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Jennifer L. HochschildEditorBook Reviews

Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 20, No. 4, 781–794 (2001)© 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and ManagementPublished by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Note to Book Publishers: Please send all books for review directly to the Book ReviewEditor, Jennifer L. Hochschild, Department of Government, Littauer Center/N. HarvardYard, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138-3806.

Judith A. Baer

Is the Fetus a Person? A Comparison of Policies across the Fifty States, by Jean ReithSchroedel, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000, 223 pp., $29.95 cloth.

What fundamental principles underlie ideologies about fetal personhood? As oftenhappens in politics, the people who think they can best answer this question are theopponents of the respective positions. Pro-life activists accuse abortion rights advocatesof valuing adults’ freedom over children’s lives. Pro-choice advocates insist that thepro-life movement’s concern for children begins at conception and ends at birth. Thefirst accusation, though not unintelligent, is false; the second, though not inaccurate,is superficial. The best scholarship has moved beyond these cliches to rigorous andincisive analysis. For instance, Kristin Luker’s study of pro-choice and pro-life activists(1984) found that the two groups were divided less by opinions about fetal personhoodthan by ideas about women’s roles. The titles of Sally Kenney’s and Cynthia Daniels’analyses of fetal protection policies construct a telling juxtaposition: For WhoseProtection? (1992) and At Woman’s Expense (1993). Jean Reith Schroedel’s new bookis a welcome addition to the literature in this field.

Schroedel seeks not to unmask ideology so much as to deconstruct it. Unlike Luker,she does not focus on individuals’ lifestyles and belief systems. Schroedel concentratesinstead on the ideologies revealed in public policy. Her purpose is “to study the issueof fetal personhood in the context of all state criminal statutes that have the potentialto accord personhood status to the fetus” (p. 2, emphasis original). These policies fallinto three general categories: restrictions on abortion, sanctions imposed on pregnantwomen for endangering the fetus (usually by substance abuse), and the prosecutionof third parties for inflicting fetal damage (usually by violence against the mother).

This focus on policy is not without risks. First, every scholar must be careful not toconfuse finding coherent patterns in the data with imposing them on the data. Second,legislation is at least as much the product of political pressures as of belief systems; itis easy to conflate ideology and politics in explaining public policy. Schroedelrecognizes that “the lack of coherence of most policies across related areas is causedby lobbying by competing interest groups.” But fetal policy, she insists, is “not

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politically incoherent” because it is not made that way: “after all, no interest groupsadvocate the use of narcotics by pregnant women” or “support individuals who commitacts of violence against pregnant women or their unborn children” (p. 11).

Adopting Kenneth Meier’s terminology (1994), Schroedel suggests that prenataldrug use and third-party fetal damage fit Meier’s definition of “one-sided issues,” onwhich almost everyone agrees. But she is not consistent on this point. She concludesthat Meier’s model of moral policymaking is of limited applicability to fetal personhoodissues. At any rate, abortion is the prime example of a “contested issue” that pits“organized groups against one another” (p. 61). Why doesn’t the interest group modelwork here? Karen O’Connor’s study (1996) suggests that the structure, if not thecontent, of abortion politics in the United States is remarkably similar to that ofpolitics in general. And even on one-sided issues, agreement on morality does notentail agreement on policy; are we sure that the liquor industry would welcome a lawcriminalizing alcohol consumption during pregnancy? Schroedel’s failure to clarifyand support her premises weakens her analysis. But the defect is far from fatal to herproject. The ideological coherence she discovers in these policies is not dictated byher underlying assumptions; it emerges from the statutes she examines and the contextin which she puts them.

Reviewing familiar ground, Schroedel finds two opposed cultural narratives inpublic discourse about abortion. The pro-life “fetal rights position” maintains thatthe unborn, like all innocent persons, deserve protection. The awkwardly named“women’s rights position”—is it not rather the opposite?—asserts that “pro-lifepositions with regard to abortion are simply a smokescreen for broader attacks onwomen’s rights” (p. 12). These underlying moral imperatives generate empiricallytestable propositions. The fetal rights imperative would expect states with restrictiveabortion laws to criminalize prenatal substance abuse and third-party damage, andto promote the well-being of vulnerable persons. The women’s rights position wouldexpect the severity of a state’s abortion laws to be inversely related to women’ssocioeconomic and political status within the state; this proposition does not accountfor the paradox of women activists promoting pro-life policies. Schroedel’s othertwo propositions are unexceptional. If fetal policy is animated by bias against women,anti-abortion states would not necessarily adopt benevolent social welfare policiesor otherwise treat the fetus as a person.

Testing these propositions requires both a comprehensive data set—readily availablein the case of state laws—and measures for all the variables. These consist of overallcomposite scores for each state in each category. Schroedel’s indicators for women’sstatus include percentages of women legislators, women’s education levels, the NOWindex of women’s rights laws, and the existence of legislation requiring insurers tocover minimum postpartum hospital stays. Her indicators of state concern forvulnerable persons include facilitation of adoption, infant health policy, and spendingper poor child and public school pupil. Like most choices of indicators, these are notquestion-proof. What, for example, does education level within a state signify whenmore and more Americans spend less and less time residing in any given state? Butall of Schroedel’s indicators are defensible choices; none is jarringly wrong. If weaccept the premise that meaningful quantitative measurement of political phenomenais possible—a premise social science accepted long ago—the only possible conclusionis that these choices meet the standards of scholarly research.

