of politics.18 The haphazard character of relationships in the regulatory area fits well with the things political scientists have generalized about. Since most case studies of the policy-making process written by political scientists, especially in the 1930's and '40's, were on regulatory legislation, it is little wonder that they thought they were able to generalize about the whole policy-making process. And it is also no wonder that they de- scribed the whole system as shifting, coalitional, pragmatic, bargaining, and one in which the outcome is a vector product of interacting forces. What this brief analysis of Tables 3 and 4 suggests is that the generalizations have real scientific precision as well as theoretic and predictive value if they are limited quite self-consciously to the regulatory third of all of the ordinary policy-making activity.19 This is what was anticipated earlier in the proposition that any unconditional generalization about the policy process is likely to face the problem that a majority of the cases would have to be treated as exceptions.

Other data of a quite different sort are being developed showing further that fundamen-

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tal differences in power structures and policy- making processes exist in institutional dimensions other than Congress. The very structure of administrative agencies varies in a predictable fashion along these lines.20 Even more clear and predictable are the relations between agencies and their environments. The same holds for the internal structures and external relations of interest groups. In all of these major dimensions, certain very important indicators of political relationships dis- tribute themselves quite differently in each of the three areas of public policy. This is enough to suggest what the role of policy analysis is going to be in the future of policy- making analysis.

What this also suggests, at the more philosophic level, is how far political science has gone in trying to make a science out of a stateless politics. A science of politics is just as possible when the state is reintroduced, so long as the state is reintroduced not as a poetic figment but as a systematic understanding of its functions and their types and consequences as they can be determined from substantive policy. Unfairly, the authors of the books under review here have perhaps been used for purposes other than their own original ones. But that may be the most important point of all. As economists, social psychologists, and logicians, as well as political scientists, they have entered the field of policy making very much under the influence of existing political science understanding and political science definitions of the field. Their mistakes in design and definition are very largely a measure of basic problems of political science, the policy sciences, in recent years. A decision-making approach, like the earlier drying up of the subfields of public administration and public law, suggests the extent to which politics has been misrepre- sented. The two major consequences of essentially a perverted definition of politics have been identified here as, first, the descent into the technocratic and the concomitant embrace of policies made by others and, second, also concomitantly, the neglect of certain fundamental variables that renders the results either insubstantial or irrelevant.

One of our authors provides an appropri-




ate conclusion. On the brink of discovery, Professor Dror averred that the aggregative [i.e., overall, institutional] characteristics of public policymaking are not a simple sum of the characteristics of the subunits' decision-making. Public policymaking has system properties condi- tioned by, but different from, those of its component units (p. 84). But after posing this as a reservation, he recognized that since decision-making body subunits compose some of the "main variables shaping the public policymaking process as a whole," review of the social psychology of decision making will reveal that "present public policymaking is very far from being as good as it could be" (p. 84). Thus, even more than the others, he got himself to the brink and then backed away from it by defining his problem as essentially a manipulative and instrumental one.

So it goes, and so it will go until we define our science in terms of these aggregative characteristics-meaning state, public, coercion, and real policy-rather than in terms of the muscular movements of components of that system.

Notes

1. The author wishes to acknowledge his indebted- ness to Professor Theodore J. Marmor whose careful reading of this article resulted in some important revisions.

2. Cf. Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: The Free Press, 1957), p. 261: "Because statistical indices of such attributes of social systems [i.e., differences in social structure] have seldom been utilized in con- junction with indices of individual behavior, com- parative sociology has been limited to loose and indecisive findings. . . . [When] relatively precise measures of individual attitudes have been ob- tained, these have seldom been combined with similarly definite measures of social structure. Thus, social psychology has in the past decade or so moved toward the systematic use of indices of individual attitudes and sentiments primarily among aggregates of mutually unrelated individuals."

3. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, quoted in Mancur Olson, Jr., The Logic of Col- lective Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Schocken Paperback Edition, 1968), p. 33-34.

4. For a more detailed comparison of the struc-

ture of contemporary political science and that of classical economics, see the author's The End of Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1969), chapters 1, 2, and 10.

5. It is difficult to make any single statement about a book authored by ten people. Professor Bauer in his introductory essay states clearly that decision making is inappropriate for char. acterizing policy formation. However, see his own definition of policy making as "politics" (p. 4), and then see Zeckhauser and Schaefer, p. 27 and pp. 95-97; Professor Bower, pp. 108ff; Professor Schoettle, p. 151 and pp. 158ff; Pro- fessor Gergen in virtually all of chapters 5 and 6, but in particular pp. 181-183 and 206-207; and Professor Schneider, pp. 278-279.

6. Also compare his concession that public policy making is not a mere sum of subunit decision making (p. 84), with his later observations on the policy-making process as an "aggregative process" involving the interactions of all the social units and individuals (p. 199).

