If there is a single theme that characterizes the public sector in the 1990s, it is the demand for performance. A mantra has emerged in this decade, heard at all levels of government, that calls for documentation of performance and explicit outcomes of government action. While this demand has emerged from governors' offices, state legislatures, and city and country governments, perhaps no activity better embodies this request than the federal Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993, the legislation that has structured expectations for performance-based management in the federal government (see Radin 1998).

The law that was enacted in August 1993 had its origins in legislation introduced by Republican Senator William Roth in 1990. Until Clinton's election in 1992, the legislation remained in the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. However, with the blessing of the Democratic White House, the legislation sailed through both houses of Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support. Despite the breadth of support, there was very little real debate over its provisions, and the legislation that was enacted was framed in very general and often abstract terms. The final bill contained little more than the good government rhetoric familiar to students of public administration. The appropriations and authorizing committees, believed to be major users of the information generated by the law, gave little—if any—attention to the requirements.

The bounce in President Clinton's job ratings that occurred in the initial 10 days of the Lewinsky imbroglio may offer as much insight into the dynamics of public opinion as any single event in recent memory. What it shows is not just the power of a booming economy to buttress presidential popularity. It shows, more generally, the importance of political substance, as against media hype, in American politics. Even when, as occurred in this case, public opinion is initially responsive to media reports of scandal, the public's concern with actual political achievement reasserts itself. This lesson, which was not nearly so clear before the Lewinsky matter as it is now, not only deepens our understanding of American politics. It also tends, as I argue in the second half of this article, to undermine the importance of one large branch of public opinion research, buttress the importance of another, and point toward some new research questions.

Whatever else may have transpired by the time this article gets into print, the Lewinsky poll bounce is something worth pondering. In a half-dozen commercial polls taken in the period just before the story broke, Clinton's job approval rating averaged about 60%. Ten days later, following intensive coverage of the story and Clinton's State of the Union address, presidential support was about 10 percentage points higher.

Reform sentiments are much in evidence on the American political scene as we approach the end of the century, and improving the way public opinion is represented in political institutions is often the major motivation of reformers. This is clear from the essays in this collection, from the activities of contemporary political elites, and from the mood of ordinary people. Gross dissatisfaction exists with the nature of representation perceived to be offered by the modern political system.

On February 9, 1996, after a seventeen-month cease-fire, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) set off a bomb in East London. Less than a week later, the London police found and destroyed a bomb that the IRA had left in a telephone booth in the West End. A few days later, another IRA bomb went off on a doubledecker bus. The British government, under the leadership of John Major, asserted that it would have no official contact with Sinn Féin, the political arm of the IRA, until the paramilitary activities stopped. The government also deployed 500 additional troops in Northern Ireland. In October 1996, the IRA detonated two bombs at the British Army's headquarters in Lisburn, bringing the violent conflict back to Northern Ireland for the first time since the cease-fire.

On May 1, 1997, Tony Blair was elected Great Britain's prime minister. His election brought a renewed sense of optimism and good will to the conflict in Northern Ireland. Responding to Blair's overtures, including his warning that “the settlement train is leaving, with or without them” (Hoge 1997a, A7), the IRA announced on July 19, 1997, that they had “ordered the unequivocal restoration of the cease-fire” (Clarity 1997c, 1). Soon thereafter, Sinn Féin was invited to participate in the peace talks, which reconvened on September 15, 1997.

For more than 25 years, my colleagues and I have been developing and applying an unofficial, academically based, third-party approach to the analysis and resolution of international and ethnic conflicts, which I have come to call interactive problem solving. The approach is derived from the seminal work of John Burton (see Burton 1969, 1979, 1984; Kelman 1972). It is anchored in social-psychological principles and follows a scholar/practitioner model. Our practice is informed by theoretical analyses and empirical studies of international conflict, social influence, and group interaction. The experience gained in practice, in turn, contributes to theory building and to the evaluation and refinement of our intervention model. The work thus represents an integration and continuing interaction between practice, research, and theory building.

The fullest—in a sense, the paradigmatic—application of the approach is represented by problem-solving workshops, which bring together politically influential members of conflicting parties in a private, confidential setting for direct, noncommittal communication. Workshops are designed to enable the parties to explore each other's perspective and, through a joint process of creative problem solving, to generate new ideas for mutually satisfactory solutions to their conflict. The ultimate goal is to transfer the insights and ideas gained from these interactions into the political debate and decision-making processes in the two communities.

Problem-solving workshops are not negotiating sessions and they are not intended to simulate and certainly not to substitute for official negotiations.

Editor's Note: This essay is drawn from a 1997 APSA Annual Meeting roundtable entitled “Can the Rational Choice Framework Cope with Culture?” It was presented by the Comparative Politics Division, chaired by Nancy Bermeo of Princeton University, and included, in addition to Ian Shapiro, Robert H. Bates of Harvard University, Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan, and Ian Lustick of the University of Pennsylvania.

I do not believe it is fruitful to try to answer the question, “Can the rational choice framework cope with culture?” Asking it implies that the rational choice approach founders due to its inattention to cultural variables, and (depending on how dire one takes the diagnosis to be), that this defect would be remedied if the rational choice framework was replaced, modified, or supplemented by what might be thought of as a “culturalist” one. Consider each of these prescriptions.