Abortion policy is not difficult to quantify. A state either has or does not have outrightor partial bans (before or after Roe v. Wade), exemptions from bans (in cases of rape,for example), parental notification laws, or limits on access to abortion; some ofthese are more restrictive than others. Schroedel assigns scores to each state in

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ascending order of stringency and categorizes each state along a continuum frompro-abortion rights to strongly pro-life. Measurement becomes more complicatedwith respect to laws on prenatal substance abuse and third-party fetal damage. Despitethe intense media coverage of prenatal drug and alcohol use, the efforts of fetalprotection activists, and the exploitation of the issue by politicians, no state lawsspecifically criminalize prenatal drug use. Prosecutions under general criminal statutesare easier to publicize than to analyze. Schroedel examines non-criminal legislativepolicies, such as requirements that pregnant welfare recipients undergo drug tests orthat drug treatment centers give priority to pregnant women. The former is an exampleof a “punitively oriented” policy, while the latter exemplifies the “public healthapproach” (pp. 107–108). Schroedel develops composite scores for both kinds ofpolicies, so that every state has a score on both dimensions.

The small amount of data available to analyze makes third-party damage a differentproblem. “The one-sided morality policy framework is completely inapplicable” herebecause “the public has collectively yawned” (p. 138). Although third parties do atleast as much damage to fetuses as prenatal drug use does, fewer than half the statesmake it a crime for a third party to kill a fetus; no state specifically proscribes non-fatal assault on a fetus; and “the media are far less intrigued by fetal harms caused bydeliberate acts of violence against women” than by drug use during pregnancy (p.120). Schroedel has only the fetal killing statutes—their presence or absence, severityof charges, stringency of sentencing, and gestational age at which they apply—fromwhich to construct a composite measure.

Schroedel’s findings are not strong enough in any direction to justify outrightacceptance or rejection of either of the two cultural narratives of fetal policy. However,“the evidence provides far greater support for the women’s rights narrative than forthe fetal rights one” (p. 164). Women’s political and social status was inversely relatedto the stringency of anti-abortion laws, although neither political variable wasstatistically significant. Anti-abortion states are harsher toward prenatal drug usethan toward third-party killings. “Pro-life states were less likely than pro-choice statesto provide adequate care to poor and needy children. Their concern for the weak andvulnerable appears to stop at birth” (p. 164). So the familiar accusation now hasempirical support.

Schroedel disavows any intention “to denigrate the sincerity of pro-life lawmakers”who profess “a desire to save unborn babies” (p. 157). Perhaps, she speculates, pro-lifesentiment is motivated not by opposition to sexual equality but by commitment towomen’s traditional role as nurturing mother. This conciliatory observation will notpersuade scholars who, like this author (Baer, 1999), are convinced that commitmentto conventional gender roles is a commitment to male supremacy. But Schroedel’s goalin her last chapter is to seek “an opportunity to find common ground” (pp. 188–190) onreproductive rights and fetal protection. She perceives possibilities for consensus onthird-party damage and for transformation of the abortion debate by drugs like RU-486, although it is hard to see why; this book engenders no more optimism about thechances for reconciling the opposing positions than Luker’s book did.

However, the chapter’s title, “Where Do We Go from Here?,” might easily refer notto policymaking but to scholarly research. The search for the organizing principles ofideology could be carried on by generating and analyzing public opinion data. Orattention might focus on the private sector; a study of the relationships among thenow-defunct fetal protection regulations, benefits plans, and family leave provisionswould be informative. Is the Fetus a Person? is notable for its ability to stimulate thescholarly imagination. Jean Schroedel has made a valuable contribution to the studyof policy and ideology alike.

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JUDITH A. BAER is Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University.

REFERENCES

Baer, J.A. (1999). Our lives before the law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Daniels, C. (1993). At woman’s expense. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kenney, S.J. (1992). For whose protection? Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Luker, K. (1984). Abortion and the politics of motherhood. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

Meier, K.J. (1994). The politics of sin. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

O’Connor, K. (1996). No neutral ground? Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Paul G. Farnham

The Art & Craft of Case Writing, by William Naumes and Margaret J. Naumes, ThousandOaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999, 234 pp., $29.95.

The Art & Craft of Case Writing presents a thorough discussion of theconceptualization, writing, and use of cases as a tool for both teaching and research.Most of the discussion is devoted to the classroom use of cases, a topic of greaterexpected interest to most readers. The book includes detailed guidance on definingthe objectives of a case, gathering the appropriate data, organizing the issues in thecase, testing and refining the materials, and developing an instructor’s manual toassist in teaching the case. Drafts and final versions of both a sample case and theaccompanying instructor’s manual are included in appendices of the book.

