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.

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.

If anyone doubts that policy analysis is like a hot dog—its contents are both variable and suspect— Sabatier's essay in this issue should remove those doubts. His outlines of the open systems/funnel of causality, rational actors within institutions, policy streams, and advocacy coalitions approaches make pellucid that adherents to any one of these perspectives will examine different variables in searching for truth, beauty, or at least explanation in public policy-making. A full illustration of how each of these lens, when focused on the same policy area, would yield a somewhat different image would require a volume of significant length. While the profession waits for Sabatier to produce such a volume, perhaps we can be satisfied with a brief discussion of how the pursuit of equal educational opportunity would be viewed through a pair of these lenses. The rational actors within institutions and advocacy coalition lenses are used to examine this important policy area.

When the U.S. Supreme Court accepted the “separate but equal” interpretation of the constitution (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896) and followed that quickly with a decision ignoring the “but equal” part of the phrase in public education (Cumming v. County Board of Education, 1899), racially segregated schools were legitimized. What followed was a long war, waged most obviously by the legal arm of the NAACP (Tushnet, 1987), which led to the Supreme Court's reversal of the Plessy decision (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954, 1955). At that point policy-making in the area of equal educational opportunity shifted from a focus on overturning a loathsome judicial precedent to implementing a favorable one. Initial euphoria led to overly optimistic predictions about the speed with which segregated school systems could be dismantled.

The United States Congress has long been known for its lack of partisan cohesiveness and the inability of its majority parties to formulate and enact programs of policy. In the modern era (since the 1930s), policy leadership in the national government has come largely from the executive branch during the few periods of reasonably unified party rule (Roosevelt's New Deal, Johnson's Great Society). Over the past 35 years, the prevalence of divided government of a particular sort (Republican presidents with Democratic congressional majorities) has highlighted the internal divisions and lack of centralized power among congressional Democrats. There is, therefore, a natural interest in instruments of party leadership that are designed to offset the tendencies toward fragmentation and parochialism in Congress. The focus of this paper is on the Senate Democratic Policy Committee.

The Senate's version of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 included provisions for the establishment of party policy committees. This legislation stemmed largely from the work of the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress, known as the LaFollette-Monroney Committee. The Joint Committee's report called for the establishment of policy committees “to formulate overall legislative policy of the two parties” (Bone 1956, 342). The Committee's work was informed by, and part of, an active reform effort at that time (which included many political scientists) aimed at bringing about stronger parties that could be held accountable for certain policy outcomes (see for example Committee on Congress, American Political Science Association 1945; Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress 1946; Galloway 1946; Committee on Political Parties, American Political Science Association 1950).

How do you explain the outcomes of modern presidential elections? This is the central dilemma of American politics. Why, for instance, did the Democrats, the so-called majority party, lose again in 1988? And why have they gone down to defeat in five of the last six presidential elections? Curiously, there appears to be no dearth of answers to these questions.

Many pundits, such as neoconservative William Schneider (1988), have argued that the Democrats are too liberal to win a national election. Others maintain that presidential elections are retrospective referenda on the economy and peace issues. According to this view, the incumbent party never loses when times are prosperous and the nation is at peace. Still others argue that presidential elections are actually beauty contests in which voters select the candidate who demonstrates the most attractive combination of personality traits, leadership qualities, and political credentials (Miller, Wattenberg, and Malanchuk 1986). Yet others contend that most losing Democratic candidates have run notoriously inept campaigns. In the Yiddish vernacular, Dukakis was a “Putz.” Finally, some analysts (Burns, Peltason, and Cronin 1989: 276–77) try to please everyone by advancing umbrella explanations that include all of these arguments.

Unfortunately, none of these explanations, taken individually, is particularly persuasive. And most appear to be little more than post hoc rationalizations. Of course, when something cannot be fully understood, we are prone to make fun of our ignorance.

The results of the 1990 elections looked rather like late night TV reruns—it felt like we had seen this show before. In a sense, we had. Once again, over 90% of House incumbents running for reelection were successful. In the Senate, only one incumbent was defeated for reelection (which unique race in Minnesota the author had the good fortune—and, he would like to think, the excellent foresight—to be involved with in a central way). And once again, the monetary advantage held by incumbents was overwhelming and was apparently a major factor in the results.

This continued pattern was widely noted—and lamented—in the news media, as it had been after the 1988 election. A Los Angeles Times article was typical. The Times concluded, “With a few notable exceptions, the results … reinforced the basic tenet of American politics that well-financed incumbents are almost impossible to beat” (Fritz, Morris, 1990, p. A25). And, as the Times and many other news organs noted, that sky-high reelection rate came in a year supposedly awash in anti-incumbent sentiment after the fiasco of the budget process and other developments. The L.A. Times appropriately quoted Ellen Miller of the Center for Responsive Politics to the effect that the “big story of this election was that incumbents were insulated by money, in spite of the incredible frustration that many voters felt” (Fritz, Morris, 1990, p. A25).

This article explores the complex and contradictory nature of representative government and its impact on elected officials seeking to balance the public interest with their own private concerns. “Ethics in government” controversies occupy a gray area of public-private overlap which is particularly uncertain today as the press and the public's expectations of acceptable official behavior appear to be changing. Popular pejoratives directed at elected officials include “conflict of interest,” “special interest,” and “undue influence” in contrast to the “public interest.” These terms encompass key representational functions whose precise meaning is unclear.

The uncertainty lies in our inadequate understanding of the nature of representation, that complex interaction between governmental institutions and individual behavior. As Heinz Eulau contends, “… none of the traditional formulations of representation are relevant to the solution of the representational problems which the modern polity faces.” These conceptual limitations hamper our ability to craft “ethics” laws defining appropriate legislative behavior without distorting essential representative functions and responsibilities.

The following discussion explores two contradictory notions of representation: the “trustee” and the “delegate.” Each model inherently favors particular decision-making biases and creates potential conflicts of interest. Important trade-offs are implicit in promoting one model over the other. The analysis also implies that rational and ethical decision-making can result from institutional processes which are designed to check and balance self-interested individual representative behavior.