U.S. SOUTH AFRICA POLICY IN THE 1980s: CONSTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT AND BEYOND

In this article no attempt is made to defend the Reagan administration's six-year-old policy of constructive engagement toward the Republic of South Africa, for to all but a few diehards the policy is indefensible. Instead, my response to Beres contains three components. First, I take issue with his dismissal of constructive engagement as no more than a ruse by which "to make apartheid palatable" to the American people, and argue that the purpose of the policy was to enable the Reagan administration to take credit for achieving a Namibia independence settlement. Second, I show that Beres' plea for popular opposition to an unjust policy comes too late, for a large number of Americans, during the past two years in particular, have been doing his bidding. Finally, I conclude with an assessment of the nature of the policy debate over South Africa that such popularity has prompted, in which direction U.S. South Africa policy now appears headed, and what issues, if any, remain to be resolved.     

AIR WARS: REGULATION AND DEREGULATION IN THE INTERNATIONAL AIR PASSENGER MARKET

International civil aviation is governed by a cartel that dissipates its monopoly profits in surplus capacity. Based on the 1946 Bermuda agreement and the International Air Transport Association, the cartel imposes heavy costs on U.S. consumers and air travellers in general. The Carter administration attempted to make international aviation more competitive, but this progress was substantially reversed under Reagan. A new policy should be based on treating air travel the same as any other commodity and therefore subject to U.S. antidumping and antitrust laws. The goal of the policy should be to shift the cost of maintaining inefficient national flag carriers from the international community back on to the taxpayers of those countries.     

The 1984 election as Anthony downs and Stanley Kelley might interpret it

This paper is an analysis of two rational choice theories of elections. Anthony Downs and Stanley Kelley's theories yield complementary interpretations of the 1984 U. S. election. Reagan's victory was based on both prospective and retrospective judgments as well as on candidate and policy considerations. Reagan won that element of an incumbent's reelection that is a referendum on his performance as president. However, people also voted on the basis of domestic and foreign policy preferences for the second term. On these issues voters preferred Mondale as much as Reagan. Reagan's victory owed remarkably little to his conservative agenda and to a warm regard for his personal qualities as a leader. His landslide was deceptive. The two Reagan victories were among the weakest of the six landslides of the postwar period by Kelley's test of decisiveness. The Reagan elections have not set the United States on the course of a long-term conservative agenda in either domestic or foreign affairs.     

New Federalism and Midwestern Cities: 1981-1985

President Ronald Reagan introduced a major new domestic initiativeduring his first term. The intent was to reduce the size andscope of the federal government and to increase the fiscal responsibilityof local governments. Mail questionnaires were sent to mayors,city managers, and finance officers in cities over 25,000 populationin Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin asking the respondentsto indicate their perception of the impact the Reagan programhad had on their cities in the previous year and their perceptionof its anticipated impact. Response rates were nearly 50 percentfor each survey. The respondents consistently overestimatedthe impact the Reagan program would have on their cities. Thefollowing analysis explores the relationship between perceivedeffects and city and respondent characteristics, such as size,partisan identification, and state. While the Reagan policieshave had a substantial impact on these cities, the impact isnot as negative as the respondents originally thought.     

The Reagan Deficit

This paper analyzes the U.S. federal budget deficit during the Reagan administration and its short- and longer-term consequences for the aggregate economy. While budget policies of the Reagan administration do not account for all of the increases in annual deficits or in outstanding federal debt during the Reagan era, an analysis indicates that the administration's program of tax reduction and defense spending build-up were the major sources of deficit growth after the recovery from the recession of 1981-82. For the near-term future, the legacy of the Reagan deficits includes (1) the failure of domestically owned capital formation to expand at rates comparable to our major trading partners, (2) the necessity of diverting U.S. products and income to servicing foreign creditors, and (3) the need for rates of interest and profits to be high enough to induce foreigners to retain their holdings of U.S. assets lest divestiture cause a virtual collapse in the exchange rate. The final evaluation of the impact of the Reagan deficit hinges on whether the Reagan era of high consumption prosperity proves a good trade-off with the consequences of attenuated macropolicy responses to recession, lower levels of U.S. owned capital stock, and remittances to foreign creditors.     

Federal Aid to Local Governments in the West: An Irony of the Reagan Revolution

Despite the fact that the Reagan election was viewed as a power shift toward the West, the decade of the 1980s produced cruel disappointment. The region was generally left out of the economic recmery of the nation because of the bust in the agricultural and mineral industries. These state and local gmernments which sufferfrom high costs and low resources were particularly dependent on the national gmernment at the very time when the Reagan Administration was cutting federal aid and transferring power to the states. Unlike Nixon's New Federalism which helped the state and local governments of the West, Reagan's policies caused their relative position in federal aid flows to deteriorate. Although the Reagan revolution in cutting domestic programs was viewed as the embodiment of western rugged individualism, the region lost in terms of federal aid to small rural local governments.     

