Political scientists who are policy scholars often trace their lineage back to the pioneering work of Lerner and Lasswell (1951). But public policy did not emerge as a significant subfield within the discipline of political science until the late 1960s or early 70s. This resulted from at least three important stimuli: (1) social and political pressures to apply the profession's accumulated knowledge to the pressing social problems of racial discrimination, poverty, the arms race, and environmental pollution; (2) the challenge posed by Dawson and Robinson (1963), who argued that governmental policy decisions were less the result of traditional disciplinary concerns such as public opinion and party composition than of socioeconomic factors such as income, education, and unemployment levels; and (3) the efforts of David Easton, whose Systems Analysis of Political Life (1965) provided an intellectual framework for understanding the entire policy process, from demand articulation through policy formulation and implementation, to feedback effects on society.

Over the past twenty years, policy research by political scientists can be divided into four types, depending upon the principal focus:

1. Substantive area research. This seeks to understand the politics of a specific policy area, such as health, education, transportation, natural resources, or foreign policy. Most of the work in this tradition has consisted of detailed, largely atheoretical, case studies. Examples would include the work of Derthick (1979) on social security, Moynihan (1970) on antipoverty programs, and Bailey and Mosher (1968) on federal aid to education. Such studies are useful to practitioners and policy activists in these areas, as well as providing potentially useful information for inductive theory building. In terms of the profession as a whole, however, they are probably less useful than theoretical case studies—such as Pressman and Wildavsky (1973) on implementation or Nelson (1984) on agenda-setting—which use a specific case to illustrate or test theories of important aspects of the policy process.

2. Evaluation and impact studies. Most evaluation research is based on contributions from other disciplines, particularly welfare economics (Stokey and Zeckhauser 1978; Jenkins-Smith 1990). Policy scholars trained as political scientists have made several contributions. They have broadened the criteria of evaluation from traditional social welfare functions to include process criteria, such as opportunities for effective citizen participation (Pierce and Doerksen, 1976). They have focused attention on distributional effects (MacRae, 1989). They have criticized traditional techniques of benefit-cost analysis on many grounds (Meier, 1984; MacRae and Whittington, 1988). Most importantly, they have integrated evaluation studies into research on the policy process by examining the use and non-use of policy analysis in the real world (Wildavsky, 1966; Dunn, 1980; Weiss, 1977).

3. Policy process. Two decades ago, both Ranney (1968) and Sharkansky (1970) urged political scientists interested in public policy to focus on the policy process, i.e. the factors affecting policy formulation and implementation, as well as the subsequent effects of policy. In their view, focusing on substantive policy areas risked falling into the relatively fruitless realm of atheoretical case studies, while evaluation research offered little promise for a discipline without clear normative standards of good policy. A focus on the policy process would provide opportunities for applying and integrating the discipline's accumulated knowledge concerning political behavior in various institutional settings. That advice was remarkably prescient; the first paper in this symposium attempts to summarize what has been learned.

Policy design. With roots in the policy sciences tradition described by deLeon (1988), this approach has recently focused on such topics as the efficacy of different types of policy instruments (Salamon 1989; Linder and Peters 1989). Although some scholars within this orientation propose a quite radical departure from the behavioral traditions of the discipline (Bobrow and Dryzek 1987), others build upon work by policy-oriented political scientists over the past twenty years (Schneider and Ingram 1990) while Miller (1989) seeks to integrate political philosophy and the behavioral sciences.

The savings and loan crisis is one of the more extraordinary developments in contemporary domestic affairs. It represents both public and private policy failures of major proportions, imposes costs on the public of between $100 and $500 billion, and creates exceptional new public management responsibilities. The Resolution Trust Corporation, created to “resolve” this crisis, is now the largest real estate agency in the nation, and, remarkably, the country's largest single employer of lawyers.

This disaster has left the public angry and mystified: What is a savings and loan (also called a thrift) and how is it different from a bank? What is FSLIC, and why did we have it if it couldn't prevent the trouble? Why does fixing the problem cost so much, and where does all the money go? Whose fault was it? Does this portend the collapse of the entire financial system?

Some reasons for the crisis are simple to see. Policy designed in the 1930s to create new financing opportunities for home mortgages was flawed and allowed to outlive its time. Thrifts were designed on the popular principle of local banks raising local funds to help local homeowners, and given a protected market. In their time, the thrifts created financing for housing where none existed before. Their capacity to do this was sustained by regulatory controls, tax policies, interest rate controls, and deposit insurance. But when interest rates rose in the 1970s, no amount of tinkering with the original scheme could protect an industry locked into long-term loans earning low rates, and paying out high rates to compete for new funds, and the thrifts could not survive.

