front cover of Paradigms and Conventions
Paradigms and Conventions
Uncertainty, Decision Making, and Entrepreneurship
Young Back Choi
University of Michigan Press, 1993
An innovative approach to the analysis of decision making under uncertainty
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Policy & Politics Japan
T. Pempel
Temple University Press, 1982
"This is a masterful, well-written examination of Japanese politics." --Choice In a comparative framework, Pempel analyzes six major areas of domestic policy-making in Japan--administrative reform, economic policy, labor relations, social welfare, environmental policy, and higher education. Each case is accompanied by selected readings translated from official government documents and the writings of critics of official policy. The book offers an unusually strong point of view, one that is sure to invite debate. Pemple attempts to unravel the intertwined issues of the autonomy of the Japanese bureaucracy and the strength of the conservative coalition. He describes the weaknesses of opposition politics and labor but goes on to suggest how protest movements can be effective and how change can occur in the face of a powerful conservative consensus. The "economic miracle" of Japan, like the other policy areas, is realistically assessed in the context of events in other industrialized countries.
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Policy Making in Israel
Routines for Simple Problems and Coping with the Complex
Ira Sharkansky
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997

All governments face problems and are judged by their ability to solve them and the policies they develop in doing so.  Compared with other Western democracies, Israel has faced a devastating number of problems of unusual severity in a relatively short time: war, terrorism, heavy immigration, unsettled boundaries, economic stresses, internal disputes about ethnicity and religion, and the lingering scars of the Holocaust and other persecutions.  Sharkansky’s analysis of the Israeli government’s routines and methods for coping with such an array of difficulties, from simple to complex to intractable, offers general insights into how governments make policy in a democracy.

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The Political Influence of Business in the European Union
Andreas Dür, David Marshall, and Patrick Bernhagen
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Many citizens, politicians, and political activists voice concern about the political influence of business in the European Union. But do business interests really pull the strings in Brussels? Contrary to expectations, this book shows that business interests are no more influential than other interests in shaping contemporary EU policies. Andreas Dür, David Marshall, and Patrick Bernhagen present an original argument that stresses the role of public actors in facilitating or impeding interest groups’ lobbying success. Novel data on a large number of legislative proposals on the EU’s agenda and three case studies present strong support for this argument. The Political Influence of Business in the European Union offers new insights into how lobbying success depends on the demand and supply of information, as well as new ideas on how to measure lobbying success. The book advances a fresh perspective on the question of business power and shows why business interests often lose in the policy struggle.
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Politics and Economics in the Eighties
Edited by Alberto Alesina and Geoffrey Carliner
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Is the federal budget deficit a result of congressional deadlocks, gross miscalculation of economic trends, or a Republican strategy to tie the budgetary hands of future Democratic leadership? To what extend does the partisan split between Congress and the executive branch constrain the president's agenda? In this volume, political scientists and economists tackle these and many other contentious issues, offering a variety of analytical perspectives.
Certain to provoke controversy, this interdisciplinary volume brings together policy experts to provide a coherent analysis of the most important economic policy changes of the 1980s. Through a detailed examination of voting patterns, monetary and fiscal policies, welfare spending, tax reform, minimum wage legislation, the savings and loan collapse, and international trade policy, the authors explore how politics can influence the direction of economic policymaking.
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The Politics of Attention
How Government Prioritizes Problems
Bryan D. Jones and Frank R. Baumgartner
University of Chicago Press, 2005
On any given day, policymakers are required to address a multitude of problems and make decisions about a variety of issues, from the economy and education to health care and defense. This has been true for years, but until now no studies have been conducted on how politicians manage the flood of information from a wide range of sources. How do they interpret and respond to such inundation? Which issues do they pay attention to and why? Bryan D. Jones and Frank R. Baumgartner answer these questions on decision-making processes and prioritization in The Politics of Attention.

Analyzing fifty years of data, Jones and Baumgartner's book is the first study of American politics based on a new information-processing perspective. The authors bring together the allocation of attention and the operation of governing institutions into a single model that traces public policies, public and media attention to them, and governmental decisions across multiple institutions. 

The Politics of Attention offers a groundbreaking approach to American politics based on the responses of policymakers to the flow of information. It asks how the system solves, or fails to solve, problems rather than looking to how individual preferences are realized through political action.
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Politics of Risk-Taking
Welfare State Reform in Advanced Democracies
Barbara Vis
Amsterdam University Press, 2010

How much and in which direction have the welfare states among the Western democracies changed over the past decades? Moreover, under what conditions have governments enacted these changes? Based on insights from prospect theory, Barbara Vis demonstrates how socioeconomic or political setbacks affect a government’s view of risk—and thereby the degree and type of reform they pursue. This study’s new theoretical stance and innovative methodological approach make it a must read for those policymakers, scholars, and students interested in the politics of welfare state reform.

