Political scientists are only now, and dimly, beginning to recognize that something called “political risk analysis” (PRA) is very much in vogue in the corporate and banking communities of this country. Any attempt to assess this uncommon development should begin with this question: Why would any banker or corporate manager wish to spend hard cash on anything political scientists might have to say about places overseas where banks and multinational corporations lend or invest their capital? After all, the profession is not exactly distinguished by its ability to make accurate forecasts. Indeed, Sartori has argued that political scientists ought to eschew forecasting entirely in that they are best able to explain what happened as opposed to what may come to pass.

Sartori's assertion of course would make historians of us all—and burden us with the historian's smug claim that, if the history examined is too recent, the immediacy of events will distort our vision and bias our judgments. Thus, rather than try to foretell where, say, Germany will move politically next year we should expend (more!) of our resources to establish once and for all what really caused Weimar to collapse and Hitler to come to power.

This is not the stuff of political risk analysis. Growing interest in this activity is little based on broad analyses of the past or on long-term forecasts of future events. The potential consumers of political assessments are intelligent, harried bankers and corporate managers who are pressed to make relatively short-term decisions that affect the viability of enterprise and investment-and, equally important, careers-in professions where tenure is unknown.

Like all of their recent predecessors, senior officials of the Reagan administration have spoken both frequently and with enthusiasm of their intention to save large amounts of taxpayers' money while making the federal government more responsive and dramatically increasing agency productivity. All of this is to be done by shaping up the federal bureaucracy.

The main activity which has emerged so far has been to implement a hiring freeze, to reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy through firings and furloughs, and to advocate a barely specified form of cabinet governance. While these actions may save money in the short run, they will not improve the actual functioning of the federal bureaucracy.

Indeed, ideas emerging from presidential appointees frequently tend to be irrelevant for one simple reason: most secretaries, assistant secretaries and even deputy assistant secretaries know very little about federal bureaucracy when they come to Washington and subsequently spend a remarkably small portion of their time learning about it—a fact that in itself is one of the major obstacles to improving the management of the federal government.

Few secretaries, assistant secretaries and deputy assistant secretaries in any administration can resist the call of endless meetings with their counterparts from the states, other federal agencies or the big interest groups. Even more compelling for them is the siren call of travel to Paris, Peoria, and sundry places east and west to spread both enlightenment and the gospel of their administration and to revel in the attention automatically granted many visiting federal officials.