To fill in the “black hole” between remaining S&L assets and what is owed to depositors will cost about $200 billion in 1991 dollars. By any measure, this is a lot of money and is in fact about equivalent to the undiscounted $500 billion figure ineptly professed by the General Accounting Office and widely echoed in media reports, political speeches, and on talk shows.

An important aspect of this cost is that it is history—gone for good. It will not come back as the result of an economic rebound, for instance. In fact, the longer it takes to pay off this bill, the higher it will go.

I speak with less conviction about such non-dollar costs of the S&L crisis as the loss of public confidence in public institutions and their officials. I do, however, believe they too are significant, and I do not agree with the cynics who argue that there was little or no confidence left to lose.

Any theory of the manner in which governmental policies get formulated and implemented, as well as the effects of those actions on the world, requires an understanding of the behavior of major types of governmental institutions (legislatures, courts, administrative agencies, chief executives), as well as the behavior of interest groups, the general public, and the media. The dominant paradigm of the policy process, the stages heuristic popularized by Jones (1970), Anderson (1975), and Peters (1986), has outlived its usefulness and must be replaced, in large part because it is not a causal theory. In the course of their empirical work, policy scholars have highlighted a number of phenomena that need to be incorporated into theories of the policy process. The development of such theories requires an integration ‘of both political scientists’ knowledge of specific institutions and behavior and policy scholars' attention to policy communities, substantive policy information, etc.

Innovations by Policy Scholars in Understanding the Policy Process

At least since World War II, most political scientists have tended to focus on either a specific type of institution (legislatures, the presidency, courts, interest groups, administrative agencies, local governments, political parties) or on specific types of political behavior outside those institutions (public opinion, voting, political socialization). These have become the standard subfields within the discipline.

In contrast, scholars interested in public policy have not been able to stay within these subfields because the policy process spans all of them. In the course of empirical work, policy scholars have highlighted a number of phenomena often neglected by political scientists without a policy focus:

a) The importance of policy communities/networks/subsystems involving actors from numerous public and private institutions and from multiple levels of government;

b) The importance of substantive policy information;

c) The critical role of policy elites vis-a-vis the general public;

d) The desirability of longitudinal studies of a decade or more;

e) Differences in political behavior across policy types.

The contribution of multiple theories of the policy process stems, in part, from the identification of alternative concepts and relations that provide distinct—though often partially overlapping—explanations of (and predictions about) policy development. Thus the competing theories single out alternative concepts as critical to the policy process, and specify widely different hypotheses for test. When theory-building is at a rudimentary level, as is generally the case for the study of the policy process, the alternative theories may provide enriching supplemental insights and hypotheses that, if confirmed, lead to better theory. In that spirit, this article provides some illustrations of the application of alternative theories to an ongoing policy dispute over adoption and development of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) as a testing and storage facility for defense nuclear wastes. My focus is on how the alternative theories emphasize different sets of concepts (and therefore data) and hypotheses, and on some of the implications for research design. These comments are based on my own preliminary research on the WIPP issue, and are meant to be illustrations and suggestions, rather than conclusions, about the policy process regarding the WIPP.

The U.S. savings and loan debacle is, or should be, of great interest to political scientists. Any public policy failure as costly as this one deserves study for that reason alone. Analysis of its origins and development may reveal why it has been so intractable. Such analysis also may illuminate a broader class of regulatory policy problems that the political process tends to manage poorly.

Most writing about the savings and loan crisis has focused on its proximate causes. The deeper political roots of the thrift debacle have not been identified. As someone who has tracked the development of the thrift crisis and analyzed deposit insurance issues since 1986, I am convinced that the problems have a deeper structure, rooted in the organization of the U.S. political/regulatory system and its interaction with private markets. More specifically, the potential for this disaster was inherent in the original 1930s' design of deposit insurance and its associated regulatory policies. At this level of analysis, the challenge to policymakers posed by the thrift disaster can be appreciated and its similarities or differences with other regulatory problems examined.

One week before the mass demonstrations that led to the collapse of the Czechoslovak Communist regime in November, 1989, a Charter 77 activist, Jan Urban, proposed that the group contest the national elections to be held in June of 1991. Urban's friends laughed at his proposals for being hopelessly Utopian. But a week later, thousands of students filled Wenceslas Square, a general strike was called, and the regime collapsed. The leaders of the future Civic Forum, who had been carefully watching events in Hungary, Poland and the GDR, had little idea that their own country was ripe for revolution.

Charter 77 would not have fared much better had it consulted Western social scientists, because our models for understanding the emergence of new social movements and their spread and outcomes are woefully inadequate. While prediction in social science is always hazardous, our lack of preparation for the recent wave of mobilization in Eastern Europe is particularly glaring, given the vast body of research and theorizing that has developed since the 1960s both in Western Europe and the United States.