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Positive Political Theory I
Collective Preference
David Austen-Smith and Jeffrey S. Banks
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Positive Political Theory I is concerned with the formal theory of preference aggregation for collective choice. The theory is developed as generally as possible, covering classes of aggregation methods that include such well-known examples as majority and unanimity rule and focusing in particular on the extent to which any aggregation method is assured to yield a set of "best" alternatives. The book is intended both as a contribution to the theory of collective choice and a pedagogic tool.
Austen-Smith and Banks have made the exposition both rigorous and accessible to people with some technical background (e.g., a course in multivariate calculus). The intended readership ranges from more technically-oriented graduate students and specialists to those students in economics and political science interested less in the technical aspects of the results than in the depth, scope, and importance of the theoretical advances in positive political theory.
"This is a stunning book. Austen-Smith and Banks have a deep understanding of the material, and their text gives a powerfully unified and coherent perspective on a vast literature. The exposition is clear-eyed and efficient but never humdrum. Even those familiar with the subject will find trenchant remarks and fresh insights every few pages. Anyone with an interest in contemporary liberal democratic theory will want this book on the shelf." --Christopher Achen, University of Michigan
David Austen-Smith is Professor of Political Science, Professor of Economics, and Professor of Management and Strategy, Northwestern University. Jeffrey S. Banks is Professor of Political Science, California Institute of Technology.
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Positive Political Theory II
Strategy and Structure
David Austen-Smith and Jeffrey S. Banks
University of Michigan Press, 2005
“A major piece of work . . . a classic. There is no
other book like it.”
—Norman Schofield, Washington University

“The authors succeed brilliantly in tackling a large
number of important questions concerning the
interaction among voters and elected representatives
in the political arena, using a common, rigorous
language.”
—Antonio Merlo, University of Pennsylvania

Positive Political Theory II: Strategy and Structure
is the second volume in Jeffrey Banks and David
Austen-Smith’s monumental study of the links
between individual preferences and collective choice.
The book focuses on representative systems, including
both elections and legislative decision-making
processes, clearly connecting individual preferences to
collective outcomes. This book is not a survey. Rather,
it is the coherent, cumulative result of the authors’
brilliant efforts to indirectly connect preferences to
collective choice through strategic behaviors such as
agenda-selection and voting.

The book will be an invaluable reference and teaching
tool for economists and political scientists, and an
essential companion to any scholar interested in the
latest theoretical advances in positive political theory.


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Post-Realism
The Rhetorical Turn in International Relations
Francis A. Beer
Michigan State University Press, 1996
The end of the Cold War encourages new perspectives on international relations. Beer and Hariman provide a comprehensive set of essays that challenge and reinterpret the tradition of realism which has dominated the thinking of academics and foreign policy makers. Post-Realism: The Rhetorical Turn in International Relations systematically discusses the major realist writers of the Post-War era, the foundational concepts of international politics, and representative case studies of foreign policy discourse.

These essays demonstrate how realism operates rhetorically and point the way toward a richer understanding of world politics.
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Power, Knowledge, and Politics
Policy Analysis in the States
John A. Hird
Georgetown University Press, 2005

If knowledge is power, then John Hird has opened the doors for anyone interested in public policymaking and policy analysis on the state level. A beginning question might be: does politics put gasoline or sugar in the tank? More specifically, in a highly partisan political environment, is nonpartisan expertise useful to policymaking? Do policy analysts play a meaningful role in decision making? Does policy expertise promote democratic decision making? Does it vest power in an unelected and unaccountable elite, or does it become co-opted by political actors and circumstances? Is it used to make substantive changes or just for window-dressing?

In a unique comparative focus on state policy, Power, Knowledge, and Politics dissects the nature of the policy institutions that policymakers establish and analyzes the connection between policy research and how it is actually used in decision making. Hird probes the effects of politics and political institutions—parties, state political culture and dynamics, legislative and gubernatorial staffing, partisan think tanks, interest groups—on the nature and conduct of nonpartisan policy analysis. Through a comparative examination of institutions and testing theories of the use of policy analysis, Hird draws conclusions that are more useful than those derived from single cases.

