Politics and Public Policy

Strategic Actors and Policy Domains

Donald C. Baumer, Carl E. Van Horn

• Publisher: CQ Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781483322315
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Getting beyond the traditional policy cycle discussed in most textbooks, the fully updated fourth edition of Politics and Public Policy offers a more comprehensive and realistic view of policymaking in the United States—one that looks beyond the jockeying between presidents and members of Congress, and explores the influence of corporate leaders, interest groups, bureaucrats, judges, and journalists. The book explores six distinct, yet connected, policy domains:

• Boardroom Politics (decisions by business leaders and professionals);
• Bureaucratic Politics (rule-making and adjudication by administrators);
• Cloakroom Politics (lawmaking by legislators);
• Chief Executive Politics (decision making by presidents, governors, mayors, and their advisers);
• Courtroom Politics (rulings by judges); and
• Living Room Politics (opinions expressed through the mass media, grassroots movements, political activists, and voters).

The authors' unique framework prepares students to evaluate the strategies of various political actors within each domain.

chapter 1

American Politics and Public Policy

House Speaker John Boehner was not a happy camper. He was preparing his chamber for a vote on a deal to step back from the “fiscal cliff,” which had been created eighteen months earlier by another deal that was necessary to avoid having the federal government default on its debt obligations. It was New Year’s Day, January 1, 2013, and the 112th Congress had yet to finish its business because it had postponed solving the fiscal cliff problem until almost the last possible hour (the 113th Congress was scheduled to start on January 3). Boehner and his Republican caucus had been outflanked by the White House and the Senate, and they alone stood between the president and a compromise package that had been negotiated by Senate leaders and Vice President Joe Biden. The Senate had acted the day before, passing legislation with an 89-8 vote that would allow tax rates to rise on American families earning more than $450,000 per year, but avoiding income tax increases for everyone else. Under normal circumstances, Boehner and House Republicans would have voted as a majority bloc to keep the legislation off the floor, but with tax increases for all Americans looming, could he and his party explain to the public why important legislation passed by the Senate (and supported by the president) didn’t deserve a vote in the people’s chamber?

Boehner didn’t think so; therefore, despite protests from his Tea Party colleagues, he was bringing the bill to the floor. As he did this, he knew that with the support of some Republicans, and virtually all of the House Democrats, the measure would pass and would be viewed as a victory for President Obama, who would finally realize his long-held goal of overcoming Republican opposition to increasing taxes on the wealthy. To add insult to injury, Boehner, who had remarked in the fall of 2011 that most Americans would prefer to watch football rather than hear a speech by the president about his latest job creation proposal, was missing the Rose Bowl. At one point, he was quoted as saying, “Am I having a nightmare or what?” Around 11 p.m., the House finally voted 257-167 to approve the deal.¹ (Stanford beat Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl 20-14.)

To observers of American politics and public policy, the bitter, drawn-out battles between Democrats and Republicans, the president and Congress, over fiscal policy (taxes and spending), which were fought almost continuously from 2010 to 2013, offered another striking example of the public policy process in the United States. It is a process, established by the U.S. Constitution more than 200 years ago, that divides power across legislative, executive, and judicial institutions and operates in a similar way at the federal, state, and local levels. Some of the important lessons about the political and policy process that were brought into sharp relief by these events are as follows:

• Presidents can exhort, but they cannot dictate policy. Presidents command media and public attention, but the legislature must approve all tax and spending policies.

• Elections matter. President Obama had just been reelected, and even his first-term archnemesis, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, had come around to the view that compromise was necessary to avoid greater economic harm to the country.

• The government and the economy are closely connected. The large cuts in government spending and the large increases in taxes on all Americans that lay beyond the fiscal cliff had grave economic implications, not only for the United States but for the entire world.

• The mass media play an important role in communicating information about unfolding events and helping shape public views about desirable policy steps. In this case, the public remained divided, Democrats versus Republicans, on the merits of the legislation, but most people agreed with President Obama that the wealthy could and should pay more to keep the government solvent and the economy healthy.²

• Wealthy Americans do not always get what they want out of the policy process.

