Political science has its laws, and they can predict what will happen in politics. One such law can predict whether George Bush will be reelected President in 1992.

It is true that political science is not politics. This relationship between the two is no different than that between any science and the reality which it analyzes. Every science is a repository of abstractions which model the critical aspects of a much more complex underlying phenomena. While some political scientists have expected a one-to-one, deterministic relationship between the science and the material it studied, most anticipated the “deterministic randomness” (or “chaos”) paradigm becoming popular even in the physical sciences today. Deterministic, because the science assumes that there are intrinsic underlying laws; but random because, with the inherent complexity, much will necessarily remain unpredictable (in statistical terms, that there always will be an “e” in the equation).

For the fifth time in its last six tries, the Democratic Party has managed to parlay its massive lead in party identifiers into another presidential election debacle. One shameless Democratic apologist, groping for a face-saving excuse, has hit upon the bizarre idea that the Democrats lose presidential elections time after time because, being rational political calculators, they find it in their partisan self-interest to do so (Erikson, 1988). This tortured theory overlooks the obvious: Democrats are too stupid to calculate their self-interest.

Although this conclusion may seem unduly harsh, science has proven that Democrats are significantly dumber than Republicans, even when the differing social bases of the two parties are held constant (Sigelman, 1988). This intellectual deficit helps explain why, time and time again, the Democrats find themselves hopelessly out-organized, out-strategized, and out-maneuvered—in short, out-thought—by the wilier Republicans.

The End of Liberalism by Theodore Lowi was and is an important book, large in conception, bold in execution, and substantial in influence. It is a provocative and influential statement of some of the problems of pluralism, or “interest-group liberalism.” One of those problems is the inadequately constrained delegation of legislative problems to administrative agencies, leading to “the atrophy of institutions of popular control” (p. 86). The atrophy occurs because administrators exercise their discretion in ways set by agency-group relationships rather than by popular choice (p. 90). To solve this problem, Lowi calls for a return to “juridical democracy,” which means, in part, limiting federal action “to those practices for which it is possible to develop a clear and authoritative rule of law, enacted democratically and implemented absolutely” (p. 271). One way of achieving that limit is by asking the Supreme Court to declare “invalid and unconstitutional any delegation of power to an administrative agency that is not accompanied by clear standards of implementation” (p. 298).

Earlier this had been the view of Albert V. Dicey, the great British legal scholar. Dicey argued against the emerging administrative law on grounds that, by removing the defense of individual rights from the common courts, it would permit the growth of the welfare state. Lowi does not mention Dicey, and there is no indication that he is opposed to the substance of the welfare state.

Following is a list of words and terms that the political scientist who finds himself or herself in a presidential campaign should never use:

epistemic concepts of democracy

multivariate logistic models

exogeneity

hegemony

macropartisanship

collective rationality

philosophical dialectic valuably

These terms and others like them may or may not have meaning in a presidential campaign—the point however, is that presidential campaigns are not exercises in theory or in scholarship, they are exercises in communicating to the lowest common denominator in the American public. Because of this they develop a culture and a set of norms that are as anti-intellectual as those found in any reputable truck stop in America (not to mention a vocabulary of four letter words that would put most truckers to shame).

Why is The End of Liberalism important? This work is not without its flaws or critics, but it is indisputably important—not because it is right, although I believe it largely is—but because it is provocative, stimulating, and pertinent to both scholai and practitioner.

The Culprit

One of the more revealing and less pedantic kiss-and-tell books to come out of a presidential administration was David Stockman's (1987) The Triumph of Politics. In it, Stockman detailed his dismay over the failure of the Reagan Revolution—an effort to establish “minimalist government” (p. 9) incorporating “sweeping, wrenching change” that “would have hurt millions of people” (p. 11) by such actions as “elimination of subsidies to farmers and businesses … an immediate end to welfare for the able-bodied poor … [and] no right to draw more from the Social Security fund than retirees had actually contributed” (p. 12).