Hird examines nonpartisan policy research organizations established by and operating in U.S. state legislatures—one of the most intense of political environments—to determine whether and how nonpartisan policy research can survive in that harsh climate. By first detailing how nonpartisan policy analysis organizations came to be and what they do, and then determining what state legislators want from them, he presents a rigorous statistical analysis of those agencies in all 50 states and from a survey of 800 state legislators. This thoroughly comprehensive look at policymaking at the state level concludes that nonpartisan policy analysis institutions can play an important role—as long as they remain scrupulously nonpartisan.

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Practical Decision Making in Health Care Ethics
Cases and Concepts, Third Edition
Raymond J. Devettere
Georgetown University Press, 2010

For nearly fifteen years Practical Decision Making in Health Care Ethics has offered scholars and students a highly accessible and teachable alternative to the dominant principle-based theories in the field. Devettere’s approach is not based on an ethics of abstract obligations and duties, but, following Aristotle, on how to live a fulfilled and happy life—in short, an ethics of personal well-being grounded in prudence, the virtue of ethical decision making.

This third edition is revised and updated and includes discussions of several landmark cases, including the tragic stories of Terri Schiavo and Jesse Gelsinger (the first death caused by genetic research). Devettere addresses new topics such as partial-birth abortion law, embryonic stem cell research, infant euthanasia in The Netherlands, recent Vatican statements on feeding tubes, organ donation after cardiac death, new developments in artificial hearts, clinical trials developed by pharmaceutical companies to market new drugs, ghostwritten scientific articles published in major medical journals, and controversial HIV/AIDS research in Africa. This edition also includes a new chapter on the latest social and political issues in American health care.

Devettere’s engaging text relies on commonsense moral concepts and avoids academic jargon. It includes a glossary of legal, medical, and ethical terms; an index of cases; and thoroughly updated bibliographic essays at the end of each chapter that offer resources for further reading. It is a true classic, brilliantly conceived and executed, and is now even more valuable to undergraduates and graduate students, medical students, health care professionals, hospital ethics committees and institutional review boards, and general readers interested in philosophy, medicine, and the rapidly changing field of health care ethics.

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Practical Decision Making in Health Care Ethics
Cases, Concepts, and the Virtue of Prudence, Fourth Edition
Raymond J. Devettere
Georgetown University Press, 2016

For more than twenty years Practical Decision Making in Health Care Ethics has offered scholars and students a highly accessible and teachable alternative to the dominant principle-based theories in the field. Raymond J. Devettere's approach is not based on an ethics of abstract obligations and duties but, following Aristotle, on how to live a fulfilled and happy life—in short, an ethics of personal well-being grounded in prudence, the virtue of ethical decision making.

New sections added in this revised fourth edition include sequencing whole genomes, even those of newborns; the new developments in genetic testing now provided by online commercial companies such as 23andMe; the genetic testing of fetuses by capturing their DNA circulating in the pregnant woman's blood; the Stanford Prison experiment and its relevance to the abuses at the Abu Graib prison; recent breakthroughs in the diagnosis of consciousness disorders such as PVS; the ongoing controversy generated by the NIH study of premature babies at many NICUs throughout the county, a study known as SUPPORT that the OHRP (Office of Human Research Protections, an office within the department of HHS) deemed unethical.

Devettere updates most chapters. New cases include Marlise Munoz (dead pregnant woman's body kept on life support by a Texas hospital), Jahi McMath (teenager pronounced dead in California but treated as alive in New Jersey), Margot Bentley (nursing home feeding a woman dying of end stage Alzheimer’s despite her advance directive that said no nourishment or liquids if she was dying with dementia), Brittany Maynard (dying 29-year-old California woman who moved to Oregon to commit suicide with a physician's help), and Samantha Burton (woman with two children who suffered rupture of membranes at 25 weeks and whose physician obtained a court order to keep her at the hospital to make sure she stayed on bed rest). Thoughtfully updated and renewed for a new generation of readers, this classic textbook will be required reading for students and scholars of philosophy and medical ethics.

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Practice for Life
Making Decisions in College
Lee Cuba, Nancy Jennings, Suzanne Lovett, and Joseph Swingle
Harvard University Press, 2016

From the day they arrive on campus, college students spend four years—or sometimes more—making decisions that shape every aspect of their academic and social lives. Whether choosing a major or a roommate, some students embrace decision-making as an opportunity for growth, while others seek to minimize challenges and avoid risk. Practice for Life builds a compelling case that a liberal arts education offers students a complex, valuable process of self-creation, one that begins in college but continues far beyond graduation.

