The Preparing Future Faculty programs organized within the American Political Science Association are best understood as part of a larger effort to attempt to enhance doctoral professional training. Other initiatives include, but are by no means limited to, “Rostering” in APSA, the “Re-envisioning the Ph.D.” project funded by Pew; the “Responsive Ph.D.” initiative of the Woodrow Wilson Association; the “Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate;” and complementary “Preparing Future Faculty” programs at Emory, Syracuse and elsewhere. These efforts are based on a number of often implicit propositions which I shall briefly identify.

Alexander Hicks has written one of the most important works in the past thirty years on the development of income security policies in democratic capitalist states. (Hicks equates income security policies with “welfare states”—a point I will revisit later.) If this were not sufficient, the book also is the most significant comparative public policy study I have read. Based on years of reflection, scholarship and teaching, it covers, not merely cites, a wide range of literatures. It is extremely sensitive to particular historical experiences. It is theoretically informed. Most impressively, it is methodologically sophisticated and imaginative. And the book is concise and well–written. In short, it is a model of what exciting comparative research can be.

The public choice-property rights perspective is an important intellectual movement aimed at refurbishing and broadening the scope of classical microeconomic reasoning. This paper assesses the political implications of the “school”–its ability both to generate significant political insights and hypotheses and to use political arguments and findings to buttress the assumptions of microeconomic theory.

I conclude that, in the main, neither effort realizes its goal. What we do find revealed by a study of the political implications of the perspective is a well-developed, if generally unacknowledged, normative position, a position that deflects attention from the major sources of power in society and thus complicates the articulation of prescriptions or recommendation statements.

Decentralization is widely advocated as a means of alleviating the perceived central stultification of modern nation-states, especially those lacking federal constitutional structures. The experience of a separate administrative and decision-making structure in Northern Ireland is examined in an effort to gain an insight into the advantages and weaknesses of decentralization in practice.

Decentralization is rapidly replacing God, Country and Motherhood in popular favor. From the revolutionary left: “The sweeping concentration of power and control in the nationwide political and military Establishment necessitates the shift to decentralized forms of organization…. Monopoly capitalism has given a new concrete sense to the ‘revolution from below.’” To the Utopian left: “The core radical ideals and values of community, equality, and humaneness… can most nearly be realized through decentralization.” To the reformist left: “Decentralization will not ‘solve’ the problems of the poor, but it is a useful beginning.” To the reformist right: “The foundation of endeavor must be good human relationships, not impersonal control from aloft and afar. Power should be more decentralized.” To the status quo right: “A person can be expected to act responsibly only if he has responsibility. This is human nature…. Let us locate responsibility in more places. And let us measure what we will do for others by what they will do for themselves.” All major shades of opinion seem to ascribe to decentralization great powers of social and/or moral regeneration. The counterpoint, “centralization,” is associated with most of the evils of the modern polity: delay, red tape, constraints on individual initiative, restraint of spontaneity.