The usefulness of this book to instructors will depend on their background, training,and attitudes toward the use of cases as an instructional tool. Faculty in schools ofbusiness or public administration, particularly those in the areas of management,marketing, administrative law, and human resources, are accustomed to teachingcase-based courses. Other disciplines in those schools, such as economics and finance,are based on more theoretical frameworks and may seldom use cases, if at all.

I approach The Art & Craft of Case Writing from the background of many yearsof teaching economics to masters’ level students in professional degree programs,including public administration, health administration, and businessadministration. Students in these programs are quite different from those in atraditional M.A. or Ph.D. program in a specific academic discipline. Professional-degree students are very applications-oriented, and they learn best through theuse of concrete examples drawn from real-world experience. They have littleinterest in theory for its own sake, and they want to be able to apply any theoreticaltools to their work environment. The discipline of economics, on the other hand,is based on a logical, deductive approach to analyzing problems. Economists beginwith a set of assumptions used to build a theory of consumer and producer behaviorand to analyze these interactions in a market setting. These models are then testedusing a variety of sophisticated econometric and statistical tools. Real-worldapplications of these models are usually discussed at the end of this process. Therole of government in many of these courses is taught in the context of “marketfailure”—a series of principles and examples on how markets may not achievedesirable results for society.

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Frustration with available materials for teaching business, public sector, and healtheconomics to professionally oriented students has led me to experiment with manyof the ideas developed in the Naumes’ book. Cases are likely to be one solution tothe incongruence between the learning styles of professional students and thediscipline-based methodologies discussed above. In chapter 1, William and MargaretNaumes define a case as “a factual description of events that actually happened atsome point in the past” (p. 10) to distinguish a case from fictional stories andhypothetical examples. They argue that the purpose in using a case is to elicitdiscussion and to analyze a decisionmaking process in messy, complex policyexamples where there is no one “best” answer. This approach is particularlyimportant for professional students, many of whom already know from their jobexperience that business and policy problems cannot be solved simply by theapplication of constrained optimization techniques.

The authors also note that cases can range anywhere “from one- or two-paragraphstories found at the end of textbook chapters, to 20-page (or more) descriptions of anentire corporation’s strategic decision making, to a series of cases that explore eventsover time or in different aspects of the organization” (p. 13). Many “cases” can bederived from the current news media, such as the New York Times or the Wall StreetJournal. Having students discuss and apply the course principles to these articles is abasic application of case analysis. In this book, the Naumes show how to extend anddevelop this process more formally. Even those faculty members who are skepticalabout the use of cases with their course material should read chapter 1, “What Is aCase and Why Write One?”

Chapter 2 relates the development of a case with specific educational objectives.Although the discussion of education theories could be shortened, Table 2.1, “CaseCharacteristics and Educational Objectives” (p. 27), is particularly useful in thinkingabout the reasons for designing a case. This discussion is closely linked with thematerial in chapter 5 on developing an instructor’s manual for use with a case. Table5.1, “Outline of a Typical Instructor’s Manual” (p. 77), should be read in conjunctionwith Table 2.1 to connect the material on how to teach a case with the objectives indeveloping it.

Chapter 3, “Finding a Case Site and Gathering Data,” makes the important pointthat ideas for cases often result from frustration in presenting certain topics in a givencourse. Professional students often want to use their own job experience as a basis forclass discussion. This is particularly important in executive programs where a substantialnumber of years of business or government experience may be a prerequisite forenrollment. These students are eager to bring their experiences to the classroom anddo not want to just listen to an instructor lecture on hypothetical situations. Examplesraised in class can either continue to be pursued as cases at that time or developed insubsequent semesters. Chapter 3 also discusses issues of privacy, data sensitivity, andthe use of the proper releases to obtain permission to use real-world business andpublic sector data in a case. Any form of class testing will help determine whetherenough information has been presented in the case for appropriate discussion or whetherthere is too much discussion in some areas and not enough on other topics. Table 7.1,“Elements of a Well-Written Case” (p. 125), is a checklist of factors to be consideredwhen class testing and analyzing the appropriateness of the case.

Chapter 10, “Video and Multimedia Case Studies,” shows where case writing isheaded in the future. It presents insights on the use of new technology, including theInternet, to improve the case format.

Some of the most important sections of The Art & Craft of Case Writing are theappendices, which present early drafts and final versions of both a sample case and

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the accompanying instructor’s manual. This material is extremely useful for new casewriters who can then see the iterative process of developing a complete case.

In summary, The Art & Craft of Case Writing is useful for both experienced casewriters and those thinking about developing and using cases in their classes. Asnoted, real-world concrete examples are extremely important for students inprofessional masters’ degree programs. Even if faculty members do not developfull-blown cases for their courses, they can benefit by considering the issues Williamand Margaret Naumes raise regarding the merits of this approach for teachingbusiness and policy courses.

PAUL G. FARNHAM is Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Andrew YoungSchool of Policy Studies, Georgia State University.