In this book, we attempt to explain public policy by focusing on political institutions as critical but changing elements of the policymaking process. As shown in Table 1-1, American public policy and politics have undergone significant changes in the past two decades. Helping the reader understand those changes and, more important, how they came about is a core objective of this book. We stress the importance of the interaction between political institutions and the larger political culture and political economy in creating both constraints and opportunities for policymakers. In addition, we extend our analysis beyond the traditional branches of government—the executive, legislative, and judicial—to encompass corporate executives at one end and ordinary citizens and the mass media at the other. In doing so, we advance a broader view of what constitutes public policy.

Our approach confirms E. E. Schattschneider’s observation that the choice of conflicts is critical to the determination of political success or failure.³ American policymaking institutions, and the policy domains associated with them, differ significantly in terms of the scope of conflict that occurs within them, how settled or unsettled they are, and how they shape the choices we, as a society, face.

TABLE 1-1 The Changing Context of Politics and the American Economy, 1990, 2000, and 2010

Sources: Unemployment: Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Labor Statistics from the Current Population Survey: Household Data: Annual Averages: 1. Employment Status of the Civilian Noninstitutional Population, 1942 to Date,” February 5, 2013, www.stats.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat01.htm, and http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000; deficit or surplus: Economic Report of the President (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2000), and Paul Krawzak, “Budget Proposal Avoids Making Tough Choices,” CQ Weekly, February 21, 2011, 686; cost of congressional campaigns: The Campaign Finance Institute, “Data,” www.cfinst.org/data.aspx; Internet access: Department of Commerce, U.S. Census Bureau, “Publications about Computer and Internet Use,” www.census.gov/hhes/computer/publications/, Internet World Stats, “United States of America: Internet Usage and Broadband Usage Report,” www.internetworldstats.com/am/us.htm, and Samuel Kernell, Gary Jacobson, and Thad Kousser, The Logic of American Politics, 5th ed. (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2012), 642; welfare cases: Department of Health and Human Services and Administration for Children and Families, Office of Family Assistance, “July 2011- SSP-MOE Caseload: TANF Caseload Data,” April 3, 2012, www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ofa/resource/2011-07-tanssp-0; gross domestic product: Executive Office of the President, Office of Management and Budget, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2001 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2000), 170–171, and Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, “National Economic Accounts,” www.bea.gov/national/index.htm#gdp.

Our primary aim in this book is to develop a conceptual framework for thinking about the relationship between politics and public policy. That framework stresses the importance of political institutions, which we have defined broadly to include structures and norms associated with different policymaking settings. Such a perspective yields six policy domains that form the core of the discussion in this book. Although we generalize about the patterns of behavior within different political institutions, we also emphasize that political institutions can be changed. We cite examples of such changes and spell out their implications for public policy. We have tried to move away from the view that policymaking is a sequential, linear process. We have also eschewed the perspective that voters and public officials are profit maximizers whose behavior can be predicted on the basis of rational expectations. Thus, our approach is to stress the importance of political institutions without reducing them to quantities in abstract mathematical formulas. The world of politics is messier than all of that, but it is not so chaotic as to preclude some generalizations.

This book is organized so that the connection between politics and public policy remains in view. It is important to be able to see the forest and the trees. To that end, this chapter introduces several important themes and perspectives. We begin with a discussion of the public officials authorized by the national and state constitutions to make policy. Next, we turn to the subject of how different kinds of governments interact with one another in a federal system. After that, the influence of lobbyists and journalists on public policy is examined. We then illustrate the remarkable elasticity of policymaking in the United States by focusing on the two ends of the policymaking spectrum: private decision making, which features a limited scope of conflict, and public decision making, with a wide scope of conflict. Last, we introduce the six policy domains and attempt to show how complex and interdependent the process is. The six policy domains are explored in depth in chapters 3 through 8.

POLICYMAKERS

At all levels of American government, power over public policy is shared by different institutions—legislatures, chief executives, and courts. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the authority to make laws, the president the responsibility to administer them, and the Supreme Court the right to interpret and enforce them. The separation of powers is designed to make each institution independent of the others. However, each delegation of authority is qualified by other constitutional provisions so that legislative, executive, and judicial powers are shared to some extent. The same phenomenon is apparent at the state and local levels. Government institutions are as interdependent as they are independent.

The functioning of these institutions over time has accentuated this sharing and interdependence, although a considerable degree of separateness and independence still exists. In addition, a variety of bureaucratic institutions has been created that, independently, wield substantial power over public policy. In this and subsequent chapters, we demonstrate that there is much more to public policy than public officials. Our initial focus is on legislators, chief executives, bureaucrats, and judges.

