In 1940, at the second annual meeting of the Euthanasia Society of America (ESA), its first president, Charles Francis Potter (1885–1962), rose to give a speech. “Euthanasia, or merciful release from suffering,” Potter declared, “is rapidly emerging from the stage when it was considered merely the obsession of a few left-wing social reformers to the period when it is being recognized as an important social measure in the same class with birth control and eugenics.” Almost thirty years later, at another ESA gathering, clergyman Henry Pitney Van Dusen said much the same thing. “Popular attention centers on the Planned Parenthood movement at the other end of life,” Van Dusen declared, and “[e]uthanasia is concerned with the responsible termination of life. The more we can relate these two movements practically the better, because they are both concerned with the responsible care of human life, one at its beginning and the other at its end.”

In the wake of India's May 1998 decision to resume nuclear testing for the first time since 1974, as well as arch-rival Pakistan's subsequent response, the attention of the world again has focused on nuclear nonproliferation policy as a means of maintaining stability in politically troubled regions of the world. The 1990s proved to be an uncertain time for nonproliferation policy. Pakistan acquired nuclear capabilities. Iraq displayed its well-known intransigence by refusing to allow International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) arms inspectors access to facilities suspected of manufacturing nuclear weapons. North Korea maintained a nuclear weapons program despite opposition from many Western nations. Troubling questions about nuclear holdings persisted in Argentina, Brazil, and South Africa. New nuclear powers were created in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Even the renewal of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 1995 failed to assuage the concerns of Western powers fearful of aggressive measures undertaken by rogue nuclear proliferants.

The British National Health Service (NHS) was created shortly after the end of World War II and formally came into being on its “Appointed Day” in July 1948. The NHS has been seen as the crowning achievement of the postwar Labour government's “welfare state” by both the general public and academic commentators. As Rodney Lowe points out, by the late 1940s opinion polls showed it to be by far the best-received part of Labour's social policies; and in popular perceptions the terms “NHS” and “welfare state” were often viewed as synonymous. Lowe himself, while carefully noting the problems that attended the birth of the health service, nonetheless sees it as an “idealistic” institution and remarks that in no other Western country, not even social democratic Sweden, “were the whole population and the full range of medical need (Beveridge's principles of universalism and comprehensiveness) so quickly realized by a free service.” Another respected commentator, Rudolf Klein, similarly highlights the exceptionally wide-ranging remit of the NHS, claiming it as a “unique experiment in social engineering.”

Money in politics is a funny thing. By legend and cliché, money is the “mother's milk of politics,” that which keeps party machinery working and campaigns running. It is also the focus of generations of suspicion and complaint. From the advent of the “spoils system” in the early nineteenth century to the PACs and “soft money” of today, there appear to be few takers for the proposition that money does not stain what ought to be the majesty and purity of politics. Money, unlike the suffrage, introduces inequality among citizens. Money gives its favored candidates and policies an unfair advantage for the public's attention. Money is the appearance, if not the fact, of corruption.

Since its inaugural use in Oregon in 1904, direct democracy—as practiced in twenty-seven American states—has garnered its share of defenders and critics. While the debate over the merits and drawbacks of citizen lawmaking remains as contentious as ever, critics and proponents alike usually concur that two extra-legislative tools—the “citizen” initiative and the “popular” referendum—were most effectively used to counteract the legislative might of special interests during the Progressive Era. Citing the clout of corporate monopolies that dominated numerous state legislatures at the turn of the century, contemporary observers of direct democracy approvingly note how citizen groups during the Progressive Era used the mechanisms to take on an array of vested interests. As evidence, they submit the popular adoption of numerous progressive reforms during the 1910s, such as the direct primary, women's suffrage, prohibition, the abolition of the poll tax, home rule for cities and towns, eighthour workdays for women and miners, and the regulation of public utility and railroad monopolies. Circumventing their partisan state legislatures, defenders of the plebiscitary mechanisms evoke how citizens successfully employed the initiative and popular referendum, as one Progressive Era supporter of the “pure” democratic process championed, to rouse “a great forward movement toward stability, justice, and public spirit in American political institutions.”

