Study Guide #8
The U.S. Party System

These are not easy readings, but they give you an excellent introduction to the processes of policy formation and implementation, the basic stuff of politics.

Kingdon’s “Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policy” is a classic in American political science, probably the most influential work of all in the small subfield in which I work, the “politics of public policy.”  I know of no book that provides a better sense of the “real world” of public policymaking, a world that is chaotic, dynamic and often unpredictable.  You read about 30 pages from the end of the book, when Kingdon is bringing together his major concepts.  My lecture on Kingdon is intended to introduce you to these concepts so that you can follow the chapter, but if there are still confusing points we should cover them in class or in office hours. 

Many early political scientists modeled themselves after physicists, and sought to find “laws of politics” that, like the laws of physics, could be used to make precise predictions about outcomes.  That quest has, I would argue, proved a miserable failure.  Today political scientists are more likely to compare themselves to meteorologists.  Weather, like politics, is hard to predict because so many diverse factors come together to produce outcomes and because small changes can echo and create large events.   But of course politics is even more unpredictable than weather because people, unlike air molecules or cloud formations, think and rethink the world they make, a particularly unpredictable process.   Kingdon’s loose set of concepts provides appropriate tools for analyzing complex relations.

Kagan, a professor at Berkeley, looks at what happens after bills are enacted into law.  In the United States, that’s a messy, complex business too, thanks again to Mr. Madison and his friends, who set up separated powers and a strong, independent judiciary.  Today the judiciary serves as an important access point and veto point for interests who lose out with Congress, the states, the President, and administrative agencies.  Kagan’s description of the Northwest Forest/Spotted Owl controversy shows how separation of powers and judicial independence shapes policy implementation.  Read pages 13-19 carefully and then skim the next few pages, which show the range of disputes in which courts get involved in the United States.

After you’ve completed the assigned reading, answer the following questions.

Kingdon

1. What are policy windows?  Under what conditions do they open? 

2. If you want to beat a policy proposal, delay it.  Why are delay tactics so effective?

3. How does a proposal get on the decision agenda?  What usually has to happen?

4. What exactly does a policy entrepreneur do to try to get her proposal on the decision agenda?  What qualities make a policy entrepreneur effective?

5. What makes policy windows scarce?

6. What are some examples of “predictable windows”?  “Unpredictable windows”?

7. What is a spillover?

Kagan

1. What is adversarial legalism?  How does it make the relationship of legislatures, administrative agencies and courts different in the U.S. as compared to most other nations?

2. What “access point” did environmental activists use in the Northwest Forests/Spotted Owl case?  (Why didn’t they just try to get the Forest Service to stop logging in the Northwest forests?)

3. On what basis did Judge Zilly strike down the Forest Services’ action?

4. What “access point” did the timber industry use to try to stop a lawsuit by environmentalists against the Bureau of Land Management?  (Why didn’t they just try to win in court?)

5. What does this case tell us about American government, according to Kagan? 

6. The Northwest Forests/Spotted Owl case involved administrative law (judicial supervision of administrative agencies) and statutory law (judicial interpretation of statutes enacted by Congress).  What two other “sources of legal authority” have empowered judges to become key players in American public policy?