In July I was in the Soviet Union for two weeks as one of eight American political scientists who were guests of the Soviet Political Science Association. This meeting was a follow-up to one held two years earlier in which six Soviets had met with an American group in Williamsburg, Virginia. We learned a lot from our Soviet colleagues in that session, since two years into the Gorbachev glasnost era they felt free to argue strongly among themselves about the social and political roots of Stalinism, and to explain how Gorbachev was chosen by a Politburo still dominated formally by the Old Guard, people who would a few years later be referred to in discussions with Americans as “the previous regime.”

It is appropriate to speak of parliamentarianism in the Soviet Union. For, as I shall briefly try to show, what is evolving in Moscow is a Presidential-Congressional system, a government which if it can be institutionalized, constitutionalized, along the lines it is developing, will resemble the American. It is, of course, far away from that stage as yet.

From the Editors of Social Sciences: In early July 1989 Moscow hosted a Soviet-U.S. Symposium on “Political Reforms and Political Science” attended by the leading politologists of the two countries. On July 6, within the framework of that forum, U.S. politologists met with Vladimir Petrovsky, Deputy Foreign Minister of the USSR, who is a member of the Soviet Political Science Association Executive Council and member of the Editorial Council of Social Sciences. The following is a summary report of the discussion which, as our U.S. colleagues suggested, centered on the new political thinking. This topic was the starting point in the discussion attended by L. W. Pye, President of the American Political Science Association (head of the U.S. delegation), Catherine E. Rudder, Samuel P. Huntington, Kenneth N. Waltz, Richard F. Fenno, and Alexander Dallin. Also present were William Smirnov, Vice-President of the International and Soviet Political Science Associations; Ninel Maslova, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Social Sciences, and a number of officials from the USSR Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

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.

The relation between knowledge and power was already complex when Plato wrote his Seventh Letter. It hasn't gotten any simpler since. Having served in three presidential campaigns (all losing), I am moved to offer a personal report from the front-line. Two opening caveats. I write in the mode of reckless generalization, knowing full well that counterexamples are legion, and I assimilate political scientists to the broader category of “intellectuals,” even though academic political science diverges in some respects from the classic sociological account of that class.

My point of departure is an inescapable fact: most politicians don't trust intellectuals. This is so for three reasons. Faced with a hostile world, politicians crave absolute loyalty, which they suspect intellectuals are constitutionally incapable of offering. Politicians prize realism, but they see intellectuals as infatuated with words that have become disconnected from the world. Politicians think that the quest for, and use of, power is the most serious thing in the world, and they have what amounts to contempt for intellectuals whom they see as shielded from the harsh realities of power. (This metaphysics of power ramifies through campaign organizations, whose “political” wings typically display a thinly veiled contempt for the “issues” shops.)

Many political scientists wonder why so few people in our discipline play key roles in presidential campaigns. After all, we have much to offer. In graduate school, we learn about statistics, policy analysis, voting behavior, and other topics with practical applications. During my own political experience—with the New York Legislature, the U.S. Congress, the Bush campaigns and other political organizations—I have often used my formal training in political science.

The problem is that graduate school supplies only part of what political activists need. And in some ways, it can actually be a handicap.

The End of Liberalism is one of the most widely read books in political science. As book review editor of the American Political Science Review, it interests me that the reviewers of neither the first nor second edition of the book predicted its enormous success. While the reviews were clearly positive in tone, they were far from effusive, and none suggested that the book would become required reading for a generation of political science students. My own copy of the book is annotated by three sets of underlines and comments—my own and those of my two daughters who were assigned the book as undergraduates. Why has the book become so important? What can we learn from it about the ingredients of a great book? Given the broad readership that has responded to Lowi's book, how relevant are the criteria that political scientists use to evaluate their own literature? What qualities should disciplinary reviewers watch for if they hope to recognize what will become a classic?