Sandford Borins

The Reinventor’s Fieldbook: Tools for Transforming Your Government, by David Osborneand Peter Plastrik, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000, 690 pp., $ 39.00 paper.

This book is a more detailed and operational sequel to Osborne and Gaebler’sReinventing Government (1992) and Osborne and Plastrik’s Banishing Bureaucracy(1997). Its jacket line, “practical guidelines, lessons, and resources for revitalizingschools, public services, and government agencies at all levels,” accurately conveysthe objective that it effectively achieves.

The Reinventor’s Fieldbook employs a top-down structure, starting with processesthat must be launched by heads of government—such as establishing a vision andsetting goals—and then moving to initiatives to eliminate governmental functionsthat no longer serve core public purposes (e.g., program reviews or asset sales). Thisis followed by a discussion of the separation of rowing and steering as exemplified bystructural reforms in New Zealand and the United Kingdom and the creation ofconsequences for performance through managed competition and performancemeasurement. Enhancing customer influence is explored in terms of expanding choicethrough voucher or reimbursement systems and making organizations accountablefor service quality. The book then moves deeper into the bureaucracy to deal withorganizational empowerment tools, such as reinvention labs, and employeeempowerment tools, such as suggestion programs. It concludes with ideas fordeveloping a more entrepreneurial and innovative organizational culture.

Each chapter or section begins with an extended case study (Oregon Benchmarksto exemplify establishing a vision, the efforts of the Social Security Administration toimprove 1-800- service to exemplify customer service initiatives, and the struggle forschool vouchers in Wisconsin to exemplify competitive customer choice). The authorsthen discuss the circumstances under which a particular tool should not be used (forexample, when not to privatize) and the lessons learned from reinventors’ successesand failures in employing it. The lessons encompass detailed implementation strategiesand tactics. They are followed by an annotated bibliography of resources. The bookneed not be read cover-to-cover as the tools stand alone.

The book has many virtues: It is detailed and comprehensive. It draws on a widerange of practitioner experience, both in the United States and internationally,including the authors’ own as reinvention consultants, as well as hundreds ofinterviews. The lessons learned make significant contributions to the political science

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literature on implementation and the organizational behavior literature on themanagement of change. The book demonstrates the international transmission ofpublic management ideas, for example, the effect of the United Kingdom’s Citizens’Charter and Next Steps agencies on the National Performance Reviews.

Writing for practitioners, the authors take a casual approach to referencing,eschewing references within the text but including page-by-page endnotes. It isunfortunate they chose not to follow The Chicago Manual of Style nor list all theirinterviews. These omissions understate the extent of their scholarship.

Despite the book’s length, the authors note that they have not exhausted the topicand promise a sequel to deal with total quality management, business processreengineering, and work outs. To this I would add implementation of the informationsystems that facilitate these reforms. The book focuses on reinvention at the top—setting the agenda and changing organizational structures and incentives—but saysless about initiatives coming from the front lines. I kept track of the reinventors’organizational levels: It turned out that of the total of 224 (!) I identified, 22 percentwere politicians, 25 percent agency heads, 39 percent middle managers, 8 percentrepresentatives of public interest groups or unions, and only 6 percent front-lineworkers. I compared this with my own research on the initiators of the bestapplications to public management innovation awards, which shows similarpercentages for politicians and agency heads, but a higher percentage for middlemanagers and a significantly higher percentage (closer to 30 percent) for front-lineworkers (Borins, 2001). (Because some applications had several initiators, the totalis more than 100 percent.)

This book, deeply rooted as it is in the new public management (NPM) approach, iscertain to attract the criticism of the old public administration (OPA) school thatdominates the pages of journals like the Public Administration Review. The Reinventor’sFieldbook makes clear the differences between the two approaches. Osborne andPlastrik tacitly accept the postulates of public choice theory: Power-seeking politiciansdefer to well-organized interest groups; perverse bureaucratic incentives createperverse bureaucratic behavior; and public sector monopolies are wasteful andinefficient. These postulates lead directly to recommendations such as creatingindependent commissions or non-partisan processes at the political level, changingincentives within the bureaucracy (for example, allowing carry-forwards andimplementing gain-sharing), and establishing public sector competition (vouchers)or quasi-competition (league tables). The use of an independent commission and anunamendable resolution to decide on a set of military base closings is an example ofa non-partisan process the authors cite with approval; ironically, Rep. Richard Armey,in other contexts a fierce partisan, devised it (pp. 68–69).

Ultimately, the vision that Osborne and Plastrik advocate is a more effective, morefocused, more efficient, and smaller public sector. It would concentrate on keypriorities, privatize inessentials, and contract out parts of its production process. Thecost of public sector production would be driven down to the minimum for a givenlevel of quality, with the private sector used as a basis of comparison. Public servantswould have increased managerial freedom but would be held accountable for meetingperformance targets.

Public choice ideas have profoundly challenged the OPA. The OPA has respondedby embracing both sides of a Hegelian dichotomy. Some authors (Terry, 1998) resortto idealization, in essence arguing that because politicians should seek to define thepublic interest and because public servants should be unbiased policy advisers andefficient implementers, in fact both groups, at least most of the time, live up to theseideals. What is rational is real. The alternative view is that politics is intrinsically

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about redistribution. Thus, bureaucratic inefficiency does not exist, becausebureaucratic production is being used to reward an interest that has won politicalsupport. What is real is rational.

