Posts Tagged Policies
Terrorism, interest-group politics, and public policy: curtailing criminal modes of political speech.
Terrorist incidents have occurred in the United States and around the world for centuries. Tax revolters, anarchists, war protesters, and other critics of government policy have often used violence to send messages to the policymakers controlling the issues of interest. The attacks of September 11, 2001, for example, have been widely interpreted as a comment on U.S. policy toward the Islamic world, especially U.S. policy in the Middle East. Indeed, terrorist attacks might be defined as violence for the purpose of sending a political message with the aim of influencing policy or at least of voicing disapproval. In this sense, terrorism is one possible method of “political dialogue.”
Even when political analysts do not share the goals of terrorist groups, they may defend the use of violence as a method of sending messages because of the political nature of the message sent. After all, political messages and popular protests receive special protection in all liberal democracies, and civil disobedience has often generated improvements in government policies. The conjunction of the “political message” explanation of terrorist actions and a “free speech” justification of those actions clearly resonates with some proponents of popular resistance, but it is nonetheless a bit puzzling for most proponents of free speech. Those who advocate the former explanation might argue that the United States brought the recent attacks on itself by various foreign-policy mistakes made over the years. Most proponents of free speech will reject this conclusion as a justification for terrorism, but they have not yet found a clear line of argument with which to respond to it.
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The Politics of Sin: Drugs, Alcohol and Public Policy.
America’s most recent moral crusade, the war on drugs, has been pronounced a failure by critics from the left, right, and center and now is favored almost exclusively by politicians, law enforcement agencies, and other groups with a stake in its continuation and a seeming imperviousness to information. In The Politics of Sin: Drugs, Alcohol, and Public Policy, Kenneth Meier provides evidence that the war on drugs has been a failure in the states but also demonstrates that this most recent attempt to expunge sin is akin to earlier failed attempts to regulate personal behavior. The analyses presented in the book underline the irrationality of many U.S. anti-drug policies but also demonstrate that forces in the policy environment make it difficult for us to learn from our policy mistakes. The book’s ultimate substantive contribution is a sophisticated, balanced, and well-reasoned analysis of the forces underlying the adoption, implementation, and effects of policies to regulate drugs and alcohol. Antidrug policies are exposed clearly as good politics but bad public policy. The frustrating fact, though, is that the results suggest that we seem unable to stop ourselves from embarking on Quixotic anti-sin campaigns despite our history of failure in the arena. Americans may be doomed to a future of badly designed and implemented policies intended to regulate sin.
Aside from this substantive contribution, Meier’s book represents an important addition to the study of public policy through his careful application of three approaches to policy analysis: cross-sectional quantitative analysis, quantitative historical analysis, and qualitative historical analysis. Meier applies each approach in this research, and the results are impressive. The study is contextually rich and empirically rigorous; rather than pursuing one line of inquiry and accepting its limitations, Meier acknowledges the weaknesses and strengths of each and uses them in complementary fashion. The volume of quantitative and qualitative data used for the analysis is enormous, and the overall effect of the blending of three forms of analysis is to provide a study that takes advantage of the best aspects of each approach while accounting for the weaknesses of each through the use of the others. This is not to say that one cannot find places to quibble with measures, model specification, and the like, but the breadth of evidence Meier brings to bear, and its consistency, renders such criticisms trivial.
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Gender Distribution in Organizations
“Gender bilingual organizations” is a find of Avivah Wittenberg-Cox. She wrote a new book, “Because, like every author, I thought there was a book screaming to be written.” (1)
The book presents seven steps to building “bilingual’ organizations.”
One of the questions Avivah poses on the gender issue is: “how can you be sure to have hired the best candidates when you only recruit men?”
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