Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-sjtt6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-22T21:21:25.207Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Governance and Democracy: Public Policy in Modern America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2009

Morton Keller
Morton Keller
Affiliation:
Brandeis University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Each stage of our national development has had a distinctive form of public policy. And each has faced a core tension between the dictates of governance and the constraints of democracy. Economic or social interests, and advantage-seeking politicians, forge policies. Countervailing interests, or changing times, or the limits of state capacity see to it that those policies rarely if ever live up to the expectations of their progenitors. But then no one ever said that the American polity, to say nothing of its democratic ideal, is a neat or orderly thing.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , January 2008 , pp. 177 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. Lowi, Theodore J., “American Business, Public Policy, Case-Studies, and Political Theory,” World Politics 16 (07 1964): 677–715Google Scholar; Lowi, , The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policy, and the Crisis of Public Authority (New York, 1969)Google Scholar; Lowi, , The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States, 2nd ed. (New York, 1979), xi.Google Scholar

2. Keller, Morton, America's Three Regimes: A New Political History (New York, 2007).Google Scholar

3. Wilson, James Q., “New Politics, New Elites, Old Publics,” in The New Politics of Public Policy, ed. Landy, Marc K. and Levin, Martin A. (Baltimore, 1995), 249Google Scholar. See also Crenson, Matthew A. and Ginsberg, Benjamin, Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public (Baltimore, 2002).Google Scholar

4. Larson, John L., Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill, 2001)Google Scholar; Goodrich, Carter, ed., Canals and American Economic Development (New York, 1961)Google Scholar; Frum, David, How We Got Here: The 70's (New York, 2000), 217f.Google Scholar

5. Huxtable, Ada Louise, Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard? (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; Rose, Mark H., Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1939–1989 (Knoxville, 1990)Google Scholar; St. Clair, David J., The Motorization of American Cities (New York, 1986).Google Scholar

6. Morton Keller, “Trade Policy in Historical Perspective,” and Vogel, David, “The Triumph of Liberal Trade: American Trade Policy in the Postwar Period,” in Taking Stock: American Government in the Twentieth Century, ed. Keller, Morton and Melnick, R. Shep (New York, 1999)Google Scholar. See also Keller, Morton, Regulating a New Society: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, 1994).Google Scholar

7. Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers; The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, 1992)Google Scholar; Keller, Regulating a New Society, chap. 6.

8. Badger, Anthony J., The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933–1940 (New York, 1989)Google Scholar; Schwartz, Jordan A., The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (New York, 1993).Google Scholar

9. Moynihan, Daniel P., Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding (New York, 1969)Google Scholar; Patterson, James, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York, 1996)Google Scholar; Milkis, Sidney M. and Mileur, Jerome M., eds., The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism (Amherst, 2005)Google Scholar; Stephan, and Thernstrom, Abigail, America in Black and White (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; Graham, Hugh Davis, “Since 1964: The Paradox of American Civil Rights Regulation,” in Taking Stock, ed. Keller, and Melnick, , 187–218.Google Scholar

10. Davies, Gareth, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence, Kans., 1996).Google Scholar

11. Gillon, Steven M., “That's Not What We Meant to Do”: Reform and Its Unintended Consequences in Twentieth-Century America (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; Unger, Irwin, The Best of Intentions: The Triumph and Failure of the Great Society (New York, 1996)Google Scholar; Moynihan, Daniel P., The Politics of a Guaranteed Income (1973)Google Scholar; Melnick, R. Shep, Between the Lines: Interpreting Welfare Rights (Washington, D.C., 1994).Google Scholar

12. Melnick, R. Shep, “Government and the Environment after Earth Day,” in Taking Stock, ed. Keller, and Melnick, , 156–184Google Scholar; Melnick, , Regulation and the Courts: The Case of the Clean Air Act (Washington, D.C., 1983)Google Scholar; Landy, Marc K., “The New Politics of Environmental Policy,” in The New Politics of Public Policy, ed. Landy, Marc K. and Levin, Martin, 207–227.Google Scholar

13. Unger, The Best of Intentions; Gillon, “That's Not What We Meant to Do”; Bardach, Eugene and Kagan, Robert, Going by the Book: The Problem of Regulatory Unreasonableness (Philadelphia, 1982).Google Scholar

14. The Political Life of Medicare (Chicago, 2003). See also Sadler, Ross and Schoenbrud, David, Democracy by Decree (New Haven, 2002).Google Scholar

15. Derthick, Martha, Up in Smoke: From Legislation to Litigation in Tobacco Politics, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C., 2005)Google Scholar; Crenson and Ginsberg, Downsizing Democracy, 157f.