Regardless of which side of this dichotomy is embraced, those in the OPA schoolprefer a larger public sector, at least in the United States. They would increase thedomain in which production decisions are made by democratic dialogue as opposedto market forces (deLeon and Denhardt, 2000). Because of their trust in public-spiritedpublic servants or their acceptance of redistribution, inefficiency poses no problem.This ethos also leads to a preference to refer to the recipients of public services ascitizens, rather than customers, the term Osborne and Plastrik most often use.

In the last analysis, the NPM and OPA views are irreconcilable because they arebased on opposing assumptions about the behavior of Homo politicus, and opposingvisions of where the line between state and market should be drawn. While the OPAcritique of Osborne and his co-authors may appear on the surface to concern theirmethodology, it is much deeper.

I strongly recommend The Reinventor’s Fieldbook to practitioners consideringimplementing all or part of the NPM agenda; they will find the lessons learned anextremely useful guide to strategy and tactics. Academics interested in NPM as wellas implementation or managing change will find much to learn. I eagerly look forwardto the fourth volume in the Reinventing Government tetralogy.

SANDFORD BORINS is Professor of Public Management at the University of Toronto.

REFERENCES

Borins, S. (2001). The challenge of innovating in government. Arlington, VA:PricewaterhouseCoopers.

deLeon, L. & Denhardt, R. (2000). The political theory of reinvention. Public AdministrationReview, 60, 89–97.

Osborne, D., & Gaebler, T. (1992). Reinventing government. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Osborne, D., & Plastrik, P. (1997). Banishing bureaucracy. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Terry, L. (1998). Administrative leadership, neo-managerialism, and the public managementmovement. Public Administration Review, 58, 194–200.

William A. Galston

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by Robert D. Putnam,New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000, 541 pp., $26.00 cloth.

Robert Putnam’s 1995 article “Bowling Alone” and the debate it sparked are so wellknown among social scientists (and to some extent the general public as well) that aconventional review of his latest and already much-reviewed book seems almost besidethe point. His central theoretical concept—the amalgam of social networks, norms,and trust, dubbed “social capital”—has entered into common parlance, as has hishistorical thesis that in recent decades social capital has declined markedly, withserious consequences for our social and political life.

Bowling Alone advances the debate in four ways: Drawing upon new data sources,Putnam traces the decline of a wide range of associational activities in much greaterdetail than ever before. He arrays a wide range of possible causal explanations for

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this decline, establishes methodological and quantitative criteria for acceptableexplanations, and then winnows the list of suspects to a handful that meet thesecriteria. He links a variety of social, civic, and political problems to the decline insocial capital. Finally, he sketches an agenda of steps that various sectors of societycould take to arrest and reverse this decline.

In the year since the initial publication of Bowling Alone, a surprising degree ofconsensus has developed concerning its strengths and weakness. On the one hand, itappears implausible to continue arguing (as some did in the mid-l990s) that nothingis changing and that Americans are as connected as ever. Something is different;while there are important pockets of associational vigor, in the aggregate we are lessconnected with one another than we were four decades ago, and less involved in awide range of activities outside our own home. If we are not yet a nation of spectators,we are well down the road to couch-potato-dom.

On the other hand, runs the consensus, Putnam’s causal explanation is less thanfully compelling, in part because he gives short shrift to some serious possibilities, inpart because his methodology for assigning weights to causes is not as rigorous as itmight be. Nor is the specification of consequences allegedly flowing from the declinein social capital wholly persuasive, in part because of the classic difficulty of movingfrom statistical correlation to causal imputation. In fact, some of the claims are sofar-reaching as to appear counterintuitive. Finally, almost no one is satisfied withPutnam’s recommendations. They seem too hortatory, incompletely specified, andinadequate to the scope and depth of the problems he has identified.

In my judgment, this consensus is just about right. So, rather than repeating it inmore detail, it is more useful to look ahead and to lay out the theoretical and empiricalagenda to which the debate swirling around this book points. We can make realprogress if we can get past polemics and take this debate as the occasion to cometogether around a sensible research program. I suggest the following elements.

(1) As many critics have suggested, it is necessary to be more precise about theconcept of social capital. In particular, we must ask whether networks of associationsare important in themselves, or rather as sources of generalized social trust. Thismatters because Putnam does not really prove that association causes generalizedtrust, and some evidence suggests that in the aggregate it is causally unrelated tosuch trust. Putnam himself says that these causal relations are “as tangled as well-tossed spaghetti” and calls for careful research, including work done underexperimental conditions, to disentangle them (p. 137).

(2) Putnam usefully distinguishes between “bonding” social capital (group-centered,inwardly focused reciprocity and trust) and “bridging” social capital (reciprocity andtrust extended to strangers and to those who differ from oneself in important respects).But the consequences of this distinction seem to go further than he takes them. Inparticular, if citizens’ reengagement with the public sphere requires a greater measureof bridging social capital, then we will need a much finer-grained analysis of thekinds of formative activities that tend to produce this more general soical capacityrather than group-specific ties.

It should also be noted that what is regarded as bridging, hence generalized, from oneperspective may be seen as bonding and particularized from another. Those who arguefor cosmopolitanism—foreign policy based on international redistribution and globalhuman rights—regard the focus on patriotic civic attachments as dangerously narrow.The conceptual distinction between bridging and bonding social capital is shorthand fora moral exploration into the appropriate bounds of fellow-feeling. Who is “we,” anyway?

(3) While Putnam’s roundup of causal suspects is impressively wide, it falls somewhatshort of an academic all-points bulletin. Here is my list of additional possibilities—

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important developments of recent decades that are mentioned only in passing, or notat all, hence not explored in adequate depth:

• economic globalization that weakens ties between firms and local communities• widening inequalities of income and wealth; the growing diversity of the U.S.

population since the liberalization of immigration laws in 1965• rising levels of materialism, and what Daniel Yankelovich calls the “affluence

effect”—the tendency of higher levels of material well-being to exacerbateindividualism

• rising levels of crime, which almost certainly reduce generalized trust• the decline of institutions, such as political parties, that once affirmatively

recruited individuals at the grassroots into wider networks• the anti-union turn of government policy, and• a series of national developments, involving leaders and public events, that have

tended to reduce trust and divide citizens from one another.

I might add that, along with others, I have an intuition that the massive entrance ofwomen into the paid workforce, and especially women with young children whowork outside the home full-time, has had a greater effect on the fabric ofneighborhoods and communities than Putnam suggests.

(4) I agree with Putnam that generational change has played a major role in alteringpatterns of association, especially because mounting evidence suggests that habitsand outlooks developed when young tend to shape participation throughout life. But,as he himself acknowledges, to say this is to do little more than reformulate a centralcausal puzzle. We need a much fuller account of what brings about generationalchange, focusing on likely causes such as family structure and dynamics, culturalshifts, and pivotal public events.

(5) Finally, above and beyond this conceptual and empirical agenda, Bowling Alonepoints toward a normative inquiry into contemporary democracy. Is increasedparticipation necessarily a sign of democratic health? (Francis Fukuyama and othersdoubt that it is.) Are forms of citizenship relative to specific historical epochs, asMichael Schudson suggests, and is our use of traditional participatory indicesoverlooking new ways of expressing citizenship? What does it mean that the verydecades that have witnessed such dramatic declines in participation and trust havealso seen an historic upswing in most forms of tolerance, a virtue not unrelated to thehealth of a diverse democratic society? It is one of the signal accomplishments of thisimportant book to have brought us face to face with the need for renewed academicand popular debate about the shape of our democratic future.

WILLIAM A. GALSTON is Director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, andProfessor at the Maryland School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland, College Park.

Graham K. Wilson

American Business and Political Power: Public Opinion, Elections and Democracy, byMark A. Smith, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, 245 pp., $16 paper.Stuck in Neutral: Business and the Politics of Human Capital Investment, by Cathie JoMartin, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, 262 pp., $19.95 paper, $49.95cloth.Does Business Learn? by Sandra I. Suarez, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,2000, 192 pp., $47.50 cloth.

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It has often been remarked that the enduring tension in capitalist democracy is therelationship between its two elements, capitalism on the one hand and democracy onthe other. For some, history shows that the relationship is close and supportive; mostdemocracies have been capitalist and, although there have been prominent examplesof authoritarian capitalist regimes, such as Pinochet’s Chile, it is a more striking factthat there has never been a regime that was both thoroughly socialist (as opposed tosocial democratic) and democratic. For others such as Charles Lindblom (Lindblom,1977), capitalism imprisons democratic governments. Policies that are perceived asharmful to business interests cannot be pursued by the governments of capitalistdemocracies unless they are willing to incur penalties such as capital flight and theloss of investment that would make these policies costly indeed. Moreover, capitalismgenerates inequalities that are themselves inimical to pluralist democracy. In the UnitedStates, business dominates the interest group system. There are far more lobbyistsworking in Washington for business than for any other interest, and business similarlydominates interest group contributions to the campaign finance system.

One might have expected that the massive normative importance of these issueswould draw political scientists in large number to the study of the relationshipbetween capitalism and democracy, business and politics. The reverse is, of course,the case. Relatively few political scientists in the United States focus on these topics.Those of us who teach courses on this topic find very few articles of any value inaddressing this topic in academic journals, such as the American Political ScienceReview, that supposedly contain the best research in the discipline. In recent years,the tide may have begun to turn. The volume of work on business and politics doesnot approach topics such as voting behavior, congressional committees, and otherwar horses of American political science that dominate the American Political ScienceReview and American Journal of Political Science. Nevertheless, there are more panelson business and politics at the major political science conventions. Both theAmerican Political Science Association and International Political ScienceAssociation have been actively working in the field in an organized fashion. Theappearance in a single year of these three fine books on business and politics mayin itself be an important evidence that the study of business and politics has forcedits way into American political science.

It is Smith’s book that engages most directly and thoroughly with the normativequestions that underpin the field. Showing commendable courage for a scholarbeginning his career, Smith seeks to discover whether corporations do indeed dominateAmerican politics. One can hardly imagine a topic less likely to fit with the standardadvice to graduate students to pick something manageable for their dissertation topic.Smith develops an intriguingly counterintuitive argument. When business unites tosupport or oppose a policy, it is likely to lose. When business is less cohesive, it ismore likely to win. Smith explains this apparent paradox in terms of the forces likelyto be arrayed against business. When business is united, it is generally confronted byimpressively organized opposition from labor or public interest groups that mobilizepublic opinion against it. Careful empirical analysis leads Smith to the conclude thatthere is no evidence that public policy shifts in favor of business when economictimes are bad. This finding negates, in his view, a central tenet of the structuralistaccount of business power and suggests that elected politicians will be forced to yieldto business to secure employment and their own reelection. Yet Smith does not reacha Panglossian conclusion that everything is for the best in this best of all possibleworlds. On the contrary, he concludes that, “Business unity coexists, but only uneasily,with the precepts and requirements of democracy” ( p. 213). Smith fears that businesspower may be excessive in two respects. First, in numerous technical but important

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us that this is not necessarily the case. There have been important examples inAmerican history of American business leaders who supported progressive initiatives:Gerald Swope of General Electric in the New Deal era is perhaps the best knownexample, and Ferguson has broadened the example into a well-known, interestingtheoretical argument. Those immersed in the comparative politics literature on welfarestate development will know that welfare states are not always developed by politicianswho are left of center and are not always opposed by business. Martin believes thatthe possibilities for productive engagement between social reformers and businesswere greater in the 1990s than was commonly realized. Basing her study on hundredsof interviews with government relations executives in a wide variety of businesses,Martin argues that, in business circles, there was considerable support for reformssuch as national health insurance, government-sponsored training, and family leave.

Why, then, did attempts at constructive dialogue—for example, between businessand the Clinton health care reform task force—fail? Martin suggests that the problem

and cumulatively very significant issues business has no serious opposition. Second,business does seem to be able to affect public opinion. Smith contends that byincreasing its support for pro-business think tanks from the 1970s onward, businesshas changed public opinion in its favor: “ …recognizable—if not overwhelming—changes in the public mood arise from shifts in the ideological balance among thethink tanks that are represented in the public media” (p. 194).

Smith’s conclusions are thus in line with those of critical pluralist scholars suchas myself (Wilson, 1981), David Vogel (1989), and Mucciaroni (1995). Business doesnot necessarily win. Business is obliged to expend significant resources on protectingits interests from other interests. Nonetheless, conflict between business and otherinterests does not take place on as level a playing field as pluralists have seemed tosuggest. Business enjoys significant advantages compared with other interests interms of the resources it can devote to politics. Smith’s distinctive contributionmay be less his conclusions than how he reaches them. He shows commendablythorough scholarship in defining and measuring important concepts such as businessunity. Smith displays considerable ingenuity in empirically testing theories, suchas the structuralist claims that democratically elected politicians are obliged tosurrender to business to attract investment. His book displays a familiarity withboth a wide range of theoretical arguments and statistical techniques often praisedbut rarely achieved.

It is, of course, possible to criticize Smith’s arguments. Some statistical analysesseem asked to bear more of the weight of the argument than appear appropriate. Therejection of the structuralist argument, for example, rests primarily on the failure ofa model to demonstrate a relationship between a downturn in the economy andpoliticians’ failure to respond to public opinion. While it is reasonable to contendthat science advances by rejecting hypotheses, it seems a little risky to base one’s ownargument on a failure to discover a statistical relationship between concepts so difficultto define or measure as public opinion and pro- or anti-business policy. As Smithhimself recognizes, it is also somewhat perilous to explain shifts in public opinion, sodifficult to define and measure reliably, by shifts in the prominence of think tanks inmedia reports. The possibilities for spurious relationships are considerable.Nonetheless, Smith deserves enormous credit for his thorough and imaginative useof data as well as for his bravery in confronting the most challenging issues in thestudy of business and politics.

Cathie Jo Martin’s book explores the relationship between business and a range ofsocial policies. We have become used to the simple idea that business invariablyopposes policies that expand the size and scope of the welfare state. Martin reminds

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is that the small-business tail wags the entire business dog. Small businesses tend tohave more clout than large corporations in business umbrella organizations, such asthe Chamber of Commerce. Conscious of their more limited resources, small businesshas organized determinedly and its apparent weakness, its fragmentation intonumerous small concerns, has translated into an important strength as it is a presencein every congressional district in the country.

Martin’s book is more representative of most important studies of business andpolitics in its methodology. Some of her evidence comes from the analysis of statisticaldata; she shows, for example, that the best indicator of whether a corporation is opento progressive social policy proposals, such as national health insurance, is whetherit employs enough policy professionals to link it to the arguments being advanced inthe policy field. Martin bases her work largely, however, on in-depth interviews anddocumentary sources rather than on statistical analysis. The method allows her toexplore the nuances of executives’ thinking and the reasons for their strategic moves.Its limitation is that Martin is necessarily influenced by those who talked to her ratherthan those who did not. Martin considers but rejects the possibility that the governmentaffairs executives to whom she talked were not representative of their corporations’leaders; although chief executives were prepared to allow their government affairsvice presidents some leeway, they would ultimately bring them back into line withmore conservative preferences. Governmental affairs executives may, in short, bemuch more liberal than executives in general.

One criticism I should make of the book, a criticism directed at the publisher ratherthan the author, is the lack of a bibliography. Footnotes are my favorite form ofreferencing but they really need to be supplemented by a bibliography or at least anindex that contains authors’ names as well as subjects.

The great strength of Martin’s book is the insight that comes from the comparativeperspective. Martin, well versed in the politics of neo-corporatist countries likeDenmark, is aware that the compromises or, as they are often called, settlements,that have to be made between progressive politicians and business in capitalistdemocracies are particularly hard to arrange in the United States because of thefragmented, competitive nature of its interest group system. Whenever a businessumbrella organization like the Chamber of Commerce agrees to compromise, forexample on health care reform, it runs a considerable risk of losing members tocompeting organizations (e.g., the National Federation of Independent Business) thatcharacterize its actions as weakness or betrayal. The implicit comparison in Martin’sbook is between the United States and countries in which business is apparentlymore strongly organized into a single business peak association. This type oforganization may be more able to make the compromises with reformers that Martinbelieves many corporate executives in the United States favor.

Martin’s book explores the relationship between business and politics in what Lowitermed the redistributive areas of social policy. Suarez’s book is an extended casestudy of business politics in the distributive policy field. More specifically, Suarezexamines the evolving tactics of corporations, largely pharmaceuticals, in defendingthe huge tax breaks they have received for shifting production to Puerto Rico. Thegreat value of Suarez’s book is that it reminds us that even when their most immediateinterests are on the line, corporations just like individuals may fail to act in a mannerthat fully protects their interests. Corporations, like individuals, have to engage inpolitical learning to maximize their political gains. Pharmaceutical firms failed tomobilize to the full to protect their tax breaks in the 1970s and saw them restricted.In 1986 and again in 1993, pharmaceutical corporations mobilized much moreeffectively and cohesively to protect their self-interest, often with the aid of politicians

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from mainland America with numerous Puerto Rican constituents. Although Suarezdoes not stress the point, the story is a microcosm of the broader story of the evolutionof business politics that Vogel (1989), myself (Wilson 1981), and Mucciaroni (1995)have told; perhaps because of a false sense of security developed during the “end ofideology” era of the 1950s, corporations did not deploy their impressive capacityto act politically to the full. Suarez, however, develops the argument moretheoretically into a model of political learning. The behavior of corporations todayis determined not only by current threats or possibilities but by their experienceof politics in a previous era. We often assume that those with resources are readilyable to pursue them. Suarez shows how even richly endowed corporations mayfail to act as effectively as possible politically. The book makes an importantcontribution to the interest group literature in general by showing how interestgroups come to engage in politics and what strategies to pursue. Yet, althoughSuarez advances an interesting theoretical argument, I would recommend thebook largely because it offers a richly detailed study of corporations discoveringwhere their interests lie, deciding to engage in politics, and then discovering howto act effectively. We need richly detailed case studies as well as statistical studiesand theories. Suarez provides one.

As is often the case in distributive politics, the story of tax breaks for corporationsoperating in Puerto Rico is depressing. There was little reason to believe that the typeof tax subsidies offered did much for ordinary Puerto Ricans or were optimal interms of stimulating economic development in the commonwealth. Although Suarez’sstudy ends with a considerable reduction in tax credits for operating in Puerto Rico,the story she tells illustrates the importance of Smith’s warning: It is in thecomplicated, detailed policy areas in which business faces little or no organizedopposition that the danger of excessive business power is greatest. Throughout theperiod in which the Puerto Rican tax breaks were in place, politicians in Washingtonwere supposedly desperate for revenue to reduce the budget deficit. Yet the tax breakssurvived. Ordinary Americans are entitled to question why their political systemgenerates such perverse outcomes and to conclude with these authors that althoughsome of the common explanations are incorrect, business has more leverage thanmany would wish. Political scientists can at least take consolation in the appearanceof three excellent studies of business and politics in a single year.

GRAHAM K. WILSON is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and AssociateDirector at Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin,Madison.

REFERENCES

Lindblom, C.E. (1977). Politics and markets: The world’s political-economic systems. NewYork: Basic Books.

Mucciaroni, G. (1995). Reversal of fortunes. Washington DC: Brookings Institution.

Vogel, D. (1989). Fluctuating fortunes: The power of business in America. New York: BasicBooks.

Wilson, G.K. (1981). Interest groups in the United States. Oxford: Clarendon Press.