7. There is another problem with this that can only be very briefly touched upon here, although it should be pursued at length by those more skill- ful and learned in these matters. This is the question of the applicability of established utility theory in a policy-making rather than a decision- making framework. I propose for general con- sideration the possibility that in real policy making the assumption of simple pairwise comparisons is meaningful only under a very limited number of conditions. One of the realities of public policy making is political differentiation, in which great effort is expended to keep the do- mains of policy separate from one another. In the three cases offered in the Bauer volume (chapters 7, 8, and 9), as well as in a very large number of cases already in the literature, one can easily come away with the impression that the real choice facing the policy makers was not between A versus B or between two schedules in which A ranks highest on one and B ranks highest on the other, but rather between A and non-A. Thus, for example Professor Furash says that the issue involving the space program may have been between spending the money for space or spending it "in other ways" (p. 286). There is no reason to assume out of hand that any such comparisons or direct alternatives were ever involved. One can, with perhaps greater ease short of real documentation, support the proposition that the money we could amass for a moon shot would simply not have been forthcoming for some other kind of shot. Then there are many other cases which involve neither comparisons of values or value schedules nor choices between A and non-A, but rather composite choices between two completely different schedules in which there is little or no overlap. This means a choice between schedule A, B, Y, Z and C, D, 0, P, in

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which each implies or involves a completely different model of commitment.

8. Cf. The End of Liberalism, op. cit., chapters 1 and 10.

9. The "primary criterion," he admits, is ultimate impact, but he also considers information on impact to be undependable.

10. See, for example, Bauer: chapter 2 on "Satisfic- ing;" chapter 4, particularly the materials sug- gesting that policy making is problem solving and not problem finding; chapter 7, esp. pp. 247, 267, and 274 ff.; and chapter 8, p. 286 (as already identified), but also see p. 282, where the author suggests that something is not a policy unless it is involved in competing factions and the usual paraphernalia of issues and bargaining.

11. Quoted in Lowi, op. cit., p. 51. Further analysis of the same problem will also be found there.

12. Ibid., p. 52. 13. Austin Ranney, "The Study of Policy Content:

A Framework for Choice," in Ranney (ed.), Political Science and Public Policy (Chicago: Markham, 1968), pp. 3 and 14.

14. Cf. Lowi, "American Business, Public Policy, Case Studies and Political Theory," World Pol- itics (July 1964). The cell labelled "Constitu- ent" will not be touched upon here at all. For an extensive treatment of this as a "non-policy" function performed, though not exclusively, by political parties, see the author's "Party, Policy and Constitution," in W. N. Chambers and W. D. Burnham (eds.), The American Party Sys- tems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), chapter IX.

15. This is a more abstract, perhaps ennobling for- mulation of policy. That is to say, actual policies can be learned from statutes and the other formal language of authoritative intentions. Properly classified as types of policy, according to the underlying criteria for types of coercion, policies are actual indicators of the functions of the state. In this sense, "the state" is no longer less accessible to scientific treatment than any political abstraction currently in use.

16. Data on group and coalition patterns, the executive, administrative structure, and external relations are currently being prepared for a volume, Arenas of Power.

17. Another important finding not strongly enough relevant to the argument here to warrant the lengthy report it deserves is the parallelism between President and Congress. Although gener- ally assumed that as the one goes up the other goes down, in a constitutional zero-sum game, these data suggest that a strong presidency re- duces the role of the congressional committee but actually reinforces and encourages congressional parliamentary activity.

18. Cf. "American Business...." op. cit., pp. 691 ff. It should be emphasized that each of the three policy categories includes a large number

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of bills that differ completely from each other in conventionally designated content. We are not speaking here of a politics of education or a politics of agriculture, where individuals come from the same sector and have similar subject matter concerns, or similar interests. Each of these broad policy categories cuts across established sectors and includes policy problems of a quite different substantive character-as suggested by the fact that many agriculture policies are redistributive and are included in the redistributive category, while other agriculture policies are regulative or distributive and are treated as such.

19. Loc. cit. The distributive policy category is not included in the analysis here because it introduces a complication that can easily be dealt with but not without burdening this review far more than already. Since the main objective here is to sustain the general proposition that fundamental differences in political processes in each subsystem exist, and since the objective is not to demonstrate that the three categories that I have developed in my scheme are by far the best ones, it did not seem necessary to go into detail into all of the categories and in all respects. These matters were reserved for later publica- tion in articles and eventually in the forthcoming book, Arenas of Power. Here I need only express my gratitude for the assistance of my colleague, Professor Duncan MacRae, in making this kind of analysis possible. He is of course not responsible for my particular use of the methodology of Q or for my interpretation of the data.

20. Preliminary results are reported in James L. Grant, "The Case for a Synthetic Functional Methodology," a paper delivered at the 1969 meeting of the American Political Science As- sociation, September 2-6, in New York City.

Book Notes Planning and Administrative Personnel in Lo- cal Governments, Bulletin No. 1631, U.S. De- partment of Labor, 1969. $.45 paper.

Designed to identify occupations related to the planning and administration of urban pro- grams and to provide a basis for further large- scale studies of employment and future manpower requirements for these occupations. Cur- rent manpower problems and future skill requirements related to planning and administrative activities are also investigated.



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Decision Making vs. Policy Making: Toward an Antidote for Technocracy