The President's FY 1990 Budget: The Last Act in a Decade of Change

This article examines the budget requests of Presidents Reagan and Bush for fiscal year 1990, and how the federal budget has changed during the decade of the 1980s. The author concludes that the federal budget has become less controllable, as the priorities and composition of federal expenditures have shifted during the Reagan years. While the Reagan and Bush budgets do not differ significantly, the manner in which they were constructed does. The effort of President Bush to define his budgetary version of a "kinder, gentler" America may be more illusory than real. The author also traces the change in federal assistance to state and local governments, concluding that, apart from transfer payments, the federal role has markedly declined.     

REAGANISM AS CORPORATE LIBERALISM: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE AMERICAN FUTURE

The "corporate liberal" regime that held together in America from the end of World War I1 to the 1960s was marked by broad agreement on ideology, public policy and a stable ruling coalition centered in the Democratic Party. This regime unraveled in the late 1960s and 1970s with the relative decline in American military and economic hegemony and the rise of a "left liberal insurgency". Key corporate liberal intellectuals and constituencies migrated to the Republican Party under Reagan. Reaganism will not sustain itself because its coalition partners are too disparate, its failure to transform the Republicans into a majority party, a lack of consensus on many issues, and the continued decline of the U.S. in the international economy. Corporate liberalism will find itself migrating to a revitalized Democratic Party, under a centrist leadership favoring fiscal responsibility, government-corporate partnerships, and a more efficient military.     

Social spending,partisan bias and vote choice. Evidence from the US

Most models in political science and political economy assume that benefiting from public spending increases the likelihood of voting for the government. However, we do not have much empirical evidence on the conditions under which recipients of public spending reward governments for their public transfers. This article studies the electoral implications of welfare spending cuts in the early years of the Reagan Presidency, when public spending changes were particularly pronounced. Using 1982 NES data, this paper demonstrates that voters who lost public benefits punished Reagan but this only occurred when they identified with the Democratic Party. By contrast, benefit recipients not affected by government cuts were more likely to support Reagan, but again this was only significant among voters identifying with the party of government. This paper thus finds that governments cannot automatically “buy” votes by using welfare spending, the influence of which is instead cushioned by party identification.     

The Sources of Growth in Federal Spending

The sharp upsurge in federal spending during the twelve years of the Reagan and Bush administrations is attributable largely—but not entirely—to the growth of outlays for entitlements. But while Reagan succeeded in cutting domestic discretionary spending by almost 10 percent, under Bush it rose by close to 18 percent. This article attempts to account for those differences and concludes by suggesting ways to slow the growth of total federal spending.     

When Casey’s blood pressure rose: a case study of intelligence politicization in the United States

This article contributes to the debate on the politicization of intelligence with a case study of a major attempt of politicization that so far largely escaped academic attention: the Special National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet Union’s role in international terrorism produced by the US Intelligence Community in spring 1981. Despite direct and indirect manipulation by members of President Reagan’s Cabinet, this case differs from those usually discussed in a decisive way – politicization failed. Based on the empirical analysis, a theoretical model of intelligence politicization is introduced that extends Joshua Rovner’s oversell model, which can explain why policymakers demand intelligence support but is insufficient due to its exclusive focus on the consumers of intelligence, by integrating the incentives of intelligence producers and specifying the determinants of whether politicization succeeds or fails.     

UNDERSTANDING "DESTARILIZATION": THE UNITED STATES IMPERATIVE

The U.S. policy of trying to destabilize the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua violates accepted principles of international law. Based on the long-standing principles of "humanitarian intervention" of the Nuremberg Judgment and Article 7 o f the U.N. General Assembly's 1974 Definition of Aggression and American traditional acceptance of the principles of natural law, the Nicaraguan intervention in El Salvador may be interpreted as law enforcement. The United States, on the other hand, is not acting on behalf of the international law of human rights in its llcovertll counter-revolutionary operation in Nicaragua but i s acting to restore repression in Nicaragua. The trouble with U.S. policy in Central America is the Reagan administrationls simplified reliance on the East/West, "free versus nonfree" nations as the only meaningful axis of its foreign policy. This leads to acceptance of the might makes right doctrine and U.S. support for repressive regimes in such places as Guatemala and Haiti. These policies not only are unlawful and contrary toour best political traditions, but are verylikely to fail.     

The Evolution of the Office of Management and Budget Under President Reagan

This article introduces a series of retrospective articles on the Reagan administration. The Office of Management and Budget became a major actor in the budget debate over the last eight years. The Reagan administration has seen a change in OMB's role from that of an advisor to the president, to an agency with a central role to play in the development of the president's foreign and domestic policy within budgetary constraints. The article focuses on how OMB has reacted to these changes producing budget conventions and techniques unique to the 1980s.     

ENERGY POLICY: HOW FAILURE WAS SNATCHED FROM THE JAWS OF SUCCESS

Prior to the energy crisis of 1973, the U.S. did not have an energy policy. The failure of the American political system to anticipate and respond to the changing facts of energy was an inevitable outcome of the way policy is made. Consistent with tradition, the search for a consensus was begun from 1973–1980. The U.S. abandoned cheap energy as a high priority and adopted secure, abundant and clean energy. Conservation came to be viewed as a source of energy along with nuclear power and synfuels. Price deregulation was the most important policy tool. The Reagan administration upset this consensus and substituted the market place as the means for maximizing supplies rather than reduce demand.
The federal role was limited to bringing publicly-owned bonds into the marketplace. At the same time, it reduced RED and concern for the environment. Thus, the Reagan administration succeeded in snatching failure from the jaws of success.     

Devolving Regulatory Authority:The Federal and State Response

One of the major legacies of the Reagan administration was its devolution of regulatory authority to the states, particularly in the area of environmental protection. The article descr&es how federal officials at EPA and the OfFce of Surface Mining (Department of the Interior) transferred regulatory responsibility to the states and how state officials initially responded to devolution. In a number of states, regulatory officials clwse to vigorously enforcefederal environmental standards despite the administration's desire for a more relaxed approach to regulation. Haoever, euidence generated by the GAO and others suggest that many of the states lacked the willingness and ability to effectively shoulder their new responsibilities. By the end of the Reagan administration, opposition to devolution had emergedfrom a number of quarters and administration officials were faced with, once again, refashioning the regulatory partnership.     

THE EXTENT OF SOCIAL REGULATION: HAZARDOUS WASTE CLEANUP AND THE REAGAN IDEOLOGY

Social regulation resolves the conflict over who will bear the costs of production-related harm to public health, safety, and the environment. The extent of social regulation reflects the political power of affected interests, the economic consequences of control, and the prevailing regulatory ideol- ogy. In this paper, I analyze the impact of the Reagan deregulatory ideology on implementation of the Superfund program to cleanup hazardous waste sites. Itesolution of the conflict over enabling legislation is examined to gauge the relative political power of Superfund Act supporters. Resolution of the ronflict over implementation is examined to determine the extent to which these same political forces limited the success of the Reagan ideology in promoting regulatory inaction.     

A preliminary theory of dark network resilience

A crucial contemporary policy question for governments across the globe is how to cope with international crime and terrorist networks. Many such “dark” networks—that is, networks that operate covertly and illegally—display a remarkable level of resilience when faced with shocks and attacks. Based on an in‐depth study of three cases (MK, the armed wing of the African National Congress in South Africa during apartheid; FARC, the Marxist guerrilla movement in Colombia; and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, LTTE, in Sri Lanka), we present a set of propositions to outline how shocks impact dark network characteristics (resources and legitimacy) and networked capabilities (replacing actors, linkages, balancing integration and differentiation) and how these in turn affect a dark network's resilience over time. We discuss the implications of our findings for policymakers. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed: Richard P. Nathan, Fred C. Doolittle and Associates, Reagan and the States Volume III, John M. Quigley, (ed.) Perspectives on Local Public Finance and Public Policy: A Research Annual George E. Peterson, Randall R. Bovbjerg, Barbara A. Davis, Walter G. Davis, Eugene C. Durman, Theresa A. Gullo, The Changing Domestic Priorities Series, John L. Palmer and Isabel V. Sawhill, (ed.) The Reagan Block Grants: What Have We Learned?     

Exploring Regionalism in the Federal District Courts

This study explores regionalism in the appointment and decisionmakingpatterns of federal district judges. We begin with an examinationof the general appointment strategies of Ronald Reagan, JimmyCarter, and other recent presidents. The role of local constraintsin this process is emphasized. Next, the behavior of federaldistrict judges appointed by recent presidents is analyzed bycomparing levels of support for civil rights and civil libertiesclaims in cases decided during the 1977–1985 period. TheReagan appointees' support scores are compared with those ofjudges appointed by Carter and other recent Democratic and Republicanpresidents. Comparisons are made in the nation as a whole andalso across circuits and states. Our findings indicate thatthe Reagan appointees are less supportive of civil rights andliberties claims than judges named to the bench by Carter orother recent Democratic and Republican presidents.