An important development in the field of environmental policy has been the growing acceptance and use of emissions trading as a cost-effective means to meet and maintain environmental quality standards. In the first half of the twentieth century, emissions trading programs not only would have been seen as unnecessary; they would have been inconceivable. The legal, bureaucratic, and technological infrastructure necessary to support such systems simply did not exist. Furthermore, most people did not see the release of pollutioncausing contaminants into the shared environment as transactions to be measured and monitored. Today, the use of emissions trading programs as a policy tool both reflects and represents the dramatic changes in pollution control policy that have since occurred.

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.”

Before getting too upset about the initially eye-popping sums candidates spend to win elections, law professor (and current member of the Federal Election Commission) Bradley A. Smith advises us to put campaign costs in perspective. Americans, he notes, spent two or three times more on potato chips than on electing candidates in the mid-1990s. For Smith, the potato chip example is only one illustration that ought to settle fears about “obscene” and “runaway” campaign expenses. Perspective, however, is unlikely to move those convinced that big donors drive the political agenda. Convinced that money and politics is a far more nefarious combination than fat and salt, campaign finance reformers will no doubt carry on their search for new ways to limit spending and contributions, continuing the Progressive Era crusade to eliminate money's degrading influence on democracy.

Significant differences in the availability of new medicines in the United States and the United Kingdom became apparent in the 1970s. This article examines the history of drug regulation in the two countries and argues that the divergence was the result of distinctive regulatory approaches that emerged simultaneously throughout the twentieth century. The British approach was based largely on informal, nonstatutory controls, while the American approach relied heavily on centralized regulatory controls. The article argues that the nature of business-government relations has played a significant role in the divergence. The impact of these divergent approaches is apparent in the contemporary regulatory framework, especially with respect to determining the effectiveness of new drugs.

As many commentators note, American political discourse is not generally characterized by a receptivity to “big” theories; nor, in particular, is policy analysis. But two writers, one at the beginning of the Cold War and one at the end, offered theories that are notable exceptions to this generalization. James Burnham and Francis Fukuyama, anchoring their theories on their observations of the Cold War, construct dramaturgical philosophies of history, synthesize and append European architectonic writers to their accounts, and offer comprehensive critiques of American liberal democracy. Moreover, both “big” theories, despite their apparent incongruence with American political discourse and conventional policy counsel, attract wide attention and are well received by economic and political elites.

Between 1965 and the end of the century, welfare—that is, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)—expanded dramatically; came under attack from conservatives, libertarians, and liberals; and then, in the 1990s, was virtually eliminated as a federal program through legislation that had broad, bipartisan support. Throughout that process of growth and declension, social scientists played central roles in shaping perceptions of welfare, most significantly by examining the impact of welfare on the work ethic, on family structure, on gender relations, on poverty, and on inner-city, black communities. This is an enormously complex story, and I have engaged it by focusing on four influential texts, each by a prominent social scientist: Daniel P. Moynihan's The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965), otherwise known as the Moynihan Report; Charles Murray's Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (1982); Martin Anderson's Welfare: The Political Economy of Welfare Reform in the United States (1978); and David T. Ellwood's Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family (1988). Although this approach inevitably oversimplifies somewhat, it also makes possible a more intensive critical reading of these key historical documents.

Early in 1839, a congressional investigation into campaign fund-raising at the U.S. customhouse in New York first brought to public attention a problem in democracy that we still are trying to solve: Who should pay for our politics? By 1839, the deferential political system of the colonial era, in which government was the almost exclusive province of the old mercantile and landed elites, was well on its way out, at least in the North. Under that system, the upper classes provided the great majority of candidates for elective office and candidates paid their own campaign expenses. The transition to a more democratic system—of broader suffrage, organized parties, and professional politicians who did not have personal or family wealth—required a new way of financing campaigns. As politicians were no longer people who had money, they had to raise money.

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’!”

In his article “Creating the National War Labor Board: Franklin Roosevelt and the Politics of State Building in the Early 1940s,” Andrew Workman argues for a revised “institutionalist” understanding of the creation of the National War Labor Board (NWLB). Specifically, Workman includes interest groups, networks of policy intellectuals, and intragovernmental relations in an institutionalist account of the origin of the NWLB. Existing accounts that focus on the government's dependence on labor unions (Sparrow) or partisan politics (Katznelson and Pietrokowski; Katznelson, Geiger, and Kryder) do not explain the complex origins of this key wartime board.