During the past decade, Democrats and Republicans each have
received about fifty percent of the votes and controlled about half
of the government, but this has not resulted in policy deadlock.
Despite highly partisan political posturing, the policy regime has
been largely moderate. Incremental, yet substantial, policy
innovations such as welfare reform; deficit reduction; the North
American Free Trade Agreement; and the deregulation of
telecommunications, banking, and agriculture have been accompanied
by such continuities as Social Security and Medicare, the
maintenance of earlier immigration reforms, and the persistence of
many rights-based policies, including federal affirmative
action.
In "Seeking the Center," twenty-one contributors analyze policy
outcomes in light of the frequent alternation in power among evenly
divided parties. They show how the triumph of policy moderation and
the defeat of more ambitious efforts, such as health care reform,
can be explained by mutually supporting economic, intellectual, and
political forces. Demonstrating that the determinants of public
policy become clear by probing specific issues, rather than in
abstract theorizing, they restore the politics of policymaking to
the forefront of the political science agenda.
A successor to Martin A. Levin and Marc K. Landy's influential
"The New Politics of Public Policy" (Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1995), this book will be vital reading for advanced
undergraduate and graduate students in political science and public
policy, as well as a resource for scholars in both fields.
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