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The Contributions of Theodore Lowi to Political Analysis and Democratic Theory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2013
Extract
Lowi, like Gaul, can be divided into three parts: (1) the policy analysis (arenas of power) scheme; (2) democratic theory (juridical democracy, the critique of pluralism, rule of law); and (3) constitutional advocacy centering on designs for parliamentary government. It is in the second category, I believe, that he has made the most significant and lasting contribution.
The first and earliest segment, the policy analysis scheme, was developed in articles, in and after the seminal 1964 book review in World Politics (Lowi 1964, 1972, 1976). Lowi's students have directly employed the policy typology in work on national institutions and policy development (Spitzer 1983; Sanders 1981). However, Lowi himself has not fully developed the implications of the typology in such a way that it could generate an integrated set of testable hypotheses and has failed to clear up essential definitions. The words used to label the four cells of the typology (distributive, regulatory, redistributive, and constituent) have fallen into common currency, but are used in a muddle of ways not consistent with the meanings I believe (as an alumna of Lowi's graduate public policy workshop) that he wants to attach to them. Much of this confusion, and the failure of this set of tantalizing ideas to bear much theoretical fruit, must be laid at the creator's doorstep for neglecting to draw out at length and in detail the typology's implications.
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- Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1990
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Notes
1. One might argue that the Congressional Budget Office is, in fact, a better model of a Weberian bureaucracy (neutral expertise in the service of a political master) than is the Office of Management and Budget in the executive branch. That bureaucracy is more highly developed in the legislature is yet another American peculiarity.
2. Two developments open a window of opportunity for juridical democracy: (1) divided government, which, as Bensel (1980) has shown, produces congresses disinclined to grant executive discretion; and (2) conservative realignment in the West and East, the global demise of socialism and rigid economic planning, the revival of markets—which means that a positive state must be erected (in the United States at least) on some other basis than planning and bureaucratic power. Only juridical democracy offers a method for expanding the scope of the state without expanding (very much) bureaucratic discretion and indicative planning.
3. Of course, the Republicans may yet prove to be the more creative. Searching for new ways to legitimate themselves in a post-Cold War era, they might seize on “voucher welfarism” as a market alternative to the traditional Democratic agenda.