Sifting data from a five-year study that followed over two hundred students at seven New England liberal arts colleges, the authors uncover what drives undergraduates to become engaged with their education. They found that students do not experience college as having a clear beginning and end but as a continuous series of new beginnings. They start and restart college many times, owing to the rhythms of the academic calendar, the vagaries of student housing allocation, and other factors. This dynamic has drawbacks as well as advantages. Not only students but also parents and faculty place enormous weight on some decisions, such as declaring a major, while overlooking the small but significant choices that shape students' daily experience.

For most undergraduates, deep engagement with their college education is at best episodic rather than sustained. Yet these disruptions in engagement provide students with abundant opportunities for reflection and course-correction as they learn to navigate the future uncertainties of adult life.

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Prediction
Science, Decision Making, and the Future of Nature
Edited by Daniel Sarewitz, Roger A. Pielke Jr., and Radford Byerly Jr.
Island Press, 2000

The idea that predictive science can simplify the decision-making process by creating a clearer picture of the future is deeply appealing in principle, but deeply problematic in practice.

Prediction offers a fascinating and wide-ranging look at the interdependent scientific, political, and social factors involved in using science-based predictions to guide policy making. Through ten detailed case studies, it explores society's efforts to generate reliable scientific information about complex natural systems and to use that information in making sound policy decisions. The book:

  • provides an overview of predictive science from historical, scientific, political, and behavioral perspectives offers case studies of the use and misuse of scientific predictions on subjects ranging from asteroids to nuclear waste disposal
  • proposes a practical analytical framework for the use of predictive science in setting policy
  • recommends actions and policies that can increase the likelihood of effective decisions
Contributors include Clark Chapman, Charles Herrick, William H. Hooke, Orrin Pilkey, Steve Rayner, Naomi Oreskes, Daniel Metlay, Stanley Changnon, Donald Gautier, Robert Moran, Joanne Nigg, and Thomas Stewart.

Prediction is the first book to look at the numerous and varied scientific, social, and political factors involved in making and using predictions relevant to a wide range of current environmental controversies and challenges. It provides much-needed context for understanding predictions and scientific pronouncements, and is an important work for anyone concerned with interactions between science and policy making.
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Prisms of the People
Power & Organizing in Twenty-First-Century America
Hahrie Han, Elizabeth McKenna, and Michelle Oyakawa
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Grassroots organizing and collective action have always been fundamental to American democracy but have been burgeoning since the 2016 election, as people struggle to make their voices heard in this moment of societal upheaval. Unfortunately much of that action has not had the kind of impact participants might want, especially among movements representing the poor and marginalized who often have the most at stake when it comes to rights and equality. Yet, some instances of collective action have succeeded. What’s the difference between a movement that wins victories for its constituents, and one that fails? What are the factors that make collective action powerful?

Prisms of the People addresses those questions and more. Using data from six movement organizations—including a coalition that organized a 104-day protest in Phoenix in 2010 and another that helped restore voting rights to the formerly incarcerated in Virginia—Hahrie Han, Elizabeth McKenna, and Michelle Oyakawa show that the power of successful movements most often is rooted in their ability to act as  “prisms of the people,” turning participation into political power just as prisms transform white light into rainbows. Understanding the organizational design choices that shape the people, their leaders, and their strategies can help us understand how grassroots groups achieve their goals.

Linking strong scholarship to a deep understanding of the needs and outlook of activists, Prisms of the People is the perfect book for our moment—for understanding what’s happening and propelling it forward.
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Prisoners of Their Premises
How Unexamined Assumptions Lead to War and Other Policy Debacles
George C. Edwards III
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A timely look at the real costs of leaders not examining their assumptions.
 
Why do accomplished and stable leaders frequently make calamitous decisions with devastating consequences for their countries—and other nations? We debate debacles such as the American involvement in Vietnam, seeking to understand why leaders pursued disastrous policies. In Prisoners of Their Premises, George C. Edwards III argues that the failure of leaders to examine their premises—the assumptions they make about the world and situation they are dealing with—cause them to ignore real problems or pursue policies that, in costly ways, deal with problems that are different than they think or simply don’t exist. Edwards looks at the role of premises in identifying (or ignoring) a problem in a series of case studies that range from strategic decisions in World War I and the Korean War to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Too often, unexamined premises color initial decisions to pursue a policy and shape the strategies leaders employ to achieve their goals, with grave consequences for their countries, organizations, and potentially the world. Timely and important, Prisoners of Their Premises demonstrates the real costs leaders incur by failing to question their assumptions.
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Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes
Frederick Schauer
Harvard University Press, 2006