Legislators

Under the Constitution and its state-level counterparts, legislators are the principal lawmakers in the political system. To become a law, a proposal, in the form of a bill, must be approved by Congress, a state legislature, or a city council. Approval depends on coalition building, the aim of which is to obtain the support of a legislative majority. Without legislative approval, no taxes can be raised, no money can be spent, and no new programs can be launched. The constitutional assumption is that the people’s elected representatives should play the leading role in making public policy.

To ensure a high degree of responsiveness, legislators are accountable to the electorate every two, four, or six years. In practice, however, electoral accountability does not always result in the adoption of policies favored by the voters. One reason is that individual legislators can often escape responsibility for policies adopted or not adopted by the legislature as a whole. Through casework, or constituency service, legislators can cultivate a core of grateful constituents who will support their legislators because they have performed some useful service for them, such as expediting the delivery of a Social Security check or arranging a tour of the White House or the Capitol building. These norms and practices enable legislators to pursue their own preferred policies, subject, of course, to certain constraints. A senator from a ranching state probably would not tempt fate by leading the fight to raise fees for grazing cattle on federal lands.

Service to constituents, coupled with decentralized and fragmented policymaking systems (centered around legislative committees), and high incumbent reelection rates characterized legislative bodies in the United States from the 1950s to the 1990s. During this period, legislative observers often compared American legislatures with those in Western Europe, where it was common to find parliamentary systems, in which the chief executive was also the leader of the parliament or legislative body, and “responsible party” systems, in which legislative members of the same party voted together on major issues. U.S. legislative bodies were typically found lacking in these comparisons because broad, party-based agendas were not the central focus of policy debates and conflicts. In recent years, however, party-centric behavior has become more prominent in legislatures in the United States. Legislators still pursue constituency services and personal political priorities, but party-based policies and party discipline have become increasingly important parts of the legislative process.

Even though parties and party leaders now exercise considerable centralized power in U.S. legislatures, legislative committees continue to be significant countervailing forces, especially in the U.S. Congress. Often referred to as “little legislatures,” committees are the legislative workshops, where bills are hammered out, amendments are drafted, and deals are struck. But here, too, many ideas are condemned to the dustbin of history. For that reason, committees are known as legislative graveyards; most bills die in committee without coming to the floor for a vote.

Despite these obstacles, legislators pass an amazing number of measures. In 2010, for example, state legislatures in the United States approved over 25,000 bills and resolutions.⁴ In general, legislative bodies prefer to pass bills that distribute benefits, rather than bills that impose penalties, or bills that redistribute the wealth across social classes.⁵ Many legislative bodies also prefer bills that delegate authority to the chief executive or the bureaucracy, even though they may complain about executive “usurpation.” By delegating authority to others, legislators escape responsibility for difficult policy problems and for solutions that upset people. Delegation has become rampant since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, when the Supreme Court, after some initial resistance, eventually allowed Congress to delegate considerable authority to the executive branch. This has led some observers to wonder whether our system of checks and balances has in fact become a system of blank checks.

Chief Executives

With individual legislators marching to their own drumbeats, chief executives face a formidable task when they engage in the politics of lawmaking. Legislative deference to chief executives is far from automatic. Legislative resistance is especially likely when the legislative and executive branches are controlled by different political parties. During the past twenty-five years, more than half of the states have had divided control of government, with at least one chamber of the legislature controlled by the opposite party of the governor. After the 2011 elections, divided control in state government stood at seventeen states, but 2012 brought about a change as thirty-seven states moved to one-party control of the governorship and the legislature (twenty-four Republican and thirteen Democratic), the highest level of unified government in sixty years.⁶ At the national level, at least one chamber of Congress has been controlled by a party different from the president’s for thirty-two of the past fifty-two years.⁷ The 2012 national elections kept this trend intact, as Democrats held the presidency and the Senate and Republicans retained control of the House of Representatives.

Regardless of which party controls the legislative branch, chief executives cannot take legislative cooperation for granted. Even under the best of circumstances, the chief executive’s power is the “power to persuade.”⁸ Members of Congress may be hostile to presidents who try to exert influence over the decisions of a separate and coequal branch of government. In short, chief executives cannot tell legislators what to do. Rather, they must wheedle and cajole, relying on good ideas, political pressure, personal charm, public support, and a touch of blarney. Some chief executives, such as Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, have made the most of their power to persuade, at least for a...