Over the last dozen years of the twentieth century, one major change affecting many American public policies consists of increased demands for efficiency. As a result, the demands on bureaucratic agencies responsible for delivery of public goods and services are daunting. Political authorities prescribe economic goals of efficiency and self-sufficiency for agencies while not reducing demands for attainment of political goals like efficacy and equity. Public officials have used techniques encouraging efficient behavior such as downsizing and evaluation through performance-based standards to make government more streamlined while still being effective. Have these changes occurred in different ways at different levels of the federal system? How can we explain those differences? Does the impact on the delivered goods and services vary significantly by level of government?

The last quarter century has witnessed a rising tide of skepticism among scholars about the link between information-gathering and policymaking. Drawing on several decades of research and rethinking, students of organizational behavior concluded that organizations collect information for reasons that have more to do with organizational dynamics than with the making of choice. Students of public policy found high-stakes policy controversies deeply resistant to recourse to “the facts.”

It was a typical election year in Philadelphia. The nation's freedom lay at peril, and everything depended on thousands of day laborers, up for sale at one to five dollars apiece on election day. That, at any rate, was what one observer warned Republicans in 1868. “Whichever party is the most plentifully supplied with the ‘root’ will command the vote of these honest ‘Bones and Sinews,’ in spite of fate!” he predicted. “The democracy for once, are in funds to repletion, & they intend to ‘win or die’!”

Parties of the democratic left have fared surprisingly poorly in postcommunist Russia. The reasons for this have to do with the legacy of the communist state, particularly the weakness of organized social associations outside the state and the continuing strength of patrimonial and corporatist patterns of state-society relations, together with constitutional and electoral institutions in the post-1993 system that undermine incentives for a system of competitive national political parties.

Currently, much of the literature surrounding Black politics in the 1920s and 1930s understates the role that Black citizens and politicians played in challenging Jim Crow and white supremacy at the national level. Instead, different factors like the “cage” that white Southerners placed on Civil Rights legislation or the influence that New Deal programs had on electoral decisions in the Black community. After realignment, Black Americans and their allies were then able to launch more effective challenges against white supremacy. Although these narratives contain much explanatory power, oftentimes they overlook critical aspects of Black politics during this period that complicate this narrative. Examining the career of Oscar DePriest, the first Black congressman elected in the twentieth Century, this article argues that Black citizens and their representatives were able to explicitly affect politics at the local, state, and federal levels through DePriest’s career prior to realignment.

In 1956 President Eisenhower signed an amendment to the social security program that created disability insurance. His action marked the end of a sharp debate over disability insurance and the beginning of two decades of consensus concerning the program. Thirty years later, however, major issues have arisen in the disability insurance program that closely resemble the disputes that preceded its passage. Consensus no longer prevails about the goals and administration of the program. In this paper, we describe the history of the social security disability program in terms of an illusive search for a political consensus.2 We first examine the U.S. Senate's 1956 debate over disability insurance. This debate provides a convenient summary of the ingredients of the compromise that sustained the consensus of the next two decades. Then, in an effort to explain what was at stake in 1956, we review discussions about disability that had taken place previously in bureaucratic and professional circles. We next examine the post- 1956 expansion of disability insurance, and we conclude with the dissolution of the compromise.

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the metamorphosis of Britain from a global, imperial power to a full (if sometimes ambivalent) member of the modern regional partnership that is the European Union (EU). During the same period, transnational criminal activity was transformed from an arena in which criminal fugitives sought merely to evade domestic justice through self-imposed exile to an environment in which improved travel and communication facilities enabled criminals to commute between national jurisdictions to commit crime or to participate in global criminal enterprises run along modern business lines. This development is so serious that it is considered in some quarters a threat to national security and the very fabric of society.

Charlton Heston, one of Hollywood's most prominent political activists, devoted much of his time to the Screen Actors Guild. Throughout the course of Heston's long acting career, the guild shifted its policy emphasis on several occasions. During the 1960s, when Heston served on the executive board, the guild adhered to its traditional strategy of focusing on wages, benefits, and working conditions. At that point, Heston took a moderate approach toward guild business, often showing his willingness to compromise. In the 1970s, the guild leadership was captured by more “liberal” actors who wished to expand the union's activities into social and political channels not directly related to the job of acting. In the 1980s, the guild's leadership became even more militantly liberal. The resulting policy shifts provoked a reaction from Heston and a number of other conservative actors. It quickly became evident that Heston was no longer willing to compromise; he began to take an ideological, hard-line approach to guild matters. He not only led the conservatives in a successful campaign to return the guild to its original policy focus, but he also shaped federal labor policy with his efforts. Convinced that safety mechanisms were needed to protect guild members from a politically active board in the future, Heston advocated federal policies that would allow union members to withhold part of their dues if they disagreed with the political activities undertaken by union leadership.

Social movements play a critical role in the development of public policy in modern America. An extensive literature provides us with valuable insights into their growth and evolution, but in the end it cannot substitute for the history of specific movements, which can be understood only in the particular circumstances of their birth and development. Over the last fifty years few movements have had the long-standing visibility, the mass involvement, and the public impact of the Right to Life movement. While there is still no adequate full-length account of the movement, an outline of some of the major aspects of its history, particularly as it is relevant to the public policy process in the United States, can be provided. Before embarking on that task, I will review and assess current interpretations of the movement, at both the popular and scholarly levels, and suggest a plausible explanation of its social sources and characteristics.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (adhd) holds the distinction of being both the most extensively studied pediatric mental disorder and one of the most controversial. This is partly due to the fact that it is also the most commonly diagnosed mental disorder among minors. Currently, almost 8 percent of youth from the ages of four to seventen have a diagnosis of ADHD, and slightly more than 4 percent both have the diagnosis and are taking medication for the disorder. In other words, on average one in every ten to fifteen children in the United States has been diagnosed with the disorder and one in every twenty to twenty-five uses a stimulant medication—often Ritalin, Adderall, or Concertaas treatment. The biggest increase in youth diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed a stimulant drug occurred during the early 1990s, when the prevalence of physician visits for stimulant pharmacotherapy increased fivefold. This unprecedented increase in U.S. children using psychotropic medication triggered an intense public debate.