This book employs a careful, rigorous, yet lively approach to the timely question of whether we can justly generalize about members of a group on the basis of statistical tendencies of that group. For instance, should a military academy exclude women because, on average, women are more sensitive to hazing than men? Should airlines force all pilots to retire at age sixty, even though most pilots at that age have excellent vision? Can all pit bulls be banned because of the aggressive characteristics of the breed? And, most controversially, should government and law enforcement use racial and ethnic profiling as a tool to fight crime and terrorism?

Frederick Schauer strives to analyze and resolve these prickly questions. When the law “thinks like an actuary”—makes decisions about groups based on averages—the public benefit can be enormous. On the other hand, profiling and stereotyping may lead to injustice. And many stereotypes are self-fulfilling, while others are simply spurious. How, then, can we decide which stereotypes are accurate, which are distortions, which can be applied fairly, and which will result in unfair stigmatization?

These decisions must rely not only on statistical and empirical accuracy, but also on morality. Even statistically sound generalizations may sometimes have to yield to the demands of justice. But broad judgments are not always or even usually immoral, and we should not always dismiss them because of an instinctive aversion to stereotypes. As Schauer argues, there is good profiling and bad profiling. If we can effectively determine which is which, we stand to gain, not lose, a measure of justice.

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Protecting Public Health and the Environment
Implementing The Precautionary Principle
Edited by Carolyn Raffensperger and Joel Tickner; Foreword by Wes Jackson
Island Press, 1999

When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. This idea, known as the "Precautionary Principle," is seen by environmentalists and public health experts as the key to protecting ecological and human health.

In January 1998, the Science and Environmmental Health Network convened an international group of scientists, researchers, environmentalists, academics, and labor representatives to discuss ways of incorporating the precautionary approach into environmental and public health decision-making. Known as the Wingspread Conference on Implementing the Precautionary Principle, the workshop focused on understanding the contexts under which the principle developed, its basis, and how it could be implemented. Protecting Public Health and the Environment is an outgrowth of that conference. The book:

  • describes the history, specific content, and scientific and philosophical foundations of the principle of precautionary action
  • explains the functions of the principle in activities as diverse as agriculture and manufacturing
  • explains how to know when precautionary action is needed and who decides what action will (or will not) be taken
  • attempts to show how the burden of proof of environmental harm can be shifted to proponents of a potentially hazardous activity
  • provides specific structures and mechanisms for implementing the precautionary principl.
Throughout, contributors focus on the difficult questions of implementation and fundamental change required to support a more precautionary approach to environmental and public health hazards. Among the contributors are David Ozonoff, Nicholas Ashford, Ted Schettler, Robert Costanza, Ken Geiser, and Anderw Jordan.

Public health professionals and academics, policymakers, environmental lawyers, sustainable agriculture proponents, economists, and environmental activists will find the book an enlightening and thought-provoking guide to a new way of thinking about ecosystem and public health protection.

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Public Policy in an Uncertain World
Analysis and Decisions
Charles F. Manski
Harvard University Press, 2013

Public policy advocates routinely assert that “research has shown” a particular policy to be desirable. But how reliable is the analysis in the research they invoke? And how does that analysis affect the way policy is made, on issues ranging from vaccination to minimum wage to FDA drug approval? Charles Manski argues here that current policy is based on untrustworthy analysis. By failing to account for uncertainty in an unpredictable world, policy analysis misleads policy makers with expressions of certitude. Public Policy in an Uncertain World critiques the status quo and offers an innovation to improve how policy research is conducted and how policy makers use research.

Consumers of policy analysis, whether civil servants, journalists, or concerned citizens, need to understand research methodology well enough to properly assess reported findings. In the current model, policy researchers base their predictions on strong assumptions. But as Manski demonstrates, strong assumptions lead to less credible predictions than weaker ones. His alternative approach takes account of uncertainty and thereby moves policy analysis away from incredible certitude and toward honest portrayal of partial knowledge. Manski describes analysis of research on such topics as the effect of the death penalty on homicide, of unemployment insurance on job-seeking, and of preschooling on high school graduation. And he uses other real-world scenarios to illustrate the course he recommends, in which policy makers form reasonable decisions based on partial knowledge of outcomes, and journalists evaluate research claims more closely, with a skeptical eye